Duane Degler Welcome to Sensemaking as a Learned Experience. I'm Duane Degler and I'm here in the comfort of my home. I thought we would all appreciate a low key conversation, a little fireside chat if you will. I appreciate the fact that the Information Architecture Conference team has pulled together this virtual conference. The organizers, the volunteers have done a huge amount and I'm doing a small part here in being able to talk to you about sensemaking as a learned experience. It's a wide ranging conversation. This is a topic that is really large and there's a whole conference on it right now. And what I'm doing is just putting in a small part of it, thinking about that aspect of learned experience. So my background is a principal of design for context. And as the information architecture lead, I am an information architect. I have a history in a number of areas of digital practice, but it's mostly been centered around digital practice, the crafting and creating of information, information spaces, ecosystems of digital content and digital technologies. So, I want to talk to you today about sensemaking as a learned experience, first and foremost, a sensory experience. Duane Degler How do we learn to make sense of things in the context of say, food and drink? Music? Art? We're going to talk briefly about those things. And then we're going to move into information experiences, how we think about seeking information, how we think about organizing and managing it and making sense of it through organizational processes. And then how we create different kinds of structures that help people interact with it. We'll talk briefly a bit about visualizing as one mechanism as well at the end. Finally, then I just want to pose a question and thoughts around digital ecosystems as needing learned experiences of their own. They need to actually be able to be learning environments, learning from the people who interact with them. So this is the scope of what we're going to talk about today. And I want to start with a simple, supposedly simple thing, which is, what is an "AHA" moment? How do we encounter and have these aha moments that are really part of sensemaking, part of the process of discovery, about connecting relationships in the way we think about things. So like oh, there's something I know, and there's something I've just seen and just learned, and they're connected to each other. It's about seeing the patterns, looking at the kind of awareness of the way that we interact with information and think about information. And there's also an emotional component. We have these emotional reactions to it. It may be excitement. It may be calm. It may be oh, thank goodness, now it starts making sense to me. It may be joy. We also share these emotions with others, the love of learning, the love of exploration and research, the love and excitement and discovery. As I think about these things, and I think about the aha moment, what I'm thinking about is synthesis, that we're capturing connections between concepts. And that is a very information architecture thing to do. So I want to first talk about sensory experiences. As I said we'll go into a few different kinds of sensory experiences fairly briefly and then move from there into the information experiences. Duane Degler I want to start with food and drink. When we're encountering foods that we may not have tried or the various kinds of drinks, you'll get these amazing lists of words. There's a vocabulary here. In the case of food it's an ingredients list. Here's all of the things that will be in this food. It's hard to know sometimes, as you taste something. Can I taste the individual ingredients? What role do they play in helping me experience the whole? What would it be like if one were missing or different or whatever. But you're beginning to learn a language. And as you enjoy the tastes, you begin to associate it with that language as well. The same in some ways is true with beers, for instance. Now here the language also begins to get into phrasing that's less about the ingredients and more about the experience. The earthy backbone, herbaceous spice, and fine refreshing sparkle. I may not necessarily be able to describe those things to you, but I can be looking for them and experiencing them as I try something. The same is true with wines. We certainly see this with wines. And it's interesting here with this description, the way they're evoking tastes that you're familiar with. Strawberry preserves, red raspberry. Things that you probably are very comfortable and familiar with. And now you're beginning to seek them in this taste as well and draw parallels to it. Now the most exuberant descriptions one might say, are very often found in things like whiskeys. In this particular case, the nose is fresh like laundry and new wood. I can't imagine all of the things that that invokes in my mind. There's also things like that vaguely herbal and leafy aspect. And then on the palate, a slightly tannic oak and leather finish. That's a lot of different words to try and experience in one mouthful. So what we're going to want to do here is just take a moment and help you find your way through to it. Duane Degler So not surprisingly, I have here a whiskey. And we're going to just take a moment and we're going to go through how I experiencee whiskeys. For those of you who want to play along at home, this happens to be a Lagavulin 16. But whatever your personal tastes and experiences are, that's what to go with. Now the first thing we'll work with is sight. So I have here two, These are two different ones, in fact. And put up a little card behind them. So you can see it is a very big difference in color. The lighter ones are going to be usually American oak barrels, and they're usually going to be mountain springs that are providing the water. And they're very light, and they also tend to be a little either lighter and more floral, or a little more fragrant. Whereas this is an island whiskey. It's very dark. And there's two things that might make that dark. One of which is in this particular case, the peat and the ocean around the island that it comes from. The peat is where the water filters through, so it sometimes has a darker coloring to it. The other case that you'll get is where whiskey is coming from cherry or port casks, where the casks are being bought from Spain, or Portugal, and that's actually a sweeter wood, a richer wood. And as the whiskey sits in that wood it absorbs not only flavor but color and they become darker. So darker whiskey might mean it's sweeter. Or it might mean it's smokier and heavier and earthier, as is the case with this one. Duane Degler Which is why we then need to move on to smell. You don't have to stick your nose right down in it. But what you're doing is getting a sense of, what is it evoking? What are the things that come up? And with this one, well, you know, this is a big whiskey. Got a big strong smell. And some might even have said, a little bit like briny, salty, sea air, and possibly a little like burnt rubber. But it's one of the tastiest burnt rubbers you'll probably experience. Duane Degler Anyway, taste then is the next step. You let it swirl around in the mouth. And you get a sense of, what is the taste like? What are the words that it's evoking for me? And at the same time, where in my mouth is it sort of activating? Here along the sides of my tongue, up along the roof of my mouth, and then as I wait, it comes back with this aromatic aftertaste that really fills the senses, the mouth, the nose, etc. So there's a lot going on in here. One of the things you can do to find out what might be to your taste is to add a little water. I use an eyedropper for that. What happens as you drop a few drops of water, and it doesn't take much, but as you put a few drops of water in it begins increasing the smell, the aromatics and trimming down the taste a little bit. So then you try it again. Some whiskies don't need water. Other whiskies benefit from a little bit of water. And so you'll try it out and experiment with it until you find a combination of flavors and words that say, this is how I like the spirit. Or really, I'm looking for something different. I'm looking for something else. And so as we go through, we're beginning to draw out those tastes, sensations, the smells, and using the language that we saw as a way of grabbing hold of, what is the sensation? And we're learning the language of it. Duane Degler So what you saw there. Lighter, darker coloring. Characteristics of the smell. Characteristics of the taste and the sensation in the mouth. And then also a process, a way of experiencing that helps you learn in the future about how to experience other things. So what we've just talked about there is a learned experience where we start with creating a framework. We learn language and a ritual for going into that experience. The most important thing is we're slowing down. It deepens the experience. It slows us down, that ritual process. Hunting for that language slows us down, immerses us more in the experience. It's really important as we start thinking about information in a little while. And finally, a bridging of the unfamiliar. So if I go along six months later, and I try another whiskey, and it isn't anything like this. Well first of all, I'm going to be comparing it to my experience with this whiskey. And then second, I'm going to be hunting for new language. I'm going to be hunting for the language that makes sense to me with this new experience, and that broadens my learning. That's why we call it sensemaking as a learned experience. These are all elements that we're doing. Now this isn't just related to food and drink. It can be for example, music is another way that we encounter this learned experience. Duane Degler While we're talking about bridging with the unfamiliar I have a little example for you So, I'm not going to play a tune now. Sorry, but we'll save that for gym night or for some other time when I happen to be with you all. But you'll see here, the lines on the neck of the instrument correspond to the standard 12 tones of the scale, musical scale that we'll encounter in the left. And the interesting thing is with this bass, those lines are just lines embedded into the neck. This is actually a fretless instrument. So the lines are there to help bridge my prior experience, my learning, my understanding of those scales, but not to limit me to them. So now I have semitones and I have glissando and I can do all sorts of things with this instrument that open up a new vocabulary that I'm trying to get to. As we look further into the music, we can think about pace and time. In music it's rhythm, that common 4/4 that sort of comfortable rhythmic paces, the consistency of pace and rhythm, and then every once in a while changing things up, catching people's attention, changing the mood. The other aspect then is the depth and richness, the harmony, the amount of amount of density in the music itself. The third aspect that we might want to think about and which will come up later as well is collaboration. The idea of ensemble. How do different people listen to each other and work together and coordinate in the music? There are recognizable patterns and themes that we'll get in music Duane Degler Tropes. Tropes, where you associate sound with experiences people are comfortable and familiar with. The classic is like horses. Clip clop clip clop. That clip clop clip clop clip clop can become translated into music and evokes certain memories in people. However, there was a point in time where there's a rise of the cavalry as a major aspect of military and society and the use of the horse and that galloping ride. I mean, think about the William Tell Overture is this sort of galloping ride. Totally different thematic musical approach. Light motifs are another aspect of that. We're all familiar in some way with for example, Peter and the Wolf, the introducing of individual instruments and their sounds by associating them with something else. Star Wars is rife with light motifs, whether it's for the Empire, or for the rebel cause or for individual characters who are strong. Those themes intermingle among themselves and weave together. Now I want to thank Bob Kasenchak. Good friend talking through this with me, we were talking a lot about both whiskey and music. One of the other things he said that was particularly interesting. He's been playing gamelan music. And he had said that he realized as he learned the music and watched the dance performances that there are layers of meaning in the gestures, in the phrasings, that he didn't know the meanings that were behind them because it's a very different language. But they prompted him a recognition that there was a gap in his understanding. And so for sensemaking, he then had to go on a further excursion to expand his understanding in that. And so we see there's both music and dance and it's part of a whole structure and language culturally, that is part of an ensemble and again, that idea of collaboration and coordination among people. Duane Degler And that actually moves us into the visual arts. Why you say? Well if we look for example, at Asian art, this is something that I've always felt that I look at Asian art and everything is composed. Everything is very carefully constructed and composed. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York has produced a looking guide specifically for that. And so this is from their looking guide. And the looking guide includes these structures. Here's the way that compositions are structured. So you can see the relationships of characters that are in it. Likewise, gestures have meaning. The implements in it have meaning. And so all of these meanings are caught in the paintings and the tapestries and others, but only if you know the language. So you're learning a visual language in this case. Duane Degler There's a technique called slow looking, which there's a colleague friend in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Art Museum, who does slow looking Saturdays, where a group of 10 or 15 people will come in and spend an hour of a Saturday with one painting. There's also an online equivalent of that. A group, a company in the UK called Cogapp has used an imaging standard called IIIF to present a slow looking where they use high resolution images and move you gently through a painting to give you the ability to look at aspects of it very closely. Things that you might miss as you're just walking by it, like the woman in the background there, who is, you know, with her umbrella, tucked in a doorway closing her umbrella, all the layers of people on the street scenes there. So the key there, again is slowing down because it deepens the experience. You start noticing details. And you can then as a group share and observe what you've seen. Duane Degler So we've been through the sensory side of sensemaking is a learned experience. Creating a framework. Slowing down and bridging the familiar. How do we do some of these things, for instance, in our information experiences? So now we want to dive into information experiences. And as we talk through information experiences, I'm going to show you a number of examples. Mainly what we're going to do here is look at different examples that will give us some hints into structures that people who use our digital spaces are encountering and how we can help enable that. And at the same time, how we as information architects and designers, think about the design of these spaces. Duane Degler So we're going to start with language again. And the idea of tacit learning. So malts.com whisky site has a very interesting faceted browsable navigation that includes flavors, similarities to things I may have tried, and similarities to my usual typical. So if we look, we can look, for example, at these three things. And start, for example, with similarity to whiskies I've tried. These are whiskies from their collection. If I look at one of them, it's giving me another set of attributes. So now we have a hierarchy of whiskies, cascading down to attributes of them. And so we see these various ones, and spicy and fruity seem to be showing up in a lot of these. Now, not all. Here we have the Glen spray, which is fresh, floral and light. So there's an additive nature to how they've done the flavors. And as we look at rich and rounded, they're taking any whiskey that includes rich and rounded and adding its other attributes that they've classified. Likewise light and floral, they're here but there's all these other attributes as well. So this additive faceted thing. As we move to what I think is most interesting similarity to my usual tipple. This is an environment that helps people learn about these spirits by bridging to their other experiences, by thinking about what it is they're seeing. Duane Degler Facets do this generally. In a number of usability tests over the years with search systems I've found that in a lot of cases, people don't actually select the filters and use the filters very actively. But what they do is they learn the terminology. They're profiling. What's the kind of thing that is in this site that I'm looking at? What sorts of things emerge? How do they relate to what I've been seeking? And things that may have a high number or a low number tell me things about the body of material that's available to me. So faceted filters serve a learning purpose, whether it's with the malt site, whether it's with this scientific and engineering site. Duane Degler Then we move into the results themselves and how we interact with results. Sensemaking happens in stages. It's not again, typically a one and done, I know what I'm looking for experience. So it starts with a person formulating what it is they're seeking, and what it is they know, and what it is they are aware that they don't know. And deciding from that how to seek information. In most cases, they will gather samples, examples of things, just going to grab a few things, something that looks promising. And then go through and assess those things. And eventually make selections of things they decide they want to keep. And in doing so organizing those items that they have found based on their usefulness in certain contexts. So, a number of years ago, we built a system for scientists and engineers and it included two attributes here that I wanted to show. One of which is for the individual who's using multiple terms. Then they get the control over turning on and off highlights for individual terms, which helps them see patterns in the results sets that come back The other then on the right is an organizing structure where they can take results that they're interested in and just drop them right from the search results page into these buckets, these groups. And then they can act on the buckets. They can search within them. They can label those buckets. Each of the groups gives them an organizing approach to then go in and do that assessment at a deeper level with sets of things that have relationships. Duane Degler There's another thing that I was exploring and got into prototyping, but we never really were able to bring it out in the final delivery, which is, how do we act on snippets? How do we act on not the result itself, but the little snippets of where the words match are. And it seemed like introducing a higher degree of progressive navigation by contextualizing search results could be particularly interesting. So by selecting a small snippet from within a particular result, we can then pop up the corresponding paragraph so we can read the surrounding words beyond what we see. And then eventually, when we say yes, this is actually something I'm interested in diving further into, you can navigate but navigate to that place in the document rather than the document as a whole. So we were experimenting with this as a way of maintaining a contextualizing capability. Duane Degler Annotation is another way to do that. With annotation, whether it's annotating terms for search, or whether it's annotating for notes on things that are there, you're collecting up small fragments of things that are of interest to you. And then being able to use them later in other ways. So in this particular instance, we'd created a JavaScript driven search box that allowed us to pull in terminology that somebody had gathered through making notes in another document. We also associated known words with the taxonomy with synonyms that allowed them to control which synonyms they wanted to associate with what they had done. Duane Degler Now we can take this further and think about how we want to do things that are collaborative, and also asynchronously foster insights. And so I want to introduce just a small tool here, a little demo, where the idea is that you have the ability to get into a document, and to make notes in that document. Basic annotation. But the environment is a collaborative environment so multiple people can interact with the same document at a time. And so you can begin to see how different people are asking questions about it. The other thing is the column that's available here on the right is there for the purposes of allowing you to gather things from multiple documents, and order and organize them. Now, these could be your notes. It could be other people's notes. But it's your organization scheme. It's for the purposes of you gathering things together and making sense of them. And that allows you to order them, move them. It also allows you to export them and move them into documents where they become a reference set that you can draw on for other work. So as you begin to make sense of things what you're making sense of is more than any individual point or idea. You're making sense of a pattern of things across multiple documents, multiple people. And that's what's actually helping you think through the way that you begin to make sense of the information that's around you. Duane Degler Now, I want to talk a little bit about interacting with relationships, because this is another aspect of sensemaking, which is how you actually go into an experience with a set of relationships, within content or within information and data. So as we think about, there are a lot of our experiences with seeking information. As we're navigating through it, we end up with lists of things, and then individual things. And then lists of things and individual, we keep bouncing between the list and the object, the list and the object. And it's really, really hard to do that synthesis task that we talked about early on, when we talked about the aha moment as being about synthesis. This is where it breaks down in our current experiences. What we do is we use workarounds for that, such as collecting up things on different tabs and moving back and forth between tabs in our browser. We've been looking at and exploring the use of more related, interconnected horizontalnavigation. Navigation through relationships. Duane Degler For example with the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, where with that site, the goal was to integrate not only information about the artworks but also information about archives, the library, her personal library, the people she was connected to, homes and belongings. It has an amazing collection of things that all ended up at the museum. So let's just start with the art because it's a natural starting point for the journey. It's the most familiar thing for people in the journey. And moving through from there, looking at the various aspects of the art. Being able to hone in using filters. But drilling in. And the first thing we wanted to be able to do was looking deeply, again, creating that deep experience, high resolution images, and the ability to really zoom in. But the relationships are key. We have the actual object that was center of her focus as she painted that work. We have other kinds of things that were influencing her in that time period, same period of time, exhibitions of the work was involved in. And archives. Correspondence and conversations that were about her thinking process in relating to it. And so here we have, for instance, the work in progress as a photograph to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. And the letter where there were conversations about that particular work. Duane Degler So let's go a little further and look at Alfred Stieglitz. First of all, there was this interesting relationship with other artists at the time, Ansel Adams. Then second of all, you look here at Stiglitz himself, and as he's represented in the information space, he's represented under a number of roles. He's the author of letters, the recipient of letters, and he's a photographer in his own right, an artist in his own right. So all of these relationships are about helping us move through and building an understanding of the connections between them. Building up a sense of how we learn about the various things we're looking at and the contexts that surround them. Duane Degler The other thing then, that we can look at is how that movement through information relationships helps people where the subjects may be unfamiliar to them. It is helps build a greater familiarity because you're seeing moving from things that are unfamiliar back into the familiar or moving things from the familiar into areas of unfamiliar and it becomes an exploratory adventure, an exploratory process that you go through. And that's how you begin to treat that learned experience as the process of sensemaking. Duane Degler So in this last section, we're going to talk a little further about, oh, it's not the last section. So I want to go back and talk a little further. I want to go back and talk a little further about structuring your experiences. You'll recall from earlier in this talk, talking about rhythm and harmony, what that means in terms of both pace and depth. There's a comfort and a confidence that comes when people are experiencing information or moving through a path. in digital web environments. This sort of comfortable, predictable, consistent, kind of like that 4/4 rhythm. It helps particularly when they're filling out forms, or when they're interacting with applications where they're having to do certain things and pay very close attention to certain things. Sometimes, though, you want to change up that rhythm. You want to change up the focus. You might want to really make them focus on one particular point. You want to shorten it down, or you want to give them a bit more breadth for them to really expand the way they're thinking about something. Duane Degler The other thing you might want to do is more harmonic. You want to increase density as the experience increases. So as they go through and learn more, whether it's you know, similar to Marcia Bates and thinking about the berry picking analogies, whether there's other ways that you progress, say in academia, from the abstract, or from early overview research into the deeper research and the deeper materials. You want to progress into that harmonic richness. Duane Degler The other thing you can do is see a broader harmonic spectrum. So you can introduce multiple things into pages that allow people to branch off in ways that are particularly interesting to them in their exploratory journey at that time. Now, in order to do that, you have to have a good understanding of the information that you work with. As a information architects, as designers, as content strategists, we have to understand the information landscape in order to be able to then help shape the information landscape. Duane Degler And a colleague, David Hobbs has been working for a while now on a very interesting tool which we've begun using. And I just wanted to sort of briefly dip into it because he's using visualization, In particular, to after crawling sites, and getting that deep information out of those sites, then going back in and the tool renders. He's then got it so the tool renders visualization. And you can apply other data to that. You can look at the visualization and slice it in different ways. And you can potentially apply rules to it. And when you apply rules to it, for example, in this case, the rules around who might be assigned reworking on that. You can also look at things by depth looking only at sub sites. You can look at it and say, what types of information is clustering? How can I see it in a different type of clustering? There are different ways of looking at it for the purposes of gaining an oversight into the information. Duane Degler So the content shimira application begins to get us thinking about visualization. Visualization, big topic and its own thing right. So we're not going to go into it in depth, but I just want to cover a few things to think about as you approach it, and things maybe for a future conversation. One is that, that it invokes different kinds of senses. We think of it as a visual language, a visual medium. But in fact, there's also time awareness. There's seeing things progress over time. There's pattern recognition. Visualizations can help us graph structure and relationships that make sense of deep and complex information. From the perspective of sensemaking and the learned experience, we're learning frameworks. We're learning ways of abstracting out of the data to see and understand data better and differently. As information architects, designers, we're also providing techniques and tools that allow people to begin to control and manipulate and understand that language that they're interacting with. Duane Degler Finally, I just want to touch briefly on the sense making that our tools do, the ecosystem od sensemaking, I'm going to call it here. I would encourage us to think as we produce tools, and sites, and content, and information in various ways to really think about how our environments learn, how our machines learn, how they evolve, and how they evolve in response to the way the individuals interact with it. How do we recognize when people are sensemaking, when people are actually gaining understandings of things? How do we see them progress? How do we see the move from subject to subject? How to move from one level of depth to other levels of depth, because they're making sense of environments that we have created? We need feedback loops. We need mechanisms to understand the experience of people who interact with our tools. And to be able to use those effectively to help encourage and support the kinds of learned experience. That actually is what we're here for. Duane Degler So in summary, just go back to, sensemaking as a learned experience is partly about creating a framework. Language that is learned and carried forward as well as process, rituals, and patterns that help people progress into an experience and make sense of it as they go. So from an IA's perspective, how do you enable an exploratory space? But an exploratory space that's supported by language? And how do you allow receptivity for new insights, learning, and models to be captured and provided by the user? The important point of slowing down. We want to deepen the experience. That's where making sense comes from is that movement into a deeper engagement with the experience and the information. And finally, bridging the unfamiliar. How people by having learned language in an experience, when they encounter a new experience, they apply that language and that process to it. And they will either it'll either resonate. Or if it doesn't, they will be encouraged then by their prior experiences to build new language around their new experiences and make sense of those new experiences. So from the perspective of IAs, again, designers, content strategists, recognizing and reinforcing a person's context, and the exploratory learning path that they're on, is the way we help with that bridging of the unfamiliar. Duane Degler And that's all there is to it. It's easy. Thank you very much. Transcribed by https://otter.ai