I’m Cameron Norman, and I am the Principal of CENSE Research + Design.
Rad Resource – [CENSEMaking]: CENSEMaking is a play on the name of my research and design studio consultancy and on the concept of sensemaking, something evaluators help with all the time. CENSEMaking focuses on the interplay of systems and design thinking, health promotion and evaluation and weaves together ideas I find in current social issues, reflections on my practice as well as the evidence used to inform it. I aspire to post on CENSEMaking 2-3 times per week, although because it is done in a short-essay format, find the time can be a challenge.
Hot Tips – favorite posts:
- What is Developmental Evaluation? This post came from a meeting of a working group with Michael Quinn Patton and was fun to write because the original exercise that led to the content (described in the post) was so fun to do. It also provided an answer to a question I get asked all the time.
- Visualizing Evaluation and Feedback. I believe that the better we can visualize complexity the more feedback we provide, the greater the opportunities we have for engaging others, and more evaluations will be utilized. This post was designed to provoke thinking about visualization and illustrate how its been creatively used to present complex data in interesting and accessible ways. My colleague and CENSE partner Andrea Yip has tried to do this with a visually oriented blog on health promoting design, which provides some other creative examples of ways to make ideas more appealing and data feel simpler.
- Developmental Design and Human Services. Creating this post has sparked an entire line of inquiry for me on bridging DE and design that has since become a major focus for my work. This post became the first step in a larger journey.
Lessons Learned – why I blog: CENSEMaking originally served as an informal means of sharing my practice reflections with students and colleagues, but has since grown to serve as a tool for knowledge translation to a broader professional and lay audience. I aim to bridge the sometimes foggy world that things like evaluation inhabit – particularly developmental evaluation – and the lived world of people whom evaluation serves.
Lessons Learned: Blogging is a fun way to explore your own thinking about evaluation and make friends along the way. I never expected to meet so many interesting people because they reached out after reading a blog post of mine or made a link to something I wrote. This has also led me to learn about so many other great bloggers, too. Give a little, get a lot in return and don’t try and make it perfect. Make it fun and authentic and that will do.
This winter, we’re running a series highlighting evaluators who blog. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.