Abstract
Digital innovation involves disciplined imagination to create disruptive artefacts that satisfy complex, emergent requirements. In connected health environments—where analytics, AI, and IoT technologies converge—prospective sensemaking plays a pivotal role as developers and domain experts must collectively confront uncertainties in the integration of digital resources. Through an eight-month interdisciplinary case study of an ambitious connected-health project, we examine how prospective sensemaking emerges through the collective social practices of different actors. Our findings suggest that traditional techniques such as use cases often fail to support generative anticipatory reasoning in digital contexts. To address this shortcoming, we identify three generative mechanisms—shifting space, shifting time, and shifting self—that are activated through collaborative storytelling and fictional prototyping. Storytelling enabled actors to construct shared, future-oriented understandings through the subprocesses of sense-demanding, sense-breaking, sense-giving, and action. Our findings provide insights into designing analytics-enabled information systems in healthcare and beyond.
Recommended Citation
O’Raghallaigh, Paidi and McCarthy, Stephen, "Narrating the Future: Storytelling as a Sensemaking Modality for Digital Innovation" (2025). Proceedings of the 2025 Pre-ICIS SIGDSA Symposium. 4.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/sigdsa2025/4