This workshop – Making Sense of Sensemaking – sounds pretty fascinating.

Making sense of the world is a common activity – it happens whenever people confront a new, complex problem. Sensemaking can be a core professional task in itself, as it is for researchers, designers, or intelligence analysts. It often begins with a process of collecting and organizing data. Sometimes the information can be organized into a fairly simple structure, one that helps to solve the problem. But the process can also be ill-defined, iterative and complex: information retrieval, organization and task re-definition all interact in sometimes subtle ways.

This 2-day workshop aims to bring together a diverse community of researchers working on understanding sensemaking activities and on technology to support them. We hope to establish a dialogue between various researchers, enrich our understanding by laying out the space of varieties of sensemaking and articulating their commonalities and differences, and draw design implications for better sensemaking tools, systems and aids.