Mike: This is interesting stuff to see you grappling with and I wish I had
more time to communicate with you on this off-line.
I will throw this out there as others might find it useful.
You are on the edge of something larger than your experiment that you might
not see or even be interested in or ready to see. For your immediate
academic purpose that is probably fine.
What you are doing with your student participants is what in practice we
call Visual SenseMaking. You are finding out that some students of design
are better at it than others. This is no big surprise. For those of us
looking at zillions of portfolios each year this is not earth shattering
news.
Traditional design education remains very focused on teaching and valuing
StrangeMaking (differencing) over SenseMaking. StrangeMaking is about how to
make one toothbrush, car, bank look different from another. SenseMaking and
StrangeMaking are different mental processes. Both are integral to design
and in most cases both are present in varying degrees. Depending on what you
are designing their proportions one to the other might be quite different.
In practice we find it quite difficult to find natural born SenseMakers but
they are around and often they find us. Natural born SenseMakers who happen
to find the SenseMaking business feel like they have found home.
I have no doubt that StrangeMakers feel the same way about finding
StrangeMaking.
Not everyone is aware that SenseMaking has long been part of the design
community. Visual SenseMaking has been an industry for many years and like
design itself it is in motion.
Your experiment is taking place in a subset of SenseMaking. Making sense of
information in the challenge / opportunity space is one of numerous elements
that are now part of the SenseMaking universe of human-centered design.
You may or might not be aware that due to the changing nature of design and
its move upstream towards engaging not just around briefs but rather around
fuzzy situations there is a revolution underway around SenseMaking that is
inclusive of many disciplines and their expertise. Leading design oriented
firms are merging various forms of SenseMaking (anthropology etc) with
Visual SenseMaking so the universe of what we now in practice call Strategic
SenseMaking is being transformed. In our executive education program called
Complexity Navigation we teach a five dimensional model of Strategic
SenseMaking.
Seeing this transformation and emergence we are trying to organize a small
Super SenseMaking Symposium if anyone is interested. In a competitive
marketplace finding other firms engaged in new combinations of Strategic
SenseMaking who are willing to share is always more difficult than finding
interested attendees. :-)
Regarding your notions of ³well-structured‹ill-structured²: Be a little
careful there. When you framed the challenge for the students as one focused
on the text you gave them the equivalent of a design brief, a framed
challenge. In practice we would bring a proven set of tools and logics to
bear on making sense of the text in ways that are sharable with others. Also
always in the mix is our unstructured creativity. We would never just have
one or the other. In this way we co-make tools for distributed design,
co-creation, participatory design, whatever you choose to call it. In
practice this is often the purpose of the exercise that you describe. That
is another entire story!
Students without formal SenseMaking knowledge would likely default to
whatever they have in their personal toolbox. Depending on how they have
been trained they might be unfamiliar with the differences between
SenseMaking and StrangeMaking in the context in which you had them working.
They might have preference for one or the other. This mix is probably what
you saw.
It would be safe to say that in order to attempt to visualize the text they
would first have to understand it themselves or more precisely start to
understand it by visualizing it. Often these actions go very closely hand in
hand. The power of the act of visualizing is that it significantly enhances
the ability to see what makes sense and what does not. Be careful as it
seems to me that you are trying to slice and dice very small gestural
notions within SenseMaking there.
In any case I wish you good luck Mike.
I will take this opportunity to mention quickly that we are presently
looking for Senior SenseMakers and SenseMaking partner firms in Europe so
anyone out there who is interested can connect with me off-line.
gk
...
GK VanPatter
Co-Founder, Director Global Ventures Development
Humantific
StrategyLab | UnderstandingLab | InnovationLab
New York / Madrid
http://www.humantific.com
...
Co-Founder
NextDesign Leadership Institute
New York
NextD
DEFUZZ THE FUTURE!
http://nextd.org
...
> From: Mike McAuley <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Mike McAuley <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:38:22 +1200
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Mike's question - well-structured and ill-structured activity in
> designing
>
> Hi Paraq,
> The analysis-synthesis model was not actually part of my methodology.
> I referred to it only to quickly establish that in a design project
> we start by making sense of the information we have at hand and then
> respond to it. As individuals ‹ within a constructivist-
> interpretivist framework, it is our life experience which will
> determine what sense we make. However, in my own study, which was an
> action research investigation, I set out to address a situation
> involving text interpretation. The problem identified from previous
> experience teaching illustration was that some students developed
> concepts which were either very literal or based on secondary
> propositions contained within the text. Through a three cycle
> approach I was able to build an argument that some students were not
> particularly good at establishing the gist of the text, what Van
> Dijk and Kintsch (1983) call the macrostructure. By not being able
> to sort the information into a hierarchical structure and
> relationship, poorer students would then, based on what they
> understood, conceptualise. So the argument is that a creative
> response to a problem is determined by how the problem is understood.
>
> As regards ³the idea that a human designer is able to operate with
> full knowledge of what he is doing and why he is doing it", I would
> agree with that only if we are talking of tacit knowledge. If we
> value the idea that explicit knowledge and metacognitive awareness is
> desirable and achievable by a more systematic approach to how design
> is taught, then working with novice students through the iterative
> and cyclical structure of action research is one way to explore how
> that can be achieved. What I have been analysing is, in a sense, the
> analysis approach students have taken to comprehend text. The data
> itself, is based on interviews and questionnaires and much of the
> evaluation is carried out by the students themselves.
>
> Getting back to well-structured‹ill-structured problems; I am arguing
> that part of the problem students had to deal with was well-
> structured ·(comprehend the macrostructure of the text) and part of
> it ill-structured (interpret understanding into an illustration). And
> I think it is reasonable to argue that different, identifiable
> thinking strategies were required for each stage.
>
> Regards
> Mike
>
> Louwerse, M. M., and Graesser, A.C. (2006) Macrostructure. In K.
> Brown (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, (2nd ed), 7,
> (pp. 426-429). Oxford: Elselvier.
>
> Van Dijk, T.A., & Kintsch, W. (1983) Strategies of discourse
> comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
>
>
> On Apr 23, 2008, at 11:19 PM, Parag Deshpande wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I think Mike¹s question raises an interesting issue which deserves
>> little
>> more debate.
>>
>> Mike is evaluating novice students using analysis-synthesis
>> approach to
>> arrive at his results. Analysis synthesis approach for design
>> originates
>> from, using Jone¹s terminology, Glass box approach, where a
>> ³designer is
>> considered as a human computer, a person who operates only on the
>> information that is fed to him². This approach, as Jones notes,
>> therefore
>> disregards ³the idea that a human designer is able to operate with
>> full
>> knowledge of what he is doing and why he is doing it². This means,
>> that
>> this approach does not take into account design skills of a designer.
>>
>> Mike's note does not elaborate if he is evaluating design skills of
>> the
>> students. However, if he is, I feel that evaluating work carried
>> out by
>> novice students (which points towards their low level of design
>> skills)
>> using Glass Box approach is likely to lead to erroneous conclusions.
>>
>> Maybe Mike can elaborate on this further?
>>
>> Look forward to your comments.
>>
>> Parag
>> IDC, University of Limerick,
>> NID, India
>>
>> J.C. Jones, ³The state-of-the-art in design methods², in Design
>> Methods in
>> Architecture, G. Broadbent & A. Ward, Eds, Architectural Assocation,
>> London, 1967
>>
>>
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