1x1 — Luca Rosati: Sensemaking, the power of relationships
What is the value and the quality of information? And how does the shaping of data chains work to conceive a meaning perspective? Well, in the end, this semantic and cognitive dimension separated apparently from the action, is a crucial part of any design framework.
Artefacts speak to us and make clear their setting of usage. The meaning, Luca Rosati told us, has to be constructed and organized. Luca Rosati is a designer sui generis, in terms of information and linguistic background. He is an author of several papers and books. His latest work, Sense-making. Organizzare il mare dell’informazione e creare valore con le persone is a well-conceived guide, quick and practical, to understand the basics of information organization, showing also the different natural ties with the humanities. He is a consultant for the Public Administration and teacher of Communication and UX design at the LUISS and IULM universities.
Within the design, the sensemaking issue, namely interpretation, is by now unavoidable given the huge amount of reachable data we encounter every day. Hence we leave space to Luca’s words and to the precious linking he makes available into his answers. Good reading!
Let’s start from our interpretive capacity and the organization where it is applied. Facing innovation, which requires excellent sensemaking performances, what are the mistakes to avoid and the challenges to overcome?
“Companies and organizations are complex systems. And to describe them, I found the words that the physic Carlo Rovelli has been using for describing quantum physics, extremely fitting: “The world seems to be relation before objects. […] As the idea of continuous space which contains things vanishes, as the idea of an elementary and primordial “time” which fluxes independently from anything vanishes. […] nature’s dancing does not occur following the rhythm of the baton of a single director, of a single time: each process dances independently from its neighbours, following its rhythm (Rovelli, Sette brevi lezioni di fisica, Lezione 5). Within this framework, the bigger risk is reductionism or rather the compression of that complexity and to operate dangerous simplification. The best way to avoid reductionism is co-design or the bottom-up designing process which involves all the stakeholders of a certain project. And by “design” I mean both the design for services and for the entirety of the company’s processes. An excellent synthesis of those methods is contained within Cristina Lavazza’s book, Radical Collaboration.”
Remaining within the organizations topic, how much awareness or scepticism do you find concerning the sensemaking methodologies? And considering the tremendous implications the misunderstanding could lead to, what performance level do you think we have reached?
“I think that the problem has a cultural nature. The resistance to a change is partially natural and understandable, but it is often the result of incapacity and resistance to envision beyond. Too many companies and organizations, and even communities, are used to looking at short or very short term, focusing only on the objectives they can fulfil in that time. I think instead, it would be important to learn how to look at least at the medium term, without considering the long one, and to recognize design as an investment. In the end, that is the same difference existing between information and knowledge”.
Now data and technologies. If on one side it appears that we desire devices that relieve us from struggle, such as thinking, on the flip side it seems that those will never imitate our sensemaking ability. Thus to what extent do technologies help us to make sense of reality?
“I think there is a cooperation between human beings and software, rather than an alternative. Even looking to the future. AI is nowadays really powerful, but even considering its major upgrades it will not solve all the ambiguities that are proper of natural language and that is the natural language richness itself. Software could help us fulfil the task of analysis and classification — that are the rawest and mechanic operations — but then these should be reviewed and refined by a human being. In other words: the interpretation and meaning of any data set is always bonded to a particular context, it changes in time and space, from one environment to another. Now, that contextual specificity is the one the software has more difficulties to process because it is not correlated to universal principles or rules. Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of information and expert of AI, explains that it is easy for a chatbot to go haywire at the moment when it should solve contextual information which pops up: “This is known as the frame problem: how a situated agent can represent a changing environment and interact with it successfully through time. Nobody has much of a clue how AI can solve the frame problem, so human intervention is constantly required, as with the robots on Mars” (Luciano Floridi, The Fourth Revolution, p. 136).”
In conclusion, let’s talk about creativity. A theme loved by designers, an activity of deconstruction. How much do you think creative capability, understood as a set of languages, experiments, and imaginative researches, is present within sensemaking?
“When one is talking about creativity there is often a lot of misunderstanding. Creativity is not creating from anything, free improvisation without rules, extemporaneous expression of any kind — as many may think. Even within the artistic field, creativity is always subject to rules: the artist, musician, poet, architect — must always confront tradition and dialogue with it, also when that dialogue occurs critically. Even the avantgarde presents itself as breaking with the most recent culture while retrieving aspects of the more ancient or submerged one — I think of the Japanese influence on Van Gogh, or the African one on Matisse and Picasso. This is also true for design, which firstly ought to respond to needs, objectives, specific people. If creativity is understood in that way — the only correct one — creativity is an important issue within sensemaking, because of both use relationships as a lever”.
