Card Sessions: Building Blocks
Cards considered in light of questions,
a gamified way to help you reframe things.
Reframing
In a network, cards considered in light of questions, with framing and reframing two processes helping us cultivate common purpose.
Cards
“Organization describes the means by which a designer puts like items “near” each other, either physically (often by moving an index card around) or implicitly in their cognitive models of the data.
This nearness describes affinity, or likeness, and the intent of organization is commonly in identifying or deriving a series of patterns in the data — or in identifying opportunistic outliers, as these can act as stimulation for innovation.
Organization also describes the ability for a designer to identify relationships and hierarchy, as is the case when creating a concept map, process flow diagram, outline, or tree-view of data. These relationships indicate prioritization and importance.” — Jon Kolko
Sessions
“Cognitive Psychologists Robert R. Hoffman, Gary Klein, and Brian M. Moon define sensemaking as “a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections (which can be among people, places and events) in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively” (Klein, Moon, & Hoffman, 2006).
This definition builds on communication theorist Brenda Dervin’s abstract description. Dervin explains that “Sense-Making reconceptualizes factizing (the making of facts which tap the assumed-to-be-real) as one of the useful verbings humans use to make sense of their worlds” (Dervin, 2003).
Both of these definitions point to a similar idea; sensemaking is a constant process of acquisition, reflection, and action.
It is an action oriented cycle that people continually and fairly automatically go through in order to integrate experiences into their understanding of the world around them.” — Jon Kolko
Considerations
“A frame is an active perspective that both describes and perceptually changes a given situation.
A frame is, simplistically, a point of view; often, and particularly in technical situations, this point of view is deemed “irrelevant” or “biasing” because it implicitly references a non-objective way of considering a situation or idea.
But a frame — while certainly subjective and often biasing — is of critical use to the designer, as it is something that is shaped over the long-term aggregation of thoughts and experiences, through the above process of sensemaking, and is therefore a larger way of viewing the world and situations that occur in it.
Like a point of view, a frame too will change, but will change over the long-term rather than the short term.” — Jon Kolko
…in light of questions
“Designers make explicit the normally implicit processes of sensemaking and framing during design synthesis, as they attempt to make meaning out of data through interpretation and modeling.
Common to all methods of synthesis is a “sense of getting it out” in order to identify and forge connections.
This is an attempt to make obvious the sensemaking conditions described above; emphasis is placed on finding relationships and patterns between elements, and forcing an external view of things.
Synthesis is an opportunity to become aware of frames and sensemaking — to make them explicit, through various forms of externalization and modeling — and to delve deeper into the causality that is found in these ways of thinking.
As designers become more seasoned, they build up a level of experience and expertise that allows that to act as if the output was “intuitive” — they are able to solve design problems in a fluid and seemingly effortless manner.
In fact, design never becomes effortless, but the process of design becomes fluid and amorphous as the designer becomes more capable, confident, and reflective.” — Jon Kolko
Gamified
Gamified: Flow
Any sufficiently advanced gamification is indistinguishable from flow.
- How would we know?
- Flow. Flow is how we know.
As our knowledge unfolds, grows, spirals and evolves through our networking, we go through stages of muddling through, understanding(un-muddling) and reframing.
The parts of our knowledge we fashion into approaches can be seen as helping us become increasingly capable to process information, weaving life(activities, processes) and signs(meaning-making, structures): flow.
Path: Learning into aliveness
In the intersects of knowledge and flow: path and virtue; virtue and path.
Virtue: Learning to see
Our learning to see, we can apply to forming lines of inquiry: co-extensive, co-extending, cultivating, evolving and becoming. Our lines of inquiry, our learning into aliveness.
a gamified way to help you reframe things.
Labs: Reframing Things
Reframing Things
How are we living into the future?
There’s many ways to frame our experiences and reframe things.
As small groups engage in Card Sessions and/or Knowledge Navigation Labs, their connecting ability with need and situational awareness with preferable outcomes, can be helped by a systems intelligence approach, a seven-fold structure and process:
1. Review
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
2. Reflect
“So, the idea of thought-proprioception is not so strange as it may sound at first. Thoughts and feelings are movements and therefore we suppose that it must be possible to have proprioception of them. Since the body has the ability to sense its own movements, which is proprioception in a physical sense, we should also be able to extend this ability in the psychological realm. It is only a natural extension of body-proprioception. In fact, it’s very strange that we haven’t developed it very much, not enough anyway.”
— David Bohm
3. Reveal
What cards are we holding, what cards are we putting on the table, what unique talent, forming what competence, instigating and stewarding what flow, what movement?
4. Reframe
Systems intelligence, applied to the Card Session Question and the participatory inquiries forming part of the Knowledge Navigation Labs.
Reframing
At the very core of all our efforts at framing and reframing,
is how we are seeing things and how we are learning to see.
Alva Noë: “I start off from this appreciation that tools and technologies are central to our lives. And one of the things I’m interested in is the way they become habitual and organize us, and it’s hard us really to conceive of ourselves apart from all of these tools that we use. Tools including language itself, or pictorial technologies, and of course writing and email — and hammers and nails and doors and door handles and floors. Tools, I think, can only have this meaning they have for us in our daily lives, in our lived experience, thanks to the way they’re embedded in a whole background of needs and expectations and ways that we live. For us, doorknobs are these really self-evident kinds of things. But if you imagine an anthropologist from a remote planet, who didn’t know that we have bodies like the bodies we have, it might require a certain amount of thought and inventiveness and intelligence to think of the doorknob, to imagine how the doorknob is used.”
5. Rethink
Philosophy and even more so, process philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead) can be seen and understood as taking thought conducive to both knowledge annealing: virtue, and knowledge flow: path. This means, that the generative review of both Card Sessions and Knowledge Navigation Labs, seen as places conducive to reveal-reframe-rethink, is ambiance and flow in service to convivial efficacy.
6. Learn to see
This is all about a Card Session participant returning from the Knowledge Navigation Lab to her ordinary line of work, often meeting resistance when she’s trying to share her newfound perception, insights and perspectives. This is beyond the scope of Card Sessions and is all about Cultural Understanding.
7. Scale: Human Centric Innovation
Human centric innovation, and at information ecology and knowledge ecosystem scale: societal innovation, is all about (re)orientation and organizing, in service to different paths to preferable outcomes.
The strategic outcome of Card Sessions and Knowledge Navigation Labs, is innovation.
The preferable outcomes: equitable, pluralistic societies.
Cards: Patterns of Play
And, in the end, the cards you receive,
is equal to the enkinaesthesia, you make.
Card Sessions
Cards considered in light of questions, a gamified way to help you reframe things.
