Combining rich and restricted langages in multimedia: enrichment of context for innovative decisions.
Résumé
This paper investigates ways in which context can be enriched, permitting identification of new resources and pathways for innovative decision making in situations where the restricted languages of conventional decision analysis offer only social exclusion to the decision makers. It describes how young decision makers in “socially excluded” communities authored and exchanged multimedia communications including audio-visual strata founded in rich language and contexts (which can support innovative conceptualisation and generate new possibilities for exploration) as well as strata employing restricted language and contexts (appropriate in assessment and monitoring these possibilities and in making tradeoffs and deciding between alternatives – a necessary precondition for turning fantasy into real action). It illustrates how the language of each stratum not only provided a different way of generating stories about what is, what could be, and what could be done about it, but also generated a different way of understanding the context in which such observations and potential actions are situated. Communicating in this way empowered the decision makes to discover new resources and implement new pathways through exploring enriched context. Their decision situations were no longer flat but integrated as strata in an arena founded on their own preferences and communications in extended language..