CHAOS, ORDER, AND SENSE-MAKING:  
A PROPOSED THEORY FOR INFORMATION DESIGN




by
Brenda Dervin
Professor
Department of Communication
Ohio State University
3016 Derby Hall
154 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43220
phone:  614-442-0721, 614-292-3192
fax: 614-442-0721
e-mail: dervin.1@osu.edu







July 30, 1996


To appear in:
Robert Jacobson, editor
INFORMATION DESIGN, MIT Press, expected publication date 1996
World Design Inc.
5348-1/2 Ballard Ave. NW
Seattle, WA 98107
206-781-5253
bluefire@well.com

INFORMATION DESIGN:  SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING OLD 
	The term information design is being offered in this volume as a designator of a new arena of activity.  The assumption is that as a species we face altered circumstances which demand a new practice.   It is assumed that prior to the advance of the new communication technologies  there was no pressing need for information design and that without the intervention of these increasingly unnatural channels humans achieved effective distribution of information through existing channels in natural ways.  
	Granting that there are many strong arguments implied by these assumptions, I want in this chapter to challenge the central idea that information design is a new idea.    If I am given the indulgence to reduce things briefly to a polarity,  it is useful to start by submitting that there are at least two ways to conceptualize information.   One way, implicit in the assumptions above, is that information is something that describes an ordered reality and has some knowable or at least idealized isomorphic relationship to that reality.  In short, information instructs us, this assumption says, about the nature of the world we live in: its history, its future, its functioning, our place in it, our possible actions, and potential consequences of these actions.  Information, conceptualized this way, must be seen as enormously valuable.  Such information inherently offers survival value.    Clearly, such a set of assumptions makes the economic and effective distribution of information uncontested mandates. (1)
	This way of conceptualizing information implies within it that the somethings labeled information can be distributed readily from time to time, place to place, person to person.(2)   In order to follow this metaphor to its conclusion we must put aside temporarily any misgivings about the capacities of humans as observers.  Aside from the corrections needed on human observing,    information is conceptualized as a natural thing potentially movable from place to place by natural forces.  In our current circumstances, it is only because unnatural forces are at work that we must  create a new practice -- information design.  
	An alternative view  of information  contests this scenario.   Evidence is already accumulating that the enormous capacities of the new technologies are being used to do what we have already done in the past only on far larger scales, much faster, at further distances, and with greater temporal repetitiveness.  Further, when one takes a hard look at fundamentals and sets aside issues of scale it is the premise of this chapter that the information design thus far offered by the new technologies is not that much different than that offered by the old technologies or by historical human practices.  
	In order to attend to these fundamentals, however, we must start with an alternative assumption about information -- an assumption that there is nothing natural about information.  Information no matter what it is called -- data, knowledge or fact, song, story, or metaphor -- is assumed to have always been designed.  It is this alternative view which drives this chapter.   It is the premise of this chapter that to assume somehow that information design is a new practice can only deter us from facing head-on some alternative conceptualizations of what that activity could be about. 
	In the succeeding sections of this chapter, I develop this argument by first presenting a brief history of our treatments of the concept  "information" discussing the implications of these for a practice called information design.  I then extract guiding principles important for theorizing the practice of information design.    I follow this by presenting an exemplar theory, methodology, and practice called Sense-Making which embodies these principles.  Finally, I conclude with illustrations of applications to practical situations.  

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CONCEPTS OF INFORMATION	
	It is beyond the purpose of this chapter to do an intensive dig into the historical roots of our treatments of the concept "information."   Rather, my goal here is to briefly provide a context for the alternative I am presenting.  Again, if I am permitted simplifications, it is possible to trace the treatments of "information" in the western tradition in terms of seven roughly chronological narratives:  

1.  Information describes an ordered reality.

2.  Information describes an ordered reality but can be "found" only by those with the proper observing skills and technologies.

3.  Information describes an ordered reality which varies across time and space.

4.  Information describes an ordered reality which varies from culture to culture.

5.  Information describes an ordered reality which varies from person to person.

6.  Information is an instrument of power imposed in discourse on those without power.

7.  Information imposes order on chaotic reality.
	While each of these narratives is presented in terms of rough chronological order of their appearance in philosophical  literatures, the chronology is cumulative in the sense that all narratives are present in our time in various combinations and in both commensurate and highly contested arrangements.  Each of the narratives could be described extensively in terms of its philosophic underpinnings.  However, the purpose here is to provide just enough description to give foundation to my argument.  Essentially, the argument is this.  Historically,  information was not conceptualized as designed.  Rather, it was conceptualized as natural description of natural reality.  This conceptualization remains our dominant conceptualization in the design of information systems.  It is as a conceptualization heavy baggage.  Most of our ideas about information design attempt to achieve narrative #1 while struggling with narratives #2 through #7.  
	There are three themes that run through the chronology of narratives.  One focuses on the nature of reality, one on the nature of observing, and one on the involvement of power.  Briefly, the chronology suggests that over time conceptualizations of information's capacity to describe reality  (i.e. ontological assumptions)  have first been tempered and then directly contested.  The tempering comes first with a growing understanding of the limits of human observing (as in #2); and then with a growing understanding of the impacts of time-space (as in #3).    Ultimately, the very foundational assumptions of reality are shaken (as in #6 and #7).  At one extreme we have an ordered and universal reality; at the other a chaotic and inaccessible reality.    
	The second theme focuses on observing with the chronology suggesting that historically it was assumed that observing created "informations" that were isomorphic with reality (as in #1).   Over time, this conceptualization moved to incorporating the idea of a need for corrections and controls on potential biases and errors (as in #2);  then to the idea that observing differs because of contextual, then cultural, then personal relativity (as in #3, #4, and #5), and then to observing as product of discourses of power (as in #6).  At one extreme, we have an epistemology assuming universally applicable observation; at the other solipsism or tyranny.  
	The third theme focuses on the involvement of power in information.  This theme is more subtle because it does not permeate the movement across narratives but rather  bursts forth suddenly in #6.  In early assumptions power was irrelevant to information because information was assumed to have a universal character and a mandated reality-describing value.  As one traces the movement across the narratives, however, one can see the impacts of struggles with power:  cultural relativity, when applied to information ideas, for example, argues for the right of differences in observing not only across time-space (as in #3), but across peoples (as in #4).  But people within cultures differ and when these voices want their differences to be heard we see the move to personal relativity (as in #5), and ultimately to conceptualizing all attempts to formalize information  as bounded within discourses of power (as in #6).  
		A great deal of philosophic history is abbreviated in the above.  The important point for our purposes is this.  It is useful to think of narratives #2 through #7 as resulting in part from our struggles to maintain narrative #1.   Nested within the narratives are a host of polarities which plague the design and implementation of information systems, not to mention the very constructions of our societies.   Alternatively,  however, the narratives can be reconceptualized as sub-parts of a larger picture.  Sometimes, it can be assumed, information describes an orderly reality;  sometimes it requires specialized observing skills and technologies; sometimes it varies across time and space, from culture to culture, from person to person.  Sometimes it represents imposition of power; sometimes it imposes order on chaotic reality.    If one accepts all the narratives as useful, the difficulty becomes how to transcend the seemingly inherent incommensurabilities between them.  For these purposes, an eighth narrative is proposed:   

#8.  Information is human tool designed for make sense of a reality assumed to both chaotic and orderly.  

THE ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
	It is possible to look at narratives #2 through #7 as a struggle with two ideas offered by narrative #1 -- the idea of a fixed and orderly reality and the idea of an isomorphic universal observing.   Essentially, what happens as the narrative chronology proceeds is that increasing complexities are introduced in assumptions regarding the nature of observing while assumptions regarding reality are reduced to an impossible choice -- either reality is assumed to be orderly or it is assumed inaccessible and chaotic.  
	Narrative #8 builds on the earlier narratives most clearly for its position regarding observing while at the same time attempting to transcend the impossible choice by accepting both the ordered realities of narratives #1 through #5 and the imposed/chaotic realities of narratives #6 and #7.  Thus, narrative #8 posits that humans live in a reality that sometimes manifests itself in orderly ways and that sometimes manifests itself in chaotic ways.  
	The importance of this ontological position is in its implications for how systems handle human differences in information-making.    In narratives #1 through #5 after tarrying with all the reasons why people see the world differently, these approaches can not resolve difference or ameliorate it except tautologically:  people see the world differently because they differ.  There is no mandate in this logic for one human to learn from another.   At this point, the solipsism becomes unbearable, and we retreat to narrative #1 and #2  for resolution.  But each chronological advance in our theories of information makes this retreat more and more difficult, and ultimately impossible as manifested in narrative #7.  
	In contrast, narrative #8 forces a different resolution with profound implications for information design.   The resolution is that in the face of differences we must look not for differences in how humans, individually and collectively,  see their worlds, but differences in how they make their worlds .   In this view, there is more than a mandate for understanding how others see the world, there is an ontological necessity.  If we conceptualize humans as struggling through an incomplete reality then the strugglings of others may well be informative to our own.
	Notice here how we must jettison much traditional baggage -- the idea, for example, that there is an amount or kind of information that can fully instruct movement.    Rather, this narrative assumes an inherent ontological lack of complete instruction introduced both by movement in time-space as well as by gaps in physical, natural, and/or social reality.   By assuming ontological chaos as well as order, we force ourselves to understand that it may be more powerful to conceptualize human beings not  as information seeking and finding, but as information designing.    
	Sometimes these information designings seem suggestive of a reality that is ordered, where a consensus regarding observing -- process, product, and consequences -- yields an informative outcome we call fact because its application to material conditions produced reliable and useful outcomes.  But the only way we can account for the overbearing evidence that today's fact is tomorrow's folly or worse the cause of tomorrow's rebellion is to reconceptualize what is involved in facts.  Fact as a word has traditionally implied essentialist meaning:  a fact describes a reality that is.   On the other hand, factizing as a verb suggests that among the many ways in which people make their worlds is a proceduring, a designing called making facts.  There are many other verbs.  A brief beginning of a suggestive list might include:  factizing, emoting, comparing, concluding, predicting, consequenting, avoiding, communing, creating, opinioning, socializing, imposing, terrorizing, inculcating, challenging, resisting, destroying.  
	With this simple idea -- that whatever it is that humans make informationally of their worlds they are always involved in acts of design -- we can pull together the threads offered by the discussion above with a view of humans as themselves ordered and chaotic  moving through a reality that is ordered and chaotic.   Humans make sense individually and collectively as they move:  from order to disorder, from disorder to order.  
	This narrative refocuses our attention away from information as such to the constant design and redesign of the sense by which humans make and unmake their worlds.   Because of its emphasis on information as designed and redesigned; as made, confirmed, supported, challenged, resisted, and destroyed, this approach positions power as a primary consideration rather than as afterthought.  Borrowing from narrative #6, this narrative requires that the power inscribed in information be subject to continuing deconstruction.  One possible consequence would be a capacity in information system design to avoid the ways in which systems now build in inequities   In essence,  our current design situation is one where information is assumed to be natural but is designed.  Because it is designed without attention to design it fits the needs, struggles and resources of the designers.  This puts all others at disadvantage.  
	Theories must then be constructed of why these others don't make use of these valuable  systems.  These theories take a variety of forms but can be summarized as arguments that humans are too chaotic and overbearingly different to make responsive system design possible.  Yet, if in fact we have developed our theories of information and our resulting system designs based on narratives #1 to #5, then ultimately difference is always measured against a standard.  The system is x, people who can not or will not use it are not x.  When attempts are made to understand these recalcitrant users research seemingly shows both a lack of understanding and disinterest as well as overbearing solipsism.  This in turn leads to conclusions that  information design must be reduced to the lowest common denominator and, in turn, to theories of madness or badness which locate the source of problems in defects in users.  Such theories persist despite ample evidence to the contrary.  

SOME PRINCIPLES FOR A THEORY OF INFORMATION DESIGN
	 Each of the earlier narratives about information moves us away from the idea that there is no designing in information seeking and finding.  What emerges in narrative #8 is a conceptualization of information informed by the complexities of narratives #6 and #7 without abandoning the potential human capabilities for observing implied by the earlier narratives.
	For purposes of our discussion here, I will label narrative #8 a communication perspective on information.  The central idea is that information is made and unmade in communication --  intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, organizational, national, and global.  This view of information mandates that information design would focus not merely on information as a thing to be economically and effectively packaged for distribution.  Rather, this view mandates that information design would in effect be meta-design:  design about design; design assisting humans in the making and unmaking of their own informations, their own sense.  Some of these meta-designs may pertain to human activities amenable to fact transmission.  But studies of information use suggest that relatively few human uses of information can be addressed solely if at all in factizing mode.  The theory behind narrative #8 mandates that meta-design must deal with the entire complex range of what humans do when they make sense, when they construct their movements through an assumed to be ever-changing, sometimes chaotic, sometimes orderly, sometimes impenetrable time-space.
	Narrative #8 mandates a particular kind of theory, one that focuses on information:  as made and unmade in communication;   as designed by all humans individually and collectively in struggle and mediation; as relevant both to making and unmaking both order and chaos; as theoretically incomplete and always open to potential contest; as relevant not only to the centered human but the decentered human; as relevant as well to human heart, body, and spirit in addition to human mind.  
	Further, this kind of theory of information design mandates as well that an information system be designed to assist human information designing and, in particular, the potentials for humans to share with each other  the ways in which they have struggled individually and collectively to both create order out of chaos, and  to create chaos out of order when that order restricts or constrains.    This kind of theory of information design mandates that we redefine the standards by which we judge something as informative:  in essence, redefine what we mean by success and failure.  Allowed into the system would not only be the factizings that permit regimentation as a sometimes useful way of making sense but the story-tellings that permit muddling throughs.  

AN EXEMPLAR THEORY, METHODOLOGY, AND PRACTICE:   SENSE-MAKING
	Twenty-two years in development, the Sense-Making approach  is in actuality a set of assumptions, a theoretic perspective, a methodological approach,  a set of research methods, and a practice.  The approach was originally developed to assess how patients/ audiences/ users/ clients/ citizens make sense of their intersections with institutions, media, messages, and situations and to then apply the results in responsive communication/ information system design.   Since its early development, the approach has been applied to a variety of contexts (e.g. political communication, everyday information seeking, health communication, organizational images, mass media audience reception, telecommunication use)  at a variety of analytic levels (e.g. individual, group, organization, community, culture) in both quantitative studies with sample ns as large as 1000 and in qualitative studies with ns as small as 20.   Work resting on the approach has been published and cited primarily in the various communication fields and the information and library science fields with some ancillary attention in other fields.  (3)
	 The phenomena of Sense-Making's interest is sense-making,  defined broadly in terms of the  set of assumptions about reality, observing,  and power to which we are guided by narrative #8.  Sense-Making starts with the assumptions of phenomenology -- that the actor is inherently involved in her observations and it is from her perspectives and horizons that observations must be understood.  What differs in this formulation is the  explicit acceptance of a reality assumed to be both orderly and chaotic.    Sense-Making then brings these assumptions together by asserting that given an incomplete ontology and an incomplete epistemology, we arrive at an uncompromising species problematic -- the human mandate to bridge persistent gaps in existence -- gaps  between self at time 1 and time 2, between person 1 and person 2, between person and society, organization and organization, and so on.  	
	From this, Sense-Making extracts two assumed mandates for the species:  one is to make sense without complete instruction in a reality which is itself in flux and requires continued sense-making; the second to reach out to understand the sense made by others for the help it provides in the  continuing species problematic.   Sense-Making emphasizes the importance of the latter assumption in particular for it is not rooted (as most calls for understanding difference are) only in a relativistic epistemology, rather it is rooted in an assumption that humans must muddle through together, and the tools they have which assume an ordered reality are useful only to a portion of their sense-making mandates.  	
	Setting this within the common polarities of social theorizing today, what Sense-Making  explicitly does is enter the research situation in  the "in between", between order and chaos, structure and individual, culture and person, self 1 and self 2, and so on.    Sense-Making focuses on how humans make and unmake, develop, maintain, resist, destroy, and change order, structure, culture, organization, relationships, self.  
	The Sense-Making theoretic assumptions are implemented in method via a core methodological metaphor  which pictures the human moving through time-space bridging gaps and moving on.  Sense-Making thus mandates theorizing based on concepts relating to time, space, movement, and gap.   Sense-Making also rests on a theory of the subject which is consonant with its ontological and epistemological assumptions:  the human is conceptualized as centered and decentered; ordered and chaotic; cognitive, physical, spiritual, and emotional, differing potentially across time and across space.   Sense-making assumes that the rigidities in information use implicitly hypothesized by demographic, personality, and many constructivist theories pertain only to a sub-set of human possibilities.  As humans move across time-space both rigidities and flexibilities are possible.  Sense-Making assumes that one of the reasons why our theories of information use and their potential applications to design have been so weak is that our theories have focused primarily on predicting patterns in rigidities, rather than patterns in flexibilities.  
	 One way in which S-M differs markedly from other approaches is that it explicitly privileges the ordinary person as necessarily a theorist involved in the development of ideas that provide guidance not only for understanding personal worlds but necessarily for understanding collective, historical, and social worlds as well.  Sense-making is mandated to theorize the human in this way by narrative #8's acceptance of ontological incompleteness.  If reality is incomplete then movement through it must be guided not only or merely by fact but by theory..  Further, in its attention to movement, Sense-Making mandates a focus on power by attending to forces that facilitate movement and forces that inhibit and constrain movement.
	 While Sense-Making relies heavily on concepts of time, space, movement, and gap, it must be emphasized that these are not set forth as if sense-making was merely a purposive, linear, problem-solving activity.  These are posited as only a sub-set of  human possibilities.  The Sense-Making metaphor must be understood as a highly abstract framework.  Likewise, too, while Sense-Making focuses on the human individual, it does not rest on an individualistic theory of human action.  Rather, it assumes that structure, culture, community, organization are created, maintained, reified, challenged, changed, resisted, and destroyed in communication and can only be understood by focusing on the individual-in-context, including social context.  Note, however, that this is not the same as saying the only way to look at the individual is through the lens of social context because this kind of theorizing implies the individual is entirely constrained or defined by that social context and, thus, admits no room for resisting, changing, inventing, or muddling.
	In both the research context and the application context, Sense-Making is implemented in practice by the application of the Sense-Making triangle which encapsulates the Sense-Making metaphor in a picture of the human (individually or collectively) moving from a situation (time-space) across a gap by making a bridge, and then moving in on the other side of the bridge.  The three points of this triangle include: situation, gap/bridge, and outcome.  
	 In the research context, as one example, the Sense-Making metaphor is implemented in the interview in a number of alternative ways, ranging from in-depth interviews lasting from 1-2 hours and up to 6 hours to brief interviews lasting 20-30 minutes.  The foundational interviewing approach, the one most aligned with Sense-Making's theory, is called the micro-moment time-line interview.  In this approach the respondent is asked to describe one or more critical situations in detail first in terms of what happened first, second, third, and so on.  Then for each time-line event respondents are asked to describe, in turn, situations (e.g. barriers, constraints, history, memory, experience), gaps (e.g. confusions, worries, questions, muddles), bridges (e.g. ideas, conclusions, feelings, opinions, hypotheses, hunches, stories, values, strategies, sources), and outcomes (e.g. helps, facilitations, hurts, hindrances, outcomes, effects, impacts).   Since Sense-Making only provides a theory of the interview and not a recipe, actual implementation can take on myriad forms depending on the study purpose (e.g. needs assessment, evaluation, audience reception, etc.).  Alternative approaches have the respondent detail the basic time-line and then choose the most important event, or question, or contact, and so on.   Some interviews enter through the situation, others through the gap, or bridge, or outcome.  
	It is important to note that Sense-Making conceptualizes the research situation as itself an applied communication situation involving attempts to understand how others have designed their senses of their worlds.   In this situation, the researcher is involved in meta-design focusing on design.  Likewise in application to what is commonly called practice, Sense-Making posits of theory of practice, a meta-design for design.   In this way, Sense-Making sees no discontinuity between Sense-Making as a research approach and Sense-Making as an approach to the design of practice. The final sections of this chapter will present some illustrations of applications to practice and draw conclusions.

SOME APPLICATIONS 
	To date Sense-Making has been applied primarily in research contexts and thus most of the applications drawn to practice have been hypothetical.  There have been, however, a number of actual practice applications and these combined with the hypothetical cases can be used here to show how the theoretic guidance offered by narrative #8 translates into a theory of the practice of information design and ultimately to meta-design.   The illustrations that follow are presented in no particular order other than there selection has been guided by a wish to present variety. (4)
	While only a few of the examples below are highly technologized, it is a fundamental assumption of Sense-Making that the enormous flexibilities which the new technologies offer makes implementation of Sense-Making in practice  potentially powerful.   Most of the practice examples below could be implemented with technologies although in doing so we would have to change our definitions of what we mean by information coverage.  In one sense, these applications demand greater coverage -- more viewpoints would be represented.  In another sense, these applications demand less coverage because by mandate nothing would be closed down to certainty and wherever inputs called "information" are accessed they would be open to change and dialogue.  
	In implementing such systems fundamental questions would need to be answered, such as:  How much diversity is sufficient to trigger user sense-making?  How can we serve factizing needs without cutting-off challenges to factizing and without retreating to a conceptualization of information as a thing to be transferred?   How do we handle vested interests?  Can a profession serve the sense-making needs of users without being subject to the powerful influences of other professionals who have vested interests in particular kinds of sense?    Given the enormity of these questions one could challenge that these illustrations are all exercises in impractical idealism.  An alternative point of view suggests, however, that there is a large space in society for professional facilitators of sense-making.   Yet another point of view suggests that the myriad challenges we see globally to nation states, organizational systems, and experts are in part of manifestations of failures on the part of the former to be useful informationally to people.  
	SENSE-MAKING THE REFERENCE INTERVIEW.   The most extensive application of Sense-Making to date has been in the interview at the library reference desk.  Training in the use of the Sense-Making approach to the reference interview  has been extensively used in several locales with some professionals reporting that they have changed their practice entirely to this approach and others reporting that they combine the approach with others.   It is fair to estimate that some 500 professional librarians have been so trained.  Essentially this approach to the reference interview focuses on using Sense-Making as a dialogic interface between librarian and patron so that the librarian can better serve the information needs of the patron.   The librarian focuses on developing a picture of the user's sense-making triangle by asking such questions as:  What led you to ask this question?  How do you hope to be helped?  If you could get the best possible answer, what would it be like?   What are you trying to do?  
	JOURNAL AUTHORS AS SENSE-MAKERS.   In a small test application, a set of 10 journal articles were abstracted for students in two classes.  In one class, traditional abstracts and keywords were presented.  In the second class added to these traditional abstracts were Sense-Making statements elicited from the authors answering such questions as:  What was it that you hoped to accomplish with this article?  What led you to write it?  How did writing it help you?  How do you think it will help others?  What was your major struggle with the article?  What remains unresolved?    Students were asked to rank order the articles in terms of potential usefulness.  They were then given the articles for use in term papers.   Three months later they were asked to rank order the articles in terms of actual usefulness.  The actual and potential usefulness ratings of the class which received the Sense-Making abstracts were significantly closer than those in the traditional abstract class.  The implication is that mandating authors to treat their writings using guidance from Sense-Making provides more potential bridges of connection for readers.
	SACRIFICING THE COHERENT JOURNALISM NARRATIVE.  In this small scale test application, journalism students were taught to sacrifice the coherent narrative which is foundation stone of journalistic practice and instead surround their phenomena of interest in the kind of circling of reality mandated by Sense-Making.  The students were taught to ask questions of themselves such as:  What leads me to care about this?  Who else cares?  What leads them to care?  What different groups of people care?  Within groups, what contests might there be?  What would be alternative views of the reasons for the contests?  Is there consensus across groups/people on any points?  What explains this?  The student journalists were also taught to select for observation and interview 5-6 maximally different sites with the selection taking into account issues of power and difference, and within sites to seek out both contest and consensus, those with power and those without.  When writing up the results of their efforts, the journalists were taught to display the results spatially rather than narratively.  In assessing the results, a group of student readers talked with the student journalists and the discussion focused on such questions as:  Given that the journalist can not present all viewpoints, what is sufficient difference to trigger the reader's own sense-making processes?  How could technologies be used to implement this kind of journalism?
	TRANSFORMING A PROFESSIONAL STEREOTYPE.  Interested in the level of activity around it's video desk a public library asked users to explain how the videos they watched helped them.  The results transformed how the librarians thought of their video collections because users reported a range of life-enhancing and survival outcomes that ran counter to stereotypes of video as entertainment.  As a result, the library both increased its video budget and developed programmatic connections between the video collection and literacy training.
	HOW BOOKS HELP.  At another library a small test was run of a bulletin board on which readers were invited to post their answers to these questions:  How did the book you are returning today help you?  What leads you to say this?  These answers were posted on a bulletin board.  Librarians observed users standing for long periods reading responses.  They also observed an increase in demand for some books with ordinarily low circulations.
	STUDENT SENSE-MAKING.  A trial Sense-Making system was developed for a class.  First, students who had taken the class in the past were interviewed using Sense-Making and ask to describe their sense-making relating to writing their class paper.   An analysis was done of the situations, gaps, bridges, and helps and these were structured into an interactive computer program so that new students could plot their own paths through the input on an as needed basis.  A large number of paths were possible.  Students could enter via situations, gaps, bridges, helps.  Thus, for example, a student might start by choosing a situation such as  "I hate this class" or a bridge "What's the best resource on this topic?" or a gap "How can I choose a topic when I'm so confused" or an outcome "What's the easiest way to do this?"    Once through the gate of each entry additional gates were offered, again developed inductively based on the actual sense-making needs of those who had gone through the experience in the past.  Students could, for example, ask a question and then select the kind of answer they would like -- for example, what a librarian said,  what the teacher said, what a good student said, a selection of what different students said.  Student users could also add their comments if they found their own sense-making needs not sufficiently represented.  
	INFORMATION PRESENTATION AT A BLOOD DONATING CENTER.  The information needs and uses of donors at a blood center arise for donors within the context of a sequenced movement through the donating process -- intake, testing, preparation, donating, recovering.  Most attempts to inform donors occur before intake but a Sense-Making study showed that there were reasonably demarked sequences of sense-making and that most information needs could be addressed more fully and more usefully by providing answers to questions more likely to be raised at particular points in the process.  Results also suggested that there were a number of information needs which were not easily articulated publicly but could be handled with a interactive and path flexible sense-making system controlled by donors.  Further, evidence suggested the donors were aware of contests and differences in perspectives that produced variety in answers to their questions and they wanted these addressed.
	INFORMATION SHEETS FOR PATIENTS.  In a small scale application in a cancer clinic, information sheets were prepared for patients which attended to the major questions patients asked as unearthed in Sense-Making interviews.  Each sheet focused on one question.  Since interviews with patients showed they were very concerned about conflicts in information, major emphasis was placed on the conflicts.  The typical question was followed by answers from 3-4 doctors, 1-2 nurses, and several patients.  The answers were then followed with a circling of the conflicts -- each source was asked what accounted for the differences in the answer and these replies became part of the information sheet.  
	SURVEILLING AN ORGANIZATION.  In an organizational context, a leader used Sense-Making to begin every staff meeting by having each staff member talk briefly in answer to these questions:  What successes did you have last week?  What successes did we collectively have last week?  What made these successes possible?  What barriers or struggles did you face last week? What barriers or struggles did we collectively face last week?  What do you see as leading to these barriers/struggles?  What do you think would help?  The leader reported that participants resisted the process at first but over time it become a meeting highlight.  In addition, the leader reported that consensus-building became much easier and over-time staff become more tolerant of and cooperative with each other.   Further,  critical needs for information collecting became more clearly apparent and efforts to answer questions less wasteful.  
	CONSTRUCTING A RESEARCH COMMUNITY.  Much the same approach was used in a research community where each participant presented work for group discussion.  Presentations were kept brief -- no more than 30 minutes -- and no interruptions were allowed.  At the end of the presentation, each listener was asked to speak for 3-4 minutes in answer to these questions:  What was helpful to you about this presentation?  How did it help?  What connections do you see between your work and this presentation?  What leads you to say that?  What confused you about this presentation?  What would have helped you handle that confusion?  What would you have like to see in this presentation that was not there?  How would that have helped you?   After this round, discussion opened up to give-and-take procedures.  Evaluation of the process by leader and participants suggested that the process helped all participants enter more easily into constructive dialogue and find ways to connect with and assist each others work.
	SELF SENSE-MAKING.  In this application of Sense-Making persons interviewed themselves using the detailed micro-moment time-line interview to examine a situation of struggle or confusion or threat.  Following the usual approaches to the interview, the self-interviewer detailed what happened in the situation and then for each time-line step what conclusions or ideas or thoughts they came to, what emotions or feelings they felt, and what confusions or worries they faced.  Each conclusion, idea, thought, emotion, feeling, confusion, worry was then probed:  what lead to it?  how does it connect to your life?  did it help or facilitate?  did it hurt or hinder? how?  what constraints or barriers or forces are at play? what explains these?  These self-interviews have been conducted with more than 1000 persons over some 20 years.  Self-interviewers have reported  increases in understanding not only of self but of others and conditions and events.  Further, they have reported  increases in understanding how and what information from others could be helpful.  


CONCLUSIONS
	This chapter has traced a brief history of theories of information design and has proposed that we must change our theory if we are to pursue a practice that is maximally helpful to the human condition. This chapter has also presented an exemplar approach called Sense-Making whose theory and methodology mandates a practice which looks at information design as involving a dialogic circling of reality, a reality that can be reached for but never touched, described in gossamer but never sculpted.  This practice is mandated to focus on meta-design:  design about design, and explicitly acknowledge that its work pertains not to merely transferring information from here to there, but to assisting the species in its information design.    
	If we are to pursue this challenge we will find ourselves having to examine our uses of some terms traditionally held fundamental to information processes:  fact, knowledge, data, and even the very concept information itself.    Our views of information are challenged by what many observers call the important philosophic rupture of our time, with order on one side, chaos on the other.   Traditional views of information define it as serving the former and threatened by the latter.  What is proposed here is a reconceptualization that chooses both order and chaos and the ways in which humans individually and collectively design the sense (i.e. create the information) that permits them to move from one to the other.   Some may see the role of information design as being diminished by this move.  Alternatively, it is possible to see the role as enriched to one of far-reaching consequence to the species.  

FOOTNOTES

(1)  Since the mandate for this volume is to write for a diverse audience, this chapter presents its arguments in as accessible language as possible without arduous tracing of the roots of ideas and detailed footnotes.  In addition citations are reduced to the bare essentials and to only the most recent work by scholars to whom a debt is owed.  Readers who wish more detailed and extensive presentations albeit developed for different purposes are directed to Dervin 1994, 1993, 1992, 1989a, 1989b.   A particular debt is owed to Richard F. Carter (1991, 1989) whose work has informed the author's own more than any other.  

(2) In this chapter, the terms information, knowledge, knowing, data, truth are used purposely without any attempt to distinguish precisely between.  The intent is to pick up on the way in which the terms are used without definition in everyday discourse, even everyday scholarship.  It is a major point of this article that most of the conceptual edifices constructed to distinguish between these terms in fact posit truth, defined as statements isomorphic to reality, as the criterion for knowledge and information.   

(3) In this presentation, Sense-Making the approach is distinguished from sense-making the phenomena by the use of the two capital letters.  
(4) More complete descriptions of most of these examples can be found in Dervin 1992, Dervin 1989a, and Dervin and Dewdney 1986.  More information can also be obtained from the author.

					
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