Link is an investigation on the process of sensemaking within design research. It’s an approach to augmenting designers in their capabilities in making sense out of data.

Context

Bachelor Thesis
July 2018, 16 Weeks
HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd
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Challenge

Design at its core is about organizing complexity and finding clarity in chaos. Finding this clarity, meaning making sense out of data, is a crucial aspect for the process of innovation. In our Thesis, we investigated the process of sensemaking in the context of design research in order to find out how this process can be altered.

Solution

Grounded in the findings from our research, we developed principles that illustrate important mechanics for the process of sensemaking. Further, we developed a tool, that we call Link — a digital platform for managing, structuring and analyzing large sets of research data, to ultimately develop insights and draw novel meaning from it.

Initial Problem

Synthesis is an abductive sensemaking process, which is why Design Research often appears as...

Crucial Aspects of Synthesis

In order to get a better understanding of the discipline and to uncover how we could alter the process of sensemaking, we conducted qualitative interviews with experienced design researchers at Dark Horse, Designit, FJORD, IBM, IDEO, Kaiser X Labs and PCH Innovations.

From that we derived what we call crucial aspects of synthesis, themes that illustrate important principles, mechanics and elements for the process of sensemaking. These aspects would serve us as a foundation for the project and would shape the requirements that we would need to fullfill.

Making thoughts tangible

Externalize

Synthesis is about forcing an external view on data. By making thoughts tangible and transferring them to a physical space, they become part of a shared sensemaking process. The effort of getting thoughts, reflections, and ideas out of our individual minds is called Externalization.

Making thoughts tangible

Think with your hands

People’s thoughts, choices and insights can be transformed by physical interaction with things. In the course of problem solving, we naturally tend to recruit artefacts and manipulate them to augment and transform our ability to think and to explain ourselves.

Making thoughts tangible

Spatialize

As the team gathers more and more data, each artifact is transferred to a research wall, a physical space where the artifacts are mapped out. By organizing these artifacts in ways that illustrate meaning, the researcher is able to build up a representation of his mental model.

Giving meaning to data

Filter

To avoid cognitive overload, researchers want to move away as fast as possible from raw data. By sorting out redundant information, summarizing and interpreting the data, the researcher is starting to make sense out of the data. This process is referred to as filtering.

Giving meaning to data

Be abductive

Qualitative data alone has little value. Only when this data is interpreted, underlying needs are identified and novel meaning is created, the true value of qualitative research shows. In order to achieve this, the researcher applies abductive logic, to give meaning to data.

Having completed the research phase, and with the principles we’ve developed in mind, we started to put our ideas into concrete terms. We explored concepts that already emerged during research and started ideating on possible solutions. We conducted a Design Sprint and derived the result into four core concepts that build the foundation of Link.

Core Concept

01 Unifying Research Artifacts

The concept is based on the idea of unifying research artifacts, be it observations, quotes, images, audio and video files, into a coherent digital format. This format is what we call data assets. An asset can contain any type of information representing a unit of meaning which the researcher considers valuable to the process of sensemaking.

Core Concept

Unifying research findings into a coherent digital format.

Giving context through tags

Without context raw data isn’t worth a penny. Only when interpretations, descriptions and contextual data is added the value is increased. Our approach is to enrich data assets with descriptive tags and contextual metadata. This allows for a much more flexible way of structuring the data over time than compared with conventional ways which are more rigid. Also, with this approach, we can keep an asset linked to its origin , which makes them easier to interpret and therefore more valuable This way of dealing with the data ultimately forms the basis for making the process more comprehensible at a later stage, because it enables some sort of process evidence.

Encouraging speculation and iteration

With our concept, we want to address the issue that working sticky notes does not allow for a flexible way of working or doing quick iterations. By harnessing the power of digital, we want to enable designers to quickly iterate and to adopt different perspectives and frames.

Making design research more comprehensible

As one of our primary goals was to make to process more comprehensible, we want to make use of the linked data assets and build a structure that supports comprehension and provides process evidence.

Grounded in the findings from research, derived from the core concepts and inspired by notions of the ideation phase we developed a digital application that we call Link — a platform for managing, structuring analyzing research data and to subsequently develop better insights.