Visual Sensemaking: Entanglement of a Digital Workflow Board at the Emergency Ward

摘要

This study explores the constitutive role of visualizations in the sensemaking of new operational work practices at an emergency ward of a Nordic University hospital. By employing a performative lens, viewing the social and the material as constitutively entangled in practice, we show how visual cues of a digital workflow board trigger intra-actions that challenge the staffs identity construction and motivates them to distinguish between who they are as medical professionals, the purpose and operationalization of the new work practices, and the visual board. In other words, they conduct agential cuts that separate human from technological agency. The identified strategies employed by actors in this process deepen our understanding of how sensemaking of new operational work practices is integral to the sensemaking occurring in the enactment of visual artifacts and how visualizations as part of a sociomaterial assemblage, condition the performative production of practices and subjects.