Saturday, December 01, 2007

Questions about shaping

More on this idea of shaping as the focus, as discussed here. I'm starting to think about the following as the analytical questions I will ask of each of the recorded sessions:

- What shaping is intended?
- What shaping is occurring?
- Who is doing it, for what reasons?
- If the intended shaping runs off the rails, why does that occur?
- What contributions to shaping occur?
- How are decisions about shaping being made?
- What kinds of decisions are they?
- Who is making them, on what basis?
- How are they taken up into the representation itself (if they are)?
- Which are ignored or dropped? Why?
- What blocks an intended shaping?
- How are the blocks resolved, avoided, etc.?
- How was the ability to shape the representation preserved or recovered?

So not so much looking for sensemaking instances (though it's great if they happen), but rather "shaping instances": when decisions were made about how to shape the maps, and why they were made that way.

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