Sensemaking view of design process

1. Ilkka Kettunen
Design as sensemaking
An autoethnography on the early phases of product development
Jussi Timonen

2. • How do designers make sense of the design process?
• How do designers create opportunities for other
stakeholders to participate in the creative process?

3. Design process
individual - centered
collaborative
reflectiverational
design hero bricoleur
participatory, situated,…dominant tehcno-rational

5. 7 properties of sensemaking (Weick 1995, 17)
1. Grounded in identity construction
2. Retrospective
3. Enactive of sensible environments
4. Social
5. Ongoing
6. Focused on and by extracted cues
7. Driven by plausability rather than accurancy

6. Analytic autoetnograpy (Anderson 2006)
Researcher is:
1. a full member in the research group.
2. visible as such a member in published texts.
3. committed to developing theoretical
understandings of boarder social
phenomena.

7. Context
• EDUFIX ltd. (pseudonym)
• Furniture manufacturing (fictious)
• 300 empoyees, 400 M€ sales, 70% exported
• R&D venture: intelligent learning environment
• Informants: designers, managers, researchers,
engineers…

8. Data
• Diary
• Videos of design group + management board
meetings
• 1600 sketchs, …

9. Story
• Autoetnography narrative, 60 pages.
• Duration 10 months
• Designing 16 product concepts
• Starting from the first meeting with the
management board
• Ending up handing over the concepts for
detail design
• Plot: enthusiasm, frustration, success…

10. Analysis / Interpretation
1st order analysis: the story – what happened?
2nd order analysis: presenting the story in a
theoretical perspective – what does all this
mean?

11. Design sensemaking practices

12. So what?
• Identity construction: identities define the
product.
• Plausablity: engage positive illusion.
• Idea of enactmenet (Schön 1983): there is no
”clean slate”.

13. Ilkka Kettunen
www.aatepaja.fi