Sensemaking... #2

Here's his steps... they seem to be similar to mine, when I'm doing research -

1. Frame the question, what is it you're trying to figure out.
Dr. Hemassi said, if you can't say it in 25 words, you don't understand what you're trying to accomplish, and you need to continue thinking it over.
But frame the problem, the domain, and generate questions that focus on the answers sought. Almost "jeopardy"-like.
Know, it's not always the first cycle of framing that you discern, but you have to start somewhere. Sometimes, you learn enough that things shift; and you follow the answer to a place you hadn't originally thought it would be. That's when the law of Serendipity takes over. My phrase: the law of serendipity.

2. Collect a lot of information on the domain.
How do others think of the domain, what works, what doesn't work.
How others organize their view of the domain can also be helpful.
If there are discrepancies between opinions, there is space for something interesting to develop the gap.

3. Organize the information.
You need to build an organized view of the domain, of the information you have gathered. If someone else has created a structure already (think association, etc); that may help you quickest. Otherwise, you'll have to build your own model.
Spend a lot of time building your information into some kind of representation (folders, topics, spreadsheet model, etc). But building this representation is KEY. The act of making the representation is when the "ah-ha" happens. It's when you start seeing the connections.

4. Iterate.
It's pretty rare to get it perfectly right the first time; so prepare and manage your time to allow for this necessary iteration phase. Do you have to change domains? Do you have to weed out junk information? Iterate, and keep iterating until you can satisfy your need to make sense of the original domain.

5. DO.
As in do what ever it is you wanted when you figured out what the domain was.
Research of the kind I work on is always trying to figure out something so you can do the next thing.

Too abstract?
More to come...