“Do you see,” “I hear you,” “It doesn’t feel right,” “I smell a rat,” “it tastes funny”—all common phrases we use to express whether or not we are making sense of our situations and interactions. Sense-making involves not only the five senses, but physical, emotional, spiritual, and intuitional responses. We strive to make better sense of our situations and our dealings with other people as uncertainty makes us anxious.
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Brenda Dervin, one of the foremost thinkers of our time, died in Seattle, Washington as the year ended on December 31, 2022. She was 85. Along with her Sense-Making Methodology, cats and birds, and interest in reading, writing, poetry, art, and music, among others, she was passionate about “humans who commit their lives to justice and the improvement of the human condition”. She wrote in her university bio, “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I consider myself a postmodern modernist. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, a modern postmodernist. On Saturdays, I rest.” She died on a Saturday.
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Sensemaking, the process of forming meaningful representations of a task or problem’s information space, is the starting point of intelligent information use.
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