INTRODUCTION H.P Lovecraft once stated that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” a quote which perfectly sums up the point of the pages you see before you. The very nature of the unknown is up for debate because we all define it differently. To one person it can mean something unfamiliar in which they have never seen or experienced and to others, it is simply something they have never even heard about in the first place. The unfamiliar can be unnerving, unprecedented and unwelcoming so we find ways to combat it. The textbook definition of sense making is the process by which people give meaning to experience. The term seams to self-explanatory but it’s a lot deeper than just slapping any meaning onto what we don’t understand, it’s a psychological process which involves us bridging absences in our knowledge with past information that we have already. We find comfort in surrounding ourselves with what we know. Unlike a standard book, there is no linearity to this project. You can flip through the pages in any order, or perhaps follow convention and go by number. Each page features small studies on different elements of our need for sense and order when faced with the unfamiliar.
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“Order to me is organisation. The first thing I think of is tidiness and a clean bedroom. ”
- Hannah Watson, Student
“Everything has an order somehow, whether it’s size, informational value or even colour. This is so we can understand it better and develop knowledge from similarities with past experiences”
- Sarah Frisancho, Student
“Order comes from understanding and knowing. Sometimes these understandings may no necessarily be the intended but it’s still valid”
- Natalie Watson, Student
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SCRIBBLING Among one of my many internet adventures, I stumbled upon an artistry technique called ‘scribble drawing.’ It was something of a game in which one person would close their eyes and scribble carelessly on a page. The person would then choose another person to create a picture out of their scribble. This is a prime example of creating meaning from nothing. Much like a Rorschach test, every person might see something uniquely different entirely.
I gave my scribble to a friend who proceeded to madly colour away like a possessed child. Within five minutes she’d created a picture which resembled a butterfly. “The first thing I saw were the curves and they reminded me of wings,” she stated. “Then the body which runs down the middle.” It’s peculiar to think this all comes from a scribble which was created with no real purpose or meaning other than to take up the space on a page. 4
A quote from Karl E. Weick sums up this process perfectly, in saying sense making and ordering tends to occur when “the current state of the world is perceived to be different” and in order to continue “people look first for reasons that will enable them to resume the interrupted activity and stay in action.” These reasons are past experiences, logic or perhaps even just personal preference. Perhaps our own personal ways of reasoning say a lot more about us than our unfamiliarity for the object. 5
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