Making Sense of Research with a Sense-Making Process

Learn sense-making processes that will guide your research and meaning-making from initial question to company wisdom

Reading Time: 10 minutes

How do we find patterns in data, and what do we do with them? How do great researchers turn research findings into decision-making tools of wisdom? Sense-making is an emerging term in design research, and it’s the secret to conducting killer research.

Sense-making in a nutshell

While sense-making might be a new word, you're probably already doing it. It’s the internal process our brains conduct naturally to learn and make sense of the world. It’s something everyone does as they move about the world.

In design, sense-making is a very specific process:

In design, sensemaking is the process of working with research data to form connections and understanding that will inspire innovative products and services.

Example:

Product Manager: “How’s the research project going?”

Design Researcher: “We’ve been collecting lots of data, but it’s too early to know what to make of it. We’ll move to the sensemaking process's next stage, which should help us find some patterns.”

“While the word sensemaking may have an informal, poetic flavor, that should not mask the fact that it is literally just what it says it is.”

— Karl E. Weick, 1995

Sense-making (often written sensemaking) is a psychological concept outside of design pioneered by Karl E. Weick in the 1970s. Because the term has roots in social psychology and knowledge management, it is highly applicable to the world of design, and sensemaking is a word you will often hear in advanced design research circles.

Sense-making in design research

Design is a messy undertaking. Any field that attempts to study how humans act in the messy real world will run into chaos. Design researchers have many methods for dealing with the disorder of humans and the data that these studies generate.

Sense-making allows you and your team to apply data in a way that will inform, inspire, and align the project. Rigorous thinking might even open up a new perspective on your research if you're rigorous.

Designers that try to understand humans inevitably practice sense-making. Understanding this internal mental process will help you better communicate the power of research to the whole organization.

While sense-making might be a new word, you're probably already doing it. It’s the internal process our brains conduct naturally to learn and make sense of the world.

The Sense-Making Process

Design researchers have a process for making sense of data that anyone can benefit from. The Sense-Making Process is a framework for understanding the mental process of sensemaking in design.

This sense-making process comes from Jan Chipchase, the “James Bond of design research.” Through his work with corporate clients in locales from Tokyo to Afghanistan, Chipchase developed a framework specifically for design research projects.

The process externalizes the internal mental process of understanding. As you progress from an educated guess to broadly applicable insights, you follow the evolution of understanding. This synthesis of data is key to creating usable insights for your team.

[Adapted from the Field Study Handbook]

As you move from left to right, you reach a higher level of understanding in the Sense-Making Process. Here’s an overview of each stage of the Sense-Making Process:

1. Identify Hypothesis

The Hypothesis Stage is the phase where you identify problems and assumptions. The hypothesis will evolve throughout the evolution of understanding, but it’s good to start with one on record. Outside stakeholders usually form these hypotheses, but sometimes researchers facilitate this process.

Key Artifacts: Questions, Problems, Assumptions, Hunches, Ideas, Needs, Opportunities

2. Collect Data

The Data Stage includes gathering recordings of interviews, charts from industry reports, summaries of desk research, etc. The actual act of collecting this data almost always happens in the discovery phase of projects.

Key Artifacts: Analytics, Artifacts, Evidence, Facts, Numbers, Photos, Quotes, Experiences

3. Structure Information

The Information Stage is the step where you sort through the data you've already collected. If you didn't decide on a structure for your data before the project, this is a chance to sort through the data and decide which parts should inform the project.

Key Artifacts: Smarter Questions, Tags, Summaries, Database, Data Wall

4. Cluster Knowledge

The Knowledge Stage builds relationships within the information gathered. This is done through clustering or spatial mapping on a data wall to create a group understanding of the phenomenon. Affinity diagramming is a great method to do this. The idea is to compare, contrast, and classify data based on its relationship with other data.

Key Artifacts: Initial Frameworks, Patterns, Shared Understanding, Smarter Questions

5. Synthesize Insights

In the Insight Stage, look at the patterns that make up the big picture until you get completely new ideas. These "aha! moments" feel like a bolt of creative inspiration. Insights combine research observations with the researcher’s experience, following the formula:

I saw this + I know this = Insight.

Insights are the most important of the soft deliverables in your projects, so be sure to record them.

Key Artifacts: Mental Models, Frameworks

6. Evaluate Wisdom

Many organizations skip the final phase of the sense-making process. How do you know that your initial hypothesis solves your problem unless you apply it broadly to other questions? This phase is all about using your research insights in broader contexts to determine its validity.

Key Artifacts: Common Sense, Folklore, Process, Vision, Opportunities, New Domains, New Hypothesis

If you've conducted your UX research well, your insights will provide a more comprehensive understanding of other questions in your company and inform better hypotheses in the future as the process starts over.

Other Models of Sense-making

This process is not completely new. You might recognize the DIKW hierarchy in this process. This popular model was popularized by systems thinker Russel Ackoff in his paper, From Data to Wisdom.

[The DIKW Hierarchy]

Designer, author, and queen of co-creation Liz Sanders applied the DIKW to her design work in a similar approach in her paper, The Fabric of Design Wisdom.

[From Liz Sanders, author of Convivial Toolbox]

Gaping Void popularized a cartoon version that isn’t design-specific, but I find it highly applicable to design research. This simple drawing has become an endless meme machine as the internet continually remixes it.

[Cartoon by David Somerville, based on a two-pane version by Hugh McLeod]

The Sense-Making Process in design takes inspiration from a variety of sources. Designers are mixers and multi-disciplinary generalists. The Sense-Making Process is an excellent example of improving your design practice by studying other fields.

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Sense-making in the Real World

While sense-making is a natural internal process humans use to make sense of the world, you can get better results with the cooperation of others. Our sense-making abilities are heightened by adding other "senses" in the room. This is often done in the corporate setting on a digital or in-person data wall covered in post-its. The team can form a group consensus on what is happening by externalizing the observations.

Sense-making happens during Design Synthesis, an abstract phase of design that connects research with the application of that research. During this phase, you turn research findings into visualizations like models, personas, sketches, and, eventually, products and services. Sense-making provides a framework for understanding how to make data useful so that it can be visualized in Design Synthesis.

Sense-making is so fundamental to understanding the world that it would be hard to imagine any design activity that doesn't have a little bit of this process involved. As you seek to evolve an understanding of your design process, pay attention to this uniquely human process that happens in your brain as you conduct sense-making in research.

Learn More About Sense-making

• Check out our bite-sized presentation on Sense-making

• Read an in-depth guide from sense-making expert, Jon Kolko

• Read more about UX Research from the Fountain Institute

• Take our 22-day UX Research course, where we transform your UX skills into Agile UX Research Skills