Collaborative Sensemaking in Crisis: Designing Practices and Platforms for Resilience

The COVID-19 pandemic exemplified the complexity of the field of crisis communication, with multiple channels and streams of information and misinformation causing new challenges for the authorities and general public alike. This complexity requires better addressing the situated and interrelated aspects of sensemaking practices and platforms, and how different disciplines and organisations collaborate during a crisis to turn ambiguity into resilience, and complexity into comprehension. We use design research and participatory design methodology to draw on learnings from the Finnish context and response to COVID-19 and other crises. These insights are then used to create design principles that bridge crisis informatics theory with HCI knowledge to create speculative, diegetic artefacts, which embody new practices and platforms that can be used to encourage collaborative sensemaking to tackle complex, large-scale crises and therefore have a positive impact on the resilience of the society.