Augmenting the process of sensemaking in design research.

Context

University

Topics

Product Design

Year

2019

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.

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.

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 fulfill.

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.