… extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. Hanne De Jaegher, who defined the term, argues that the interaction process itself can take on a form of autonomy.
Using participatory sense-making as a lense, we looked at different degrees of co-exchange, co-responsibility, co-existence and co-creation. Rather than looking to pinpoint the best way, the research allowed for a discussion on different approaches in enabling participatory sense-making and how situations evolve in various ways depending on a variety of approaches and settings initiated by the facilitator.
For deeper insights how we used participatory sense-making as a lense to analyse participation and the facilitator role we recommend to check the paper Withdrawing the Performer - facilitating participatory sense-making published in Reposition 2024
In summary, the concept of Participatory Sense-Making supported our research on how the facilitator prepares, creates and modulates a field for interaction. Our findings identify different facilitating approaches and also lay open the agency that is brought to participants inside participatory settings. Further as we applied the concept in a qualitative, not quantitative, research setting we could combine knowledge from social cognition with artistic and phenomenological approaches to interviewing and grasping experience.
The artistic approaches we applied can be understood as an enigmatic yet tangible form of empiricism, employing creative reasoning to open alternative perspectives on how human interaction evolves and takes material form. In this way we see that the research we conducted can offer a different perspective on the epistemology of interaction and joint cognition.
Clearly, the agency involved in being in collaboration with something or someone resonates with many processes of daily life. The fact that reflective tools for facilitating participation, as well as methods for articulating modulations of agency, can be developed within the framework of artistic and interdisciplinary research highlights the relevance of artistic research within the broader discourse on social and political processes.
A relevant co-benefit of applying Participatory Sense-Making as a conceptual lense in a practice based artistic research setting, was that the concept didn't only support us in analysing participatory practices from a perspective of social cognition. It also allowed us to experiment and expand the idea of Participatory Sense-Making inside non normative settings, as inside the public series setting where for instance Krõõt Juurak invited us to invent new pronouns.