“Information is a tool designed by human beings to make sense of a reality assumed to be both chaotic and orderly. In the face of differences we must look for differences not in how humans, individually and collectively, see their worlds but in how they make their worlds (i.e. construct a sense of the world and how it works). For if we conceptualize the human condition as a struggle through an incomplete reality, then the similar struggles of others may well be informative for our own efforts. Information is made and unmade in communication – intrapersonal, social, organizational, nation, and global. With this view of information, information design cannot treat information as a mere thing to be economically and effectively packaged for distribution. Design to assist people to make and unmake their own nformations, their own sense. Must deal with the entire complex range of what humans do when they make sense, when they construct their movements through what is assumed to be an everchanging, sometimes, chaotic, sometimes orderly, sometimes impenetrable time-space.
We create an information system to assist people in designing their own information and in sharing with each other.”
DERVIN, Brenda. Chaos, order, and Sense-making: a proposed theory for information design. In JACOBSON, Robert (org.). Information Design. London: MIT Press, 1999.