This design toolkit draws on research conducted by the Digital Democracies Institute and the BRIDGE Research Consortium, along with activities and design elements created by the Imaginative Methods Lab at Simon Fraser University. It combines research on communications, tech platform business models and economic incentives, sociology, public health communications resources, and participatory action research. It has emerged out of research and practice that addresses the challenges of information disorder and social cohesion, and their impact on community wellbeing during moments of crisis and upheaval, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. 

COVID-19, and the responses from governments, publics and communities around the globe, represented a moment where a digital media ecosystem that prioritizes “virality” was confronted with a viral pandemic: a collision between the design and incentives underlying our information ecosystems, and the imperative to maintain a well-informed public amid a public health crisis.  

Digital technologies and networked communications infrastructures presented novel and life-saving ways to understand, track and predict patterns as the pandemic developed, helping to protect vulnerable communities, design and develop countermeasures and vaccines, and to highlight some of the more poorly-understood aspects of the pandemic, like Long COVID.¹ However, the incentives governing the design of social media platforms- to prioritize reach and engagement, to compete for user attention against other platforms, and to organize users into groups based on the value of their aggregated data- contributed to the proliferation of inaccurate or dubious information, conspiracy theories, content designed to engage through fearmongering or incitement to anger, and the sale of “alternative” cures that in some cases led to widespread deaths. 

What must not be forgotten in discourses about “misinformation,” however, is that narratives spread when and where they resonate, and misleading information often spread, either through sincere belief or cynical opportunism, because of past instances of alienation, discrimination and exploitation of individuals and communities that are undeniably real- stories like the Tuskegee Experiments on African American patients in the USA², experiments in nutrition and vaccination on Indigenous peoples in Canadian residential schools³, exploitative pharmaceutical experiments on children in Nigeria.⁴ Therefore, in order to address the challenges of information disorder in times of crisis, it is crucial to understand the ways that the digital engagement economy warps, distorts and exacerbates existing narratives and relationships, without overlooking or dismissing the lived experiences and realities on which they are based. Instead, we must balance a critical view of the narratives we encounter with a respect for the experiences and values of others: a balance that requires a collective, participatory approach to sensemaking.  

What follows is based on a series of assumptions:  

• The information disorder commonly referred to as “misinformation” is not merely a challenge of correcting inaccurate information, but a decentralized, social process, enacted through collective sensemaking among individuals and communities.⁵ Efforts to address the exploitative impact of tech platforms in the digital engagement economy must be similarly decentralized, participatory and community-driven.⁶  

• “Truth” is socially-constructed, and dependent on context. Approaches to information disorder challenges based on the “Knowledge Deficit Model” inherently assume hierarchies of knowledge, privileging certain knowledge and ways of knowing over others. These approaches also carry with them a perception of individuals as “blank slates” whose behaviour can be changed merely through exposure to “better” information⁷. The reality of sense-making and decision-making is more complex, and surpasses any monopoly on truth, relevance or authority.   

• Polarization is not solved simply by reducing conflict, but by increasing the opportunity and capacity for productive conflict. Reaching a perfect, harmonious consensus cannot be achieved, at least not without a high degree of exclusion and authoritarian domination. A truly democratic approach is aimed at facilitating a form of conflict where opponents can engage as adversaries rather than enemies, with some degree of shared values⁸, with the intention to utilize conflict as a means of facilitating collective decision-making⁹.  

The aim of this workshop design is to help communities consider how our information ecosystem has changed, and to approach communication not as adversarial individuals but as participants in collective sensemaking. This is designed to address affective polarization: the perception of others as enemies, whose opposing viewpoints must be “debunked” or otherwise “defeated” through debate.¹⁰ 

Instead, this design invites participants to consider how communities are reconfigured in networked digital infrastructures, to get curious about the “imagined communities” to which their neighbours might belong, and to explore the scaffolding of identity construction and performance that may underlie how others perceive their experiences, or approach conversations.  

Visitors to this site will find a series of activities and design features they may consider using for community engagement, participatory action research, or educational programs around a variety of topics. The focus is on exploring how commodified sensemaking disrupts and alters processes of interaction and community deliberation that are often unexamined in daily life. By engaging with these workshops, participants may find opportunities to contemplate these practices, consider how they have changed along with shifts in our information ecosystems, and take part in collective discussion around how they might reframe community engagement and collective sensemaking on their own terms.