I've been fascinated by both what seems to be common knowledge and what doesn't seem to be common knowledge among all the different folks I work with. I'd like to see this topic expand into a full-blown discussion of our individual and collective theoretical foundations, as well as a place to start to work on developing a common theoretical foundation. In the meantime, though, it seems to me that a starting place is an annotated list of annotated lists, as it were. What are the relevant portions of your traditional disciplinary theoretical foundations, and what do you feel are the most important things for the rest of us to read or at least skim?

This is in no particular order, and incomplete, as I'm doing 14 other things at the same time... I'm filling things in as they arise elsewhere.

• Sense-making (capitalized), when I use it, refers to Brenda Dervin's Sense-making methodology. As a result of my understanding of the research into embodied cognition and social learning, I have been integrating Sense-making into my work. Btw, that also means that I have been expanding my collaborative network to include Communications folks. My view of inter-disciplinary work is not that I muddle through other folks' disciplines, but rather that I find collaborators in those fields. But I'll let them speak for themselves, as they clamber onto our wiki.
  • Brenda Dervin - goddess of Sense-making :)
  • Sense-Making Studies home page
  • Human studies and user studies: A call for methodological interdisciplinarity - This paper is one of a set that address issues in disciplinary structure in disciplines that I would consider to overlap with Digital Arts and Sciences. More on that later
  • Sense-Making Methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Available from http://amazon.com. We found this to be an invaluable resource, and ended up ordering one of our own rather than borrowing the library copies.

• embodied cognition

• social learning

Theory sections from projects on this wiki (section just started end of July, 2008)

From the discussion on interaction design for this wiki

When people (or dogs, I suppose), grab their computer/iphone/ipod/etc, fire up a browser, and start to interact with one of these things we build, they show up with a rich history that led up to that moment. What's more, they do so in an ever-changing environment, and each of them does so in a different ever-changing environment. The punchline is that the legacy of how (western? hmmm, gotta go ask my buds...) culture thinks of information (and computers) is to leave users (all users, including you and me) blissfully unaware of all (or at least some of) this lovely contextual info. And so we hammer away at whatever tool someone else has lovingly built, demanding why the thing can't read our minds. read more...