Participatory Sensemaking through Visualising Conversations

Both conversations between people and finding ways to visualise complex phenomena are important topics for sensemaking in systemic design research. This presentation introduces the COCOnUT and TaCo projects, which together create a system which extracts words from conversations, visualises them using a diagrammatic approach, and enables participants to combine and annotate them in near-real time, using a tangible interface. Particularly in multi-stakeholder contexts such as democratic deliberation, or participatory policy-making, the ability for participants to see what is being said (and what has been said) by themselves and others and to investigate and interact with themes emerging from the conversation—ideas which have been re-stated or reframed, terms used to mean different things, different terms used to mean the same thing, ideas which should be grouped together, and so on—are all part of a process of understanding each other’s understanding. Ongoing work will explore possibilities for this kind of tool as part of participatory sensemaking in design and conversation processes.