research focuses on the role of quantification and metrics as tools that actively shape organising processes and policy in response to grand social challenges. Rather than examining metrics as merely providing 'evidence' for managers and policy makers, his research places numbers and visualisations in the foreground to understand how notions of knowledge, innovation and accountability are constructed and practiced in such settings.Dr Matteo Ronzani's research focuses on the roles of visualisations and material artefacts in processes of organising and on how metrics and indicators are implicated in the making of transnational governance.
ABSTRACTIn this study, we explore how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artefacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, we examine the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, we conducted a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response. Our study offers two contributions. Firstly, we develop a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, our study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and we unpack how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.