This document provides an overview of theories related to understanding risk and human experience from a sociocultural perspective. It discusses key concepts from theorists such as Maturana, Varela, and Coeckelbergh regarding how risk is socially constructed through language, stories, and human perception/experience rather than being an objective external factor. The document examines how risk communication can incorporate this complexity by understanding existing risk narratives and seeking to change risk perceptions by building on established meanings and worldviews rather than simply defining risk.

1. Risk and Human
Experience:
An introduction to
shaping everyday
life
Gregory Vigneaux, MS
@Gregory_Vig
gvigneaux@outlook.com

2. “The prevention of disasters can require deliberate smaller-scale disruption
and the active participation of people willing to adapt their habits” –
Trentmann
“The purpose of disaster risk reduction is to create a very different
attitude to disasters and to risk. It is an attempt to...get each individual
to ask, ‘What can I do to protect myself and to minimize risk?’” -
Wahlström
“It is likely to take an even longer time before effective wildfire risk
management becomes a way of life in the wildland-urban interface”
- Daniel

3. “Our knowledge of risks and hazards is
always mediated by human thinking,
language, and experience. There is no
hazard in-itself and no risk-in-itself. It is
always risk and hazard as perceived,
known, and talked about by humans.”
- Mark Coeckelbergh

4. “Risk is a multidimensional concept, and those
working to effect changes in the behavior of
individuals and communities need to
incorporate this complexity in their risk
communication messages.” – Sarah McCaffrey

5. “By and large, the amount of effort that must be
expended in describing and understanding the
make-up and workings of a system is our best
practical indicator of complexity, and its inverse
is our best practical indicator of simplicity.” –
Nicholas Rescher

6. “Design is the process of deciding
on and then realizing preferred
futures.” – Cameron Tonkinwise

7. Q1. How can we understand perceptions of risk
that diverge from and even oppose our own?
A SENSE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

8. “Risk is neither a feature of the world (an
objective, external state of affairs) nor (…)
a subjective construction by the mind, an
internal matter, but is constituted in the
subject-object relation.” –Mark
Coeckelbergh

9. Purely Subjective
Solipsism/Idealism
Purely Objective
Rationalist/Cartesian/
Representationalism/Realism
“The projection of
a pregiven inner world”
-Varela, Thompson, & Rosch
“The recovery of
a pregiven outer
world” -Varela, Thompson, &
Rosch
“The middle road,
right on the razor's edge”
-Maturana & Varela
“Reality is not given: it is perceiver
dependent, not because the perceiver
constructs it as he or she pleases, but
because what counts as a relevant world is
inseparable from the structure of the
perceiver” -Francisco Varela

10. The consequence is
that there is no possible
way, in principle, for the
external world to
communicate itself in
its primordial, true form
to the nervous system.”
– Humberto Maturana

11. Color Perception, Language, & Context
“We can correlate our naming of
colors with states of neuronal
activity but not with wavelengths.
What states of neuronal activity are
triggered by different perturbations
is determined in each person by his
or her structure and not by the
features of the perturbing agent.” –
Humberto Maturana

12. Language as a Middle Road
“Language does not describe a pre-existing world, but creates
the world about which it speaks.” – Terry Winograd & Fernando
Flores
We cannot speak ‘what there is’ but we speak ‘what there is’ as
it becomes so in our speaking.” - Humberto Maturana

13. “We human beings exist in language” - Humberto Maturana
Language as a Middle Road
“We must be quite clear about the fact that the very idea of
something given and existing, and the very reference to some
reality or some sort of truth, unavoidably involves language”
- Humberto Maturana

14. Language
Stories

15. “When we draw a distinction, we split the world into “this” and
“that;” through language we constantly bring forth and ascribe
significance to certain aspects of the world”- Haridimos Tsoukas
"A distinction splits the world into two parts, 'that' and 'this',
or 'environment' and 'system', or 'us' and 'them', etc. One of
the most fundamental of all human activities is the making of
distinctions.” -Francisco Varela
Story Properties: Distinction

16. “An explanation is a particular kind of answer to particular
kind of question that asks how things, events,
phenomena, or in general terms, the experiences of the
observer come about.” – Humberto Maturana
Story Properties: Explanation
“An explanation in any domain always has the form: “If
this and this happens, then the result is such and such.”-
Humberto Maturana

17. “Explanatory
propositions [of things
distinguished] entail
different manners of
living” – Humberto
Maturana

18. “Natural phenomena do not ‘have reasons’….
The reason for a phenomenon does not
belong to the phenomenon, but to the
human beings who forge an explanation that
seeks to account for this phenomenon.
….Human beings, because they are linguistic
beings, have the capacity to provide reasons
for everything that happens.” – Rafael
Echeverría

19. “As medical knowledge of chemistry and
biology develops, disease is transformed
from an ever-present danger into a risk
relating to one's way of life.
More and more of the future apparently
comes to depend on decisions taken in the
present…and more
and more current undesirable situations
are regarded as the unwanted result of
past decisions or decisions omitted.”
- Niklas Luhmann

20. Story Validity & Constraints to Change
Past Experience: “As we explain we human beings use our experience and
the coherence of our experiences to explain our experiences, and we do so
while we call “experience” that which we distinguish as happening to us as
we reflect on what we do or live” – Humberto Maturana
Legitimacy of Actions: “Each domain of explanations constitutes a domain
of actions” Humberto Maturana, 1998; John Mingers
Microidentity (Informal Condition): “Who we are at any moment cannot be
divorced from what other things and who other people are to us.” –
Francisco Varela; Humberto Maturana

21. “When we sit at the table to eat with a relative or friend, the entire
complex know-how of how to handle our utensils, how to sit, how to
converse, is present without deliberation. We could say that our
having lunch-self is transparent. You finish lunch, return to the office,
and enter into a readiness that has its own mode of speaking,
moving, and making assessments. We have a readiness-for-action
proper to every specific lived situation. I call any such readiness-for-
action a microidentity and its corresponding lived situation a
microworld.” – Francisco Varela
Transparency

22. The Dynamics of Living in Language
(With acknowledgment to Kurtz & Snowden (2003) & Maturana (1988;1995))
Coherences of Everyday Life
(Domain of Microworlds and Microidentities –
Stories already told)
Chaos/Nothingness
(Domain of Empty-handedness-
Need to tell a story)
Imperceptible Transition
Transition by Distinction
Transition by
Self-Explanation
Transition by
External Explanation

23. APPLYING THEORY TO PRACTICE
Q2. “How can we seek to change them?”

24. “Information has no
existence or meaning
apart from that given to
it by the system with
which it interacts” –
Leyland

25. Risk is a story:
A way of bringing forth a world and
explaining our experience of it.

27. Individuals exposed to the same risk may respond differently
based on their interpretations of a variable array of external
factors…. Given this complexity, it is not surprising to find a
variety of reactions and responses to the same wildfire risk. This
suggests that although it is important to continually
communicate risk information, outreach efforts with too singular
a focus on defining and quantifying wildfire risk as a means to
engage the public are unlikely to be effective – Sarah McCaffrey

28. Communication design…is an act of social and
cultural production. It carries the burden of
both reflecting the culture as it is and shaping
the culture of the future. Beyond the decision
to promote particular products or ideas,
designers must evaluate what their choices
about visual messages do to normalize
certain values and behaviors; to express
certain messages and beliefs in the ordinary
experience of every day life – Davis & Hunt

29. What stories are already
being told and why are they
valid?
• Coherences of
Experience
• Microidentities
&Microworlds
• Actions seen as
valid
Gathering the Present

30. “[MAD did not] involve themselves
with the interests of drinkers or
argue with drinkers in an attempt to
change their behavior. Rather, they
were in the business of achieving
their goals by appealing to their
fellow citizens’ concerns about
responsibility.”

31. Risk as:
Preservation of Freedom
Maintaining the “way things are”
Boldly living in the New West
Mountain identity
Taking a stand

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