Collective memory and data visualization: an independent study

43 min readJan 17, 2019

This is a documentation of my exploration of using data visualization as a prosthetic for building collective memory. This independent study was advised by Molly Wright Steenson at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design.

The primary goal of this independent study is to test the process of collecting text-based data and to explore the viability of instrumentalizing that data with a small community to create artifacts of reflection. This exploration is intended to refine my approach for future explorations that will center around using data visualization, and possibly machine learning, in communities for constructing collective memory and histories. To support the development in mindset and posture for these future explorations, I include reading and research as a key part of this exploration, targeting literature in journalism, community building, design, and visualization.

This independent study also serves as a proof of concept of the ideas I am considering for my M.Des thesis project next year.

Week I: conversations and strategy

I began my thought process for this independent study by revisiting my plan of action:

Building a tool to collect text messages from cohort members throughout the semester to be utilized later in reflective practices
Begin reading Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Collect new potential readings
Set up conversations with relevant faculty and other connections

Per Molly’s suggestion, I scheduled meetings with both transition design researcher Gideon Kossoff, and design librarian Jill Chisnell, to discuss the relevant ways in which a community could be organized around data visualization and to inform my initial direction for readings (respectively).

My conversation with Gideon revealed several ways my inquiry is similar to historical methods of crafting community artifacts. For example, the family tree, oral history traditions, and yearbooks have served the same purpose my data visualization tools might. Further, the idea that a yearbook might serve as a frame for my data visualization practices deeply interested me. Indeed, I am crafting tools for students, and thus a yearbook makes contextual sense. Also, my peers likely have a familiarity with using yearbooks in the past, especially relevant to their sensibilities as design students. In any case, I can pull from these analog precursors as I begin to think about how to organize my peers around crafting artifacts.

Gideon asked some pointed questions about the final form:

How is this project different than Facebook, which serves a similar function in terms of supporting collective history making? Specifically, Facebook enables local groups to craft repositories of collected artifacts. Still, there is a limit to the ways in which Facebook allows users to encode information, especially visually. Further, a key portion of my posture for this project are notions like ownership of data and privacy.

What is the rationale for crafting a physical zine (rather than a digital artifact)? There are interesting tradeoffs between crafting physical zines rather than purely digital artifacts. First, physical zines are latently visible, which is especially important with regards to knowledge transfer. The design studio (in which the students work) acts as a site of congregation, and physical artifacts in that space serve as reflections of its culture. In the future, when new students enter the studio, physical artifacts may be more readily available conveyors of culture. Still, digital artifacts offer more flexibility and interactivity and might serve as an important counterpart to a physical artifact. This question belies a larger in my inquiry: what forms of memory storing matter for the community I’m working with. In terms of visualization, what types of data / wisdom matters?

As a first step in gaining new perspectives on organizing techniques, Gideon recommended A Simpler Way by Margaret Wheatley, a text that challenges mainstream modes of living and working through themes of “play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence.” He also recommended I study the history of the Occupy Movement, particularly because it was spontaneously anarchistic. Finally, he recommended The Art of Community: 7 Principles for Belonging by Charles H. Vogl, which describes methodologies for mindfully crafting cultures of belonging. These texts together form a useful starting place, in tandem with Emergent Strategy, to informing my sense how to cultivate community. Once I have some community-building heuristics in mind, it’ll be easier to understand how a data visualization intervention may help.

A couple days later, I met with Jill Chisnell, the Design Librarian at CMU. We began with the goals of my independent study, which centers around understanding the general principles of collective memory and organizing to a point at which I can begin to thoughtfully create data-driven interventions in a community.

Jill helped me further understand the areas of study that my project overlaps with. We discussed key words beyond the scope of what I had been looking at before, and came up with a list:

Collective Memory: group identity, cultural memory, social memory, tradition, storytelling
community building
Data Collection: self-annotation, activity logging, text mining, information visualization, naturalistic data (records of human activity without researcher intervention), self-visualization, mapping
Technology, social media, new media
unstructured text

We discussed the library resources at my disposal and how to use them.

JSTOR. Articles in important journals with a balance of disciplines.
ProQuest. Look at the references in relevant theses. May be useful in scoping down a project
dSHARP. “a virtual center for a coalition of faculty and staff dedicated to advancing research and teaching involving digital scholarship–the use and reuse of digital evidence, methods, and tools for research, pedagogy, and publication.”
SAGE research methods. Contains handbooks with information about how to carry out qualitative research methods
SpringerLink. Check out lecture notes in computer science and sociology
and more!

Out of these resources, it was clear that discussing my project with the folks at dSHARP would provide a huge amount of value, given their involvement at the intersection of several different disciplines.

Also, as Jill and I discussed my project, it became apparent that the way in which I’d leverage data would be key. In particular, it’d be helpful to find projects with similar contexts or data sets to inform my methods.

Jill also provided me with several titles of interest, including:

As I sift though these resources, my goals will include:

Gain an understanding of collective memory. What are the important components in building and maintaining these memories?
Distill initial community organizing heuristics I can follow as I begin planning how to meet with my peers.
Find previous examples data and community building

This week, I also began finding some interesting ways to engage my community of designers. First, I began reading Emergent Strategy. There is a self-assessment handbook inside, which targets how well a community is embodying the principles outlined in the book:

Fractal. The relationship between small and large
Adaption. How we change
Interdependence. Who we are and how we share
Non-linear. The pace and pathways of change
Resilience. How we recover and transform
Creating more possibility. How we move towards life

Second, I had a conversation with group members from a studio project from last semester. In this group, we found cohesion and interdependence had emerged with ease. We discussed the aspects of our group that had caused this shift. At the core of the issue was trust. We had set a tone of mutual respect and appreciation in our group, which manifested into a less stressful collective spirit.

One of the group members, Ulu Mills, mentioned an idea the brought up last year that perhaps played into our group’s strength: appreciation. She suggested we schedule appreciation days for students; a similar thing had been instituted at a former workplace. She said that, once the obligatory ironic “over appreciation” jokes were made, the joke devolved into earnest and effective forms of care. This simple ritual had lightened the spirit of the office. This was a valuable insight. Perhaps rituals of appreciation are a core aspect of community that will further inform my study.

Week II: a tacit direction shift, and an introduction to emergent strategy

Several conversations from this and last week catalyzed a shift in the structure and types of data visualizations I believe are best for this project.

Research on collective memory. First, my knowledge on collective memory deepened. Students pursuing thesis work next year were tasked with writing a summary last week. Embedded in my task was finding a working definition of collective memory, and identifying the aspects of it I thought held water in terms of data visualization tools. As I considered the act of mindfully crafting narrative, the importance of engaging with existing forms of memory. I questioned whether initially going for asynchronous data collection would effectively create a cohesive community narrative.

Talk with Kyuha Shim. I’m a research assistant for Kyuha Shim, a professor at Carnegie Mellon specializing in computational art and data visualization.This week, we had a conversation about a new project of his that focused around collaborative data visualization, a continuation of another student’s work in a previous course. Their project had rested on a Javascript library called Socket.io, which allowed in-browser interactions. A previously unconsidered possibility for synchronous data visualization had emerged. What would happen if we constructed artifacts together in the same physical space?

Emergent Strategy. Finally, as I further read emergent strategy, I realized the potency of the everyday ritual. Indeed, many of the tactics for initially building resilience and interdependence in emergent strategy focused on interpersonal interactions; the magic that happens when people gather together. A lot of the strategies centered around how to conduct meetings: setting agendas, intention, etc. Creating a physical space in order to establish meaningful channels of communication makes sense as a first step. (as opposed to the asynchronous approach, which might work better when those channels and relationships are established)

I thought back to last semester, where groups of us met to discuss how we were coping with the load of graduate student work. The artifacts that came from those interactions seemed to have reverberated in a positive way throughout the cohort. Further, my conversation with Ulu last week popped into my mind: a defined physical space would be powerful for appreciation, which could be effectively amplified by visualization.

In sum, I’d like to tacitly pursue reflective, collaborative data visualization as core to my praxis of crafting community artifacts of memory.

An introduction to Emergent Strategy. As I read, Several concepts within the book stood out:

Critical connections:

“Emergence emphasizes critical connections* over critical mass”
“…our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses

Scale:

“Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more *vulnerable* and more empathetic.”
“Meaningful scale depends on deep transformation work, rather than surface widespread work”
“Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at a universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience.”

Imagination:

“A visionary exploration of humanity includes imagination.”
“How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material? We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data. But first we imagine. We are in an *imagination battle*…I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free. All of this imagining, in the poverty of our current system, is heightened because of scarcity economics. There isn’t enough, so we need to hoard, enclose, divide, fence up, and prioritize resources and people. We have to imagine beyond those fears. We have to ideate — imagine and conceive — together.”

Shame versus pleasure:

“Some of us are surviving, following, flocking — but some of us are trying to imagine where we are going as we fly. That is radical imagination.”
“…*pleasure* evokes change — perhaps more than shame. More precisely, where *shame* makes us freeze and try to get really small and invisible, pleasure invites us to move, to open, to grow.”
“…adaptability and interdependence [in Octavia Butler’s books] — often through the practice of repeated vulnerability.”
“…facts, guilt, and shame are limited motivations for creating change…”

Weeks III-V

Session 1 plans and overall semester plan

A first session: appreciation. On February 4th, we had our first gathering for the project. As Confluence (our job fair) loomed in the distance, I wondered what would be a way to introduce this kind of meeting at the start of the semester. I had noticed throughout the school year that people were continually doubting their prowess and validity as designers, especially those shifting towards interaction design from another area (industrial design, etc.).

The goal of the meeting was to make the things going right, particularly as designers, in our lives explicit and known. It’s often the case that we express what’s going wrong (what’s giving us pain) than the things that are going well (what’s giving us pleasure). However, in my projects (in Studio II and Transition Design) this semester, it’s apparent that pleasure is vital for growth, movement, and openness. In my mind, beginning to appreciate what you have will open more avenues for pleasure, growth, and resilience.

As I read Emergent Strategy, it became clear that the way in which a meeting is opened is critical for setting the tone and atmosphere for the rest of the meeting. Hence, the table was lined with a variety of snacks (vegan cake, popcorn, and others kindly contributed by some participants), there was an aromatherapy diffuser emitting tangerine scent into the air, and chill music playing in the background.

Also critical in this introduction was maintaining transparency about my project. According to Emergent Strategy, transparency is not only vital for an equitable relationship between me, the designer, and my cohort, but also for the atmosphere of the subsequent meetings. Transparency allows the group to relax. “A relaxed body is the most powerful body.” Therefore, I shared that I’d be writing reflections (these!) about the sessions and developing a data visualization tool for the group near the end of the project, based on the kind of thing that’d speak true to our group as a collective. I also shared the truth of the matter, the priority of the project are the people in the group and creating value for them, especially since I had been setting up gatherings at tough moments last semester. People didn’t seem overtly concerned with what I was doing, although it would be crucial to check with folks offline too.

Underpinning the entire first section of the meeting was how weird I felt conducting it. I talked more about why this might be with my advisor, Molly, but it was clear there was something to this feeling. It was a combination of guilt and embarrassment. Who was I to be creating a space like this? Would people even need a space like this? Or was it useless?

I was floored by how many people actually did show up (almost too many to conduct that type of gathering)! I noticed diversity of people in terms of the ways in which express they appreciation openly towards others in the studio. What happened next was truly special.

To start off, I began by asking people to share “what is giving you life right now?” We’d pass a rock around (a pretty pink quartz rock, picked up in northern Maryland, perfectly shaped to fit in the right hand), passing it when we were done speaking. I envisioned this opening based on methods for facilitation outlined in Emergent Strategy . The first was intention setting: setting the tone for the (more awkward) exercise to come. The second was the “peace circle,” in part the act of sitting in a circle as a group, openly sharing, without expectations, for the sake of release. I began by sharing my own, which included a walk in (unseasonably) warm weather, and a long lunch with a dear friend. I passed the rock along, and as others shared their thoughts, I wrote them on the board, making sure to strip proper nouns to (somewhat) anonymize the results.

It was cool to find that people started upvoting what had previously been said. After hearing everyone share what they “were living for right now,” it was nice to see the things people found pleasure in, especially as the semester had started to ramp up.

The next exercise was more challenging. My intent was to pair people at random, each taking five minutes to write a note about what they appreciated about the other as a designer. We came up with the particulars of the exercise together in the moment; I received a lot of feedback from people as we tried to figure out what form the exercise would take, etc. By the time it was into it, it (refreshingly) didn’t feel like only my exercise. Each person would write things they appreciated about a random person (like a secret santa of happiness).

We began writing on sticky notes to the person we were paired with. I will admit, I was worried the individual reflections would seem forced. The alternative for this exercise was for everyone to write something they appreciated about each person, although, as someone pointed out afterwards, it was nice to focus on one person.

Once we finished writing, I instructed everyone to read the appreciation they had received to the group. People were slightly embarrassed at this notion. At first it seemed weird, but it was refreshing to see people transform as they read the kind words someone had written about them. People who usually didn’t spend time together were sharing little hugs. People I didn’t expect to find value in the exercise were grinning as they read the words about them. I myself didn’t expect to feel this good, especially when writing kind words for someone else.

The meeting ended after this section, and I closed by expressing how thankful I was for everyone in attendance. I also reassured them I wouldn’t be sharing the particulars about who attended or the whiteboards for the sake of privacy / transparency. A couple people assured me it was fine, but I found it might safer to keep these private.

As the meeting closed, people hung back and talked. The atmosphere was relaxed and positive as people continued to eat the snacks and talk. I felt at ease; this weird experiment could actually mean something.

Tools for practicing Emergent Strategy. Several aspects of Emergent Strategy informed the way I conducted the previous meeting, taken from a set of tools for facilitation outlined at the end of the book:

On my schedule, I’ve technically ended my time with Emergent Strategy, but I’m finding it will be vital to continually revisit the book as the semester progresses.

Conversation with DSHARP. I visited the open hours for Carnegie Mellon Libraries’ DSHARP (Digital Sciences, Humanities, Arts: Research and Publishing Resources). I had a conversation with Scott Weingart and Matthew Lincoln about possible resources or ways to think about my project:

The first people Scott mentioned were Lauren Klien, (who Molly had mentioned before) who is working on book about data feminism, and Jaquelin Wernimont, “Network Weaver, Scholar, Digitrix”
Mattew talked about the audience of the visualization as vital for the design, as well the idea of data collection itself as reflection, pointing out projects like one at George Mason University that centered the collection of images and writing about the Boston Marathon bombing.

Conversation with Peter Scupelli. My conversation with Peter was focused on ways in which we can articulate and imbue design methodologies with values. He provided a few scaffolds for this effort, pointing out works from designer and philosopher Tony Fry, Batya Friedman’s work on Value Sensitive Design, and his own work in constructing a course about design ethos and action.

Conversation with Dan Lockton. I talked with Dan about tools for developing metaphors. He mentioned a few resources that would help, such as the syllogism / Bateson, and others on the imaginaries website. Another important question about the project as a whole emerged: how to make the pattern of making data viz rituals usable to other groups? Also, he mentioned the importance of finding those cyclical events that would be important to consider, such as Confluence.

Debrief with participants. A week after the first meeting, I touched base with a few people who were at the meeting, asking them a few questions. Emergent Strategy asserts that capturing feedback from participants is critical; feedback on an individual level affords more high resolution, honest feedback and ensures more voices are heard.

I asked people how they’d like the space to be used. What was the best way to use the space? What kind of things would be useful to touch base on when the group gathered together? In particular, with a mind toward Confluence, people responded with questions that would help to put in conversation:

Who are we as designers?
How did we grow last semester?

Debrief with Molly. My debrief with Molly about the first session was centered around my feeling of unease in creating space for the meeting. I told her: “it feels weird.” She asked me to think about what it could be that makes these moments uneasy. My thought is that creating a space for community is a form of vulnerability. Indeed, it is creating a new social script. The vulnerability is the possibility that the group of people might reject the formation, with tangible social consequences for me, the designer.

The second half of our debrief centered around the idea of what the next session could look like. Molly suggested a paired, visual conversation, such as the one Stacie Rohrbach and her had demonstrated to help elicit ideas for thesis projects. The idea seemed like a good prosthetic to capture the kind of conversation about our take on design and other self-reflecting questions we could ask ourselves in preparation for Confluence. With this method, a visual artifact would result from the interaction. Further, having this type of conversation makes sense in a pairs, or a group setting; a partner who understands your take from the outside would ask questions from a place of understanding, provoking their partner with possible ways to move forward.

Plans for next session: growth. For the next session, I coalesced the ideas from the previous meeting into an aim to create space to afford people to craft an “elevator pitch” for Confluence. To answer this, we’d ask what makes each of us unique as a designer; what is our take on design?

Embedded in this inquiry are questions about our experience thus far in graduate school:

How have we grown as designers at CMU?
What have we gained based on our experiences?
How we will apply the things we’ve learned at CMU to our practice as designers?

Getting started with Socket.io. This week, I wrote a “hello world” script for Socket.io. I also drafted a scaffold / template for the system I wanted to build that would accomodate any number of future data visualization types:

Weeks VI and VII: Growth

Second and third sessions: growth.

For the second and third sessions, I took the advice from participants and Molly’s advice to heart. What kind of space did the community need at this point in time, right before confluence? How could an act of externalization help solidify something like an elevator pitch?

I held space for two discussions. There were difficulties in amassing large numbers for either, with the growing business of the cohort as our job fair, approached and the semester work load ramps up. I had to feel my way through finding just the right moment to schedule sessions as the community ebbed and flowed. Both sessions involved a continuation of the “grounding” question of “what is giving you life right now?” We continued to pass along the piece of rose quartz I had used as a totem in the last session, to indicate who could speak at the moment.

In the first session, I asked people about whether the exercise would work for them, and got positive responses. I spent some time demonstrating the technique, using my own take on data visualization and design as the template:

Then, the other participants paired up and followed suit with the exercise. The second session went similarly, except I added a couple more questions about confluence at the beginning of the session after the “what is giving you life right now?” question:

How do you feel about Confluence?
What do you need [for Confluence] right now?

Other passerby stopped in to answer the questions too. The answers to the questions were lighthearted, poignant, thoughtful. It became clear that, at least to the people in attendance of the session, that the participants felt a huge existential weight of the job/internship search at large. Confluence seemed to be the magnification point of these worries, such as being able to pitch themselves as a designer.

The paired exercise continued smoothly this time, with similar results to the last session. The feeling of these sessions was remarkably more serious, with these job requirements looming in the distance. Through working with people, I could, however, sense a kind of resilience based upon the previous work we’d done in the past session. People were, in general, open to give and ask for (and receive) support, a critical element in the social fabric of any community, particularly within the recommendations of Emergent Strategy.

Debrief with participants

After three sessions, I was left with an nebulous, hovering question to answer: what kinds of things do we want to remember? The answer to this question would inform the type of data visualization I’d be creating. Thus, I began by asking a couple of participants this question.

My first conversation centered around the idea of “why are you here?” This person thrives on verbal, individual reflection. To them, a rationale behind electing to be in this particular time and space (i.e., spending a lot of money on a grad school education) is key. Understanding the motivations of their peers was quite important, especially when it comes to collaboration. This sentiment resonated with me a bit, particularly because it reminded me of the way defining principles and values are key in defining a guiding arc for activist groups. Indeed, Emergent Strategy articulates several samples of sets of principles other groups use. These principles serve as a safety net and guidepost such that, when things become tough, these act as a guide for action. These are the values we fall back upon in the tough times.

Our conversation also drifted towards the types of things that cannot be manifested in portfolio pieces, the matter that ended up being more consequential and meaningful to their experience here. For example, the state of mind that captured in one-off, experimental pieces for class and the conversations that inform them. One particular assignment in which they felt like everything changed in the way they were thinking. They mentioned a weird art piece we had made together, a metaphor for our conception of our current existence. To me, our conversation hit at capturing the ephemeral, rich social interactions that can only be possible for a group of people in the same, concentrated space. Our minds are, in this context, synchronized on the same material, and thus those musings come together at interesting flashpoints.

I asked another participant the same question. Instead of writing, they prefered to capture and reflect upon memory through photos. They chaffed at the question “why are you here?” They thought it was too back facing, and that there was no one answer to that question. Instead, they preferred to ask “Why are you here now? What am I doing here?”

However, their response mirrored several of the key takeaways from the other conversation. Academic aspects were relevant, but only in ways that related to their manifestation between people. In other words, the social connections were key. The everyday aspect was also key. What was our life like from day to day? What is a typical day? They thought it would be vital to capture the ephemeral spirit of our community through the small details, such as a friend offering to help craft emails, another friend borrowing a cloth to clean their glasses. They would rephrase the question “what do you want to hold on to that you know you’ll forget?” It was very important to hold onto not only the space, sounds, and smells of the everyday, but the feeling of it.

I don’t want to forget how hard it was, but I’m already forgetting.

Again, they mentioned the same art piece that was brought up in the previous conversation. There was something about this visceral visual metaphor that captured the spirit of the existence.

There is a conversation only the people in this room can have. Find it
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

It’s clear that a rich, visual metaphor is key in the next steps of my process. Also, it’s clear that different kinds of questions are different among people. They need to choose what they want to remember.

Week VIII-IX: bodies

Over the next two weeks, I began to solidify my first guess as to how we could begin to encode memory: bodies as a way to encode a memory about emotions.

How did I get here? Several weeks ago, I participated in the Studio for Creative Inquiry’s Processing Day. I listened to talks by Kyle McDonald and Hannah Davis. McDonald and Davis both showed projects in which the body was used as a controller in browser-based applications, such as ML5.js. McDonald’s project, How We Act Together, done in collaboration with Lauren McCarthy, inspired me to think about the possibility of using the body as a form of input in the browser using JavaScript(!). This can be done with ML5.js, which provides a layer of abstraction of libraries like PoseNet on TensorFlow.js, making Machine Learning easily deployable with JavaScript.

With this capability in the back of my mind, I thought about the possibility of using the form of a body to convey both feeling and identity. Connections between them, or aggregate representations of body or text, could provide a conduit for showing the emergent connections between actors.

With this first form in mind, I created a more robust model of my system and the type of data that could be displayed:

What was encouraging about the use of a pose was the fact that this form could not only serve as a conduit and organizing principle for multiple lenses of capturing information (hence, accommodating for the different types of information people wanted the community to recall,such as “why are you here?”), it could take an artful form, a need that members of the community strongly desired.

Then, I began prototyping encoding with ML5.js implementation of PoseNet in the browser, particularly testing its affordances on the phone (which was pretty awesome to see that it worked quite efficiently):

At this point I had a simple implementation of the basic flow of data: Mobile pose input -> received by server -> displayed by computer.

Receiving pose data from other phones, computers, etc. connected to the same server.

Now, I had to improve the input of the pose, particularly translating pose input data into a single, normalized figure.

Lingdong Huang’s playroom, which uses robust code to clean and normalize pose estimation to a single skeleton.

Skeleton drawing remixed from Lingdong Huang’s pose estimation code

Based on these examples, I began refining the input of the pose:

I used Lingdong Huang’s pose normalization code to produce this figure.

This code implemented the drawing in P5.js, which is a little unwieldy to draw artful shapes. Thus, worked on updating the code to Sketch.js, which could afford a more artful implementation of the figure.

Last week, I had a conversation with Emma Slayton, an anthropologist and data visualization expert at Carnegie Mellon University. She gave me a few pointers as I develop my application:

Emergence by not being too deterministic in the way the data is structured
Participant-defined encoding structures (color, etc.)
Validated the use of the body as an interesting proposition for encoding color

I also read Jenny Odell’s piece on Medium, Designing for the In-Between. Her writing emphasized how data affords ways of “seeing people.” For example, how Facebook “sees” us through the type of data it collects:

This example made reflect upon think of how we’d be “seen” through the data collected at the end of the project.

How will we, through my project, be seen through data, over time, via the representations I develop?
A homogeneity in representation is harmful, particularly imposing a frame of representation hides invisible attributes and interconnectedness between aspects of a system.

The piece provoked me to think about the necessity for accommodating and designing for “the in-between” in my visualizations:

We should object to this design, because a world with no in-between does harm on every level. It does harm to me as a person with a multifarious self. It does immediate harm to those who try to cross borders and boundaries, like LGBQ, trans, and immigrant folks. And it does harm to all of us by depriving us of the exchange of ideas and perspectives that are truly outside of our own. A world with no in-between is like an anemone with no fish to do a wiggle dance for it. It can’t breathe. — Jenny Odell, Designing for the In-Between

The piece also cultivated thoughts about how the continuousness of community, organisms, sans-boundaries are vital. In my work, I have to answer the hard question of how to begin representing the interconnectedness, magic of the connections in my community. Some other choice inspiring words from Odell:

On top of all of this, being able to see the in-between is a matter of collective survival. — Jenny Odell, Designing for the In-Between
It’s that “whether we understand it or not” that contains the real wisdom, the acknowledgement that the most important parts of ourselves and the relationships between us may actually be those that are the least legible and the most unruly. — Jenny Odell, Designing for the In-Between
But we would do well to remember that no system of categories is disinterested or neutral, and that each reflects as much about its maker as it does about its contents. All systems of categories and all standards have a purpose, and sometimes that purpose has been to extract, monitor, divide, and subjugate.
— Jenny Odell, Designing for the In-Between
I refuse to be one thing. I’m two things, three things, a hundred things at once, and I’ll be a hundred different things tomorrow. I don’t want the convenience of being collapsed, defined, optimized for legibility. I want to be aerated, blobby, and porous. I want to be the sea around an archipelago, a society of islands harboring uncountable species. I want to be a distributed self, an assembly that assembles with others, that refuses — or more appropriately, exceeds — hyper-rational, neocolonial frameworks, hierarchies, and ways of seeing.
— Jenny Odell, Designing for the In-Between

Week X

Debrief with Molly. As I finish up my first crack at creating a prototype for my project, I met with Molly to discuss how to effectively think about the body as a data encoding direction and ways to effectively think about testing the tool.

First, Molly encouraged me to think about my prototype in terms of mainstream data visualization principles. In what ways does my prototype interrogate standard data visualization principles? By asking this question, I could elicit the novel data visualization methodology I am implicitly using in the development of my prototype.

Next, she introduced me to Johanna Drucker’s concept of capta (as opposed to data). On one hand, data is situated as a “given” whereas capta is “taken and constructed.” Am I making data, or capta? I’ll be looking into this concept, exploring where this takes me.

We briefly discussed Giorgia Lupi’s work, especially in terms of the similarity in artfulness in both of our practices. Molly encouraged me to think about the ways I’m building upon her practice, esp. with regard to her “data patterns.”

We also discussed Walter Benjamin, and his approach to thinking about memory, constructing late 19th century Paris through hypertexts.

Next, we discussed ways to evaluate my prototype: Molly brought up a few semantic differentials: Active versus passive. Individual versus collective. Static versus dynamic (animation).

She asked “What are you curious about learning?” In other words, what should I focus on noticing in my testing? I responded:

What kind of pose would people perform? How the social arrangements impact the use of the pose.
What ways do people feel this is helping them remember/not remember?

In general, I felt concerned about how to empower people to remember through this form. How might I enable people to express themselves in this way?

Finally, we discussed research directions based on my focus on posing as a form of visualization:

Pose, historically, as a power move in claiming identity and space.
Adam Kneally. Soma deep, i.e. each experience is necessarily a felt, embodied one. Eurythmics. Every memory has a accompanying bodily experience.
How will the act and performance of posing change over time?

Data as capta. As Molly suggested, I explored Johanna Drucker’s take on data visualization in the context of digital humanities in her work “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” The main thrust of this article articulates a polemic of the implicit realist approach in data visualization methodologies used in the humanities.

Instead, the methodologies of data visualization, in her view, should be rethought through a humanistic lens. First, all data should be viewed as capta, or constructed. Collecting data, or observations, is therefore an interpretive task. Second, the forms representing data (as capta) should take a more nuanced manifestation, showing the ambiguity, complexity, and constructedness of the interpretive models used to manifest them (and the data they represent).

Drucker provides two principles of the humanities to consider when rethinking digital tools:

Consider knowledge as interpretation.
Any observation of phenomena is constructive / constitutive

I have several thoughts in response to Drucker’s assertions that may form the basis of principles of “capta visualization,” which center around exposing:

The collection and organization paradigm of the data itself.
The interpretation and representation schemes that brought the form of a visualization into being.
Cleaning and pruning process of the data.

Testing the prototype. With a mostly working prototype of the model, my aim was to test the usage of ML5.js and the idea of posing with designers in the cohort, specifically in terms of these questions:

What kind of pose would people perform? How the social arrangements impact the use of the pose.
What ways do people feel this is helping them remember/not remember?

In general, people thought the pose was a high-resolution, revealing way to capture feeling beyond words. One person said that even without the labels, the information coming from the poses was quite clear:

An example of the kinds of poses that can be made.

What kind of pose would people perform? How do the social arrangements impact the use of the pose? In one person’s view, the pose was a kind of a performative externalization. In fact, it was suggested to incorporate a “share back” of the pose in the group, going around our sharing circle one by one and performing the pose for people.

What ways do people feel this is helping them remember/not remember? One aspect I imagined would be a good addition to the tool was additional inputs (color, shape, etc.). However, one person thought that the focus on the pose itself; additional encoding elements would distract. In particular, adding color might be problematic — if each individual had their on understanding of color, there might not be a way to generalize how individuals are using color across the group. It seems there is a tension between emergent color schemes and deterministic color schemes.

Iterating the questions asked. Initially, I was using the question “How are you feeling this week?” in my tool. However, people felt as though this question didn’t elicit the kind of specificity needed to help them hold on to a particular memory. Indeed, the notion of conflicting feelings made this general question problematic. I felt as though it was important to narrow the question asked to a specific topic or event. Some people are afraid of forgetting the positive aspects of their experience in particular, while others still want to recall the painful ones.

Emergent properties of the group. People identified a need to show the interconnections between group members as critical for remembering. How do the poses, or people connect to one another? In other words, how can relationships get remembered? Maybe the idea that people can show how they relate to each other’s experiences?

A need to see the emergent properties of the group, particularly through the lens of relationships and roles became apparent. Showing the roles, or modes that people fell into in the group was suggested as a possible way to capture this. Further, how people saw the group / space as a whole was pointed out. Here, the interplay between the individual and the collective is an important point.

Week XI-XII

Experimentation with form This week, with a minimally viable product under my belt, I moved to experiment with the possibilities of encoding the different basic parameters of the visual properties of the figure. I played with line weight and smoothness:

Line weight, individual figure upon user input

Line weight, figures viewed in the collective

Of note, it was interesting to see that the thinner lines afford better data density — more discernible poses at a smaller scale. The thicker lines give a more “iconic” look, like Otl Aischer’s pictograms for the 1972 Munich Olympics:

source: mediamadegreat, design: Otl Aicher

Smoothness, individual figure upon user input

Smoothness, figures viewed in the collective

Smoothness may play upon the Kiki-Bouba effect; sharp poses being able to convey one kind of feel and smooth conveying another. This may be a worthwhile attribute to allow people to edit for their figures.

As I continue to test the affordances of my MVP, the ways in which people “break” the input to convey themselves continues to floor me (in a good way), leading me to consider some of the increasing justifications for the use of a pose as a form of data input.

How a fellow studio member felt one day this week.

The justification for the pose, revisited. This week, I also met with Hannah Du Plessis, a principal at Fit Associates and a professor at CMU’s School of Design. In part, her work centers around cultivating systemic change through the lens of the community and individual. In her view, the individual is the critical site of systemic transformation. She mentions in her paper, “Mindset and Posture Required to Engender Life-Affirming Transformations,” each individual is a part of a larger self-creating system.” To shift our oppressive paradigms, we must begin to observe how we manifest the patterns in our behavior and thinking.

As we spoke about this concept at large, she validated a concept I had been intuiting thus far: a reconnection with the body — the senses — is a critical precursor to being present in a community. It begins with an observation of our inner world, an activity in which we notice the processes of senses that produce our identity. Looking at our inner world becomes one akin to that of a materials lab, one in which we explore, notice, and shift the processes within that. Like any other material, like wood or paper, we unconditionally accept this thing that is our inner experience, objectively examining it without judgement.

Acknowledging our feeling through the form of pose is a start in establishing an outlet to begin to observe the embodied component to our memories. This embodied component is the ephemera that can get lost during and after an experience. My tool could serve as a prosthetic for observing, noticing this ephemeral component of memory that is the body.

The idea that my prototype serves as a tool for creating poses, as opposed to a free draw on paper, is significant. Hannah emphasized how not everyone is comfortable expressing themselves through a blank canvas. I surmised that things such as shapes, building blocks, and other tools reduce the friction in self expression and the fear of drawing / painting poorly. These tools could provide pathways of expression,allowing people a prosthetic to express the inexpressible through other means. They can use a figure to contort their body, displaying it anonymously to the collective (as my friend has done in the contorted pose above).

Hannah gave me several other key points of feedback on my prototype:

Pose as a form of data is a nice way to start to tap into the embodied experience; what the body knows
Giving an option for anonymity is key for this setting.
Pairing the figure with text is a good choice. The figure gives richness in nuance (through embodiment) while the text provides an opportunity for understanding
Providing a standard form of a figure gives people the opportunity to express themselves faster and easier
In her view, a community is a group who chooses to be together. Therefore, a way in which the community chooses to be together, an agreement, is key.
How can you scaffold the experience to help people bring their full selves to their community. How can I allow for the expression of what they can offer?
Think about how the tool can capture windows into the inner experience over time.

At the end of our conversation, I felt reinvigorated in the direction of the project. What I’d like to explore next is the intersection of exercises meant to reconnect us to our bodies (breathing, body scan), and the needs of bodily expression that cater to both this cohort and subsequent cohorts. At this moment, I am brave enough to conjure a design prompt:

How might I design a data visualization tool for my cohort to remember through observation and encoding of the sensations of body and the associated stories?

Based on my research and discussion with Hannah, I have the following justifications for the pose as a potent design direction for encoding memory, manifested as a “stick figure:”

Unconditional acceptance and noticing of body is fundamental aspect for life-affirming community
Every memory is embodied
Drawn, not acted out (the tech is buggy on phones, and posing in front of people removes the semi-anonymous aspect)
Abstract form provides not only a sense of anonymity (as opposed to drawn figures), but is more relatable because we can map ourselves onto it (see Understanding Comics):

Opportunity for exaggeration

What present and future cohorts need. To move forward in exploring the form figures will take in a more meaningful way, I need to identify key aspects of the observing the embodied experience that visualization would serve. In the present, what our cohort could need is a caring forum in which to express emotions and receive acceptance and validation. I hear you.

Another key aspect is to identify the pattern in feeling, finding ways to move beyond together. By observing, shifting the pattern in thought and action. We can be resilient.

Future cohorts would benefit from this expression in two ways. First, the identification of the patterns in previous cohorts. It’s happened before, I’m not alone.

Second, a recording of the ways the pattern was shifted is key. I can also be resilient.

Perhaps with this knowledge passed down, the possibility for a a shift in the cyclical pattern of over-stress and self doubt in the design studio toward a cyclical pattern of observing and overcoming could emerge.

High-level journey map of how memory could be passed to new cohorts

Using these aspects, I can begin to formulate how visualization can support these specific processes.

The feels of several people before a recent presentation.

Week XIII: soma-deep and a new journey map

“the body is not only the crucial source of all perception and action but also the core of our expressive capability and thus the ground of all language and meaning”
— Merleau-Ponty [1]

Qualities of experience as guideposts for form exploration. I began to read Stephen Neely’s work, which led me to readings about the Feldenkrais Method:

“The Method, founded by its namesake Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984) is a meliorative body-practice that uses specific physical exercises, led by a practitioner to improve physical and psychological well-being.”

Neely’s work is based on the premise that consideration of the soma-experience is vital, citing scholars and musicians such as Jaques-Dalcroze, who assert “before any experience is understood in the mind, it has to first resound through and be felt in the first experiencing instrument, the body.”

Further, Neely states that there remains a “depth, wealth, and wide range of potential interactions available to the experiencing body,” which may indicate that exploring other components of the soma (more than just the figure) could be key to may prove more potent for participants:

Heavy / light (swinging example from Neely’s TED talk)
Control / release (Calligraphy vingiette from Neely’s paper on Soma-Deep)
Gesture (Skateboarding vingiette from Neely’s paper on Soma-Deep)
Temperature (Feldenkrais Method)

Expanded journey map. I made a more granular journey map, based on the general one above, focusing in on the flow that would happen between group members in one meeting:

Observing a way to shift patterns of thought was a critical component of this flow, especially after consideration of du Plessis’ work. In both current cohorts and future cohorts, identifying how shifts could happen are critical.

Incorporating a way to validate members in session became another critical aspect, showing that their feelings were heard.

Thus, in deliberation on where to focus building out, I decided to focus in on the activities that contributed the most to the reflection process and transfer of tacit knowledge:

Bubbling up the most vital questions to be answered
Writing associated stories with each emotion
Building out a way to validate experiences
Writing out ways thinking needs to shift

If I have time after building out these critical features, I want to explore building out some of the more experimental ways of mapping experience to visual form (weight, pressure, temperature, as noted above) into my prototype.

From Shusterman, R.: Body Consciousness a Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press, New York (2011)
Neely, S. (2017, July). Soma-Deep as a Marker for Idealized Experience. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 127–134). Springer, Cham

Week XIV — XV: Building out validation, stories, shifts, and questions

In these final weeks of the project, I endeavored to finish my prototype and test it in a final session with the group. Before the final session, I implemented several things:

Displaying participants in a circle
Allowing / showing validations from other people
Selecting questions to be answered
Allowing participants to write in stories
Building a way for participants to write in their patterns of thought
Displaying stories and patterns of thought in the group view
Visual exploration of corporeal sensations, deciding on tension as a way to express sensation
Building out visual display of tension as a circle with waves

In the midst of implementing these items, I had the chance to explore the library of books about belonging, data visualization, and community at Fit Associates with Hannah Du Plessis and Marc Rettig:

Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Besse Van Der Kolk, M.D.
Yes And…Your Mental Agility by Gijs van Bilsen, Joost Kadijk & Cyriel Kortleven + Sue Walden
Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal

With these in hand, I was able to develop a rationale for crafting questions to ask. I thought back to my reading of Emergent Strategy:

There is a conversation only the people in this room can have. Find it
— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

I realized one of the core questions at hand in this process was figuring out what conversation needed to be had with this group at this stage of the semester. We’re about to part ways (some for good, some for the summer). It’s a time of reflection and change. I looked to Peter Block’s identification of critical kinds of conversations that foster belonging:

I wanted questions that afforded us both the opportunity to reflect on critical experiences as a way of healing as outlined above by Block, and the opportunity to pass knowledge forward. Thus, I adapted several boilerplate questions from Peter Block’s Community, minding the value the answers could bring to newcomers:

Possibility: Declare a possibility that has the power to transform the studio + inspire you. Despite being at the end of the semester, we still have time to add things such as art and plants to our space. Beyond the tangible, it is key to reflect upon what might bring life and joy to our existence here? For the people who encounter this information, they’d be able to take some of those good ideas forward still, building upon them as strategies.
Ownership: What is the idea about the studio that you tell others about most often? The one that you take you identity from. This may reveal some of the ways people look at the space, the positive, negative, complex feelings that people have developed around their conceptions and expectations of the room. Many of us hold untold views, and it’s revealing to us and others when we articulate it. For newcomers, it may indicate how they may come to view this place of gathering, and the importance it held for those who occupied it.
Dissent: What resentment do you hold about the studio that no one knows about? Many of us discuss painful moments to each other individually, but few are voiced to the larger crowd. Further, resentment may serve as a large burden upon our psyche and bodies. Expressing this kind of dissent, and being heard, may serve as a healing moment. In the future, as people encounter these resentments, they may prepare for these kinds of realities instead of being blindsided by them, perhaps try new things. If they hold the same resentments, seeing them from past members of the cohort may be validating.
Gifts: What is the gift you have that you do not fully acknowledge? A sensibility to deny what we have that is special is a scourge upon our group. Block asserts that this is the hardest question to answer: “The focus on gifts confronts people with their essential core, that which has the potential to make the difference and change lives for good.” Beginning to unapologetically answer questions like these are key to the affirming thought patterns necessary for us to thrive together, especially because there is no built in “right answer” or completion in design problems.

I tested these questions individually with a couple of would-be participants. The interchanges we had were immediately potent, moving us to a deep, personal place. Still, I asked myself whether we, through our previous sessions, had engendered enough trust between us to be honest about these details in a group? I hoped the visualization and non-verbal input would make sharing difficult aspects that could arise from these questions a little easier. With these questions in mind, I continued to implement the rest of the features in my tool.

Displaying participants in a circle and showing validations from other people. Key to my visual, I realized, is reinforcing the idea that we are “gathering” as a group. Thus, my first step was to change the way people were displayed on screen, mirroring the way we’d be sitting together as a group:

Then, I set out to implement the validation aspect of my journey map. Participants can hit a “validate” button on their phones after submitting their stories, triggering hearts to fly into the center of the circle.

One interesting decision emerged here. Should I map “validations” to individual members, or keep them in the center? I decided to keep them in the center, to avoid a sort of “voting” to emerge through the use of the validations.

Selecting questions to be answered. I realized that we’d like to ask multiple questions throughout a session, so I set up a way to select the question being answered from the master screen.

Allowing participants to write in stories. A key aspect in Hannah’s work is to allow people the chance to expand and note the stories informing their feelings. Plus, it’d be great to see some detail behind the phrases that’d be included in the initial answers of the question such that an understanding of the feeling can be carried forward.

[x].

Building a way for participants to write in their patterns of thought. The final aspect of my application was exposing the patterns of thought that transcend stories. If multiple people in a community share patterns of thought such as “I can never do well enough,” it’s possible to revise these patterns to a preferred state. In other words, the “shift” necessary in a community to engender a life-affirming place.

Displaying stories and patterns of thought in the group view. It’s important to reflect these aspects of the question back to the group, particularly the patterns. Thus, I added a way to switch views in the master visualization.

Visual exploration of corporeal sensations, deciding on tension as a way to express sensation. Having extra time after implementing these features, I set out to explore a variety of ways to visualize corporeal sensations beyond a mere pose.

I also played around with the idea of using the shape of the outer points of the pose as a frame for communicating degree of openness:

Building out visual display of tension as a circle with waves. Reusing some line generation code, I was able to map smoothness, wave height, and number of waves to tension on a scale of 0 to 1, with increasing tension generating circles with spikier, more compact lines:

The last session

Enclosed in the classroom space to prevent interlocutors. Brought brownies and cookies (people liked). It felt intimate (good).

Preparation. Wrote rational behind the project and the agenda on the whiteboard. Brought brownies, cookies. Others contributed juice and helped set up the space.

Improv. 30mins. people brought their own games. Broke the ice. For me, it felt weird to be using body / playing games together. But it felt special. Getting accustomed to the space we were sitting in. Everyone was laughing and enjoying themselves. A critical aspect.

Games played, provided by two people:

Counting upwards collectively. Everyone closed their eyes and felt when it was best to say their number.
Sending a message in a circle, everyone holding hands.

Grounding / introduction. 5mins. Using whiteboards to set rationale for our activity and the expectations of the space. Hopefully helped people to understand what the meaning of the meeting was?

Declare a possibility that has the power to transform the studio + inspire you.

Possibility. 30mins. Opened with what this means. People realized they had the same ideas of what the space could be like, within their reach. This was exciting for them. Seeing the ideas in the visualization provoked people to talk about them. It was clear that these possibilities meant more and were based upon values embedded in what the space meant to them, which emerged in the next conversation.

What is the idea about the studio that you tell others about most often? The one that you take you identity from.

Ownership. 30 mins. You could see in the viz that people felt much more tense. In the circle, it had more motion and spikes. In the visualization postures, people were more folded up. People talked about the mismatch between their expectations of the space and their realities. Many people felt the same way here too. We could see and appreciate the different ideas of what the space really means to us. The pain we were experiencing really came out of it. “Home.” life.

Ending question: What are you looking forward to this summer? Tried to end with future thinking. Especially important because the vibe of the last two questions became heavy (including some light crying).

Debrief. There is a conversation only the people in this room can have. Find it. People felt good talking about things together and reflecting. It was clear how close and comfortable everyone had become in the course of the session and throughout the year together.

Conversations we didn’t get to —

Dissent. “What resentment do you hold about the studio that no one knows about?”
Gifts. “What is the gift you have that you do not fully acknowledge?”

Each of these conversation is critical to have at some point, it’s clear a two hour meeting might be necessary to fit these in. Technical issues and getting used to using the technology might have also played a role.

The visualization

Errors. Weird! Maybe about browser compatibility :|
Anonymity in data good.
Entering in information — people generally didn’t have an issue with speedily coming up with answers and filling out the form.
Nice to see responses externalized. “Now that I see it, I want to have a conversation about it.”
Circular paradigm for tension good; needed to specify what the tension was about to help (specifically about the idea or just
People commented on the form of the bodies; it was clear they understood what they meant, it was fun for them to try to decode things.
People were talking very personally; about the prompt but surprisingly also much more than that.
It was hard for the visualization to capture the nature of the conversation, but that’s okay.
People realized they all felt the same; wanted the same things in the space
It was nice to have the patterns and visualizations to keep a hold of what people really thought.

How it felt to hold the space

Thank goodness for the gifts of Hannah Du Plessis, Peter Block, and adrienne maree brown. Helped me formulate a structure.
Didn’t feel nervous — knew that people were there because they earnestly wanted to be. Which is what Peter Block recommends. Further, Hannah Du Plessis has asserted that communities are groups of people who elect to be together.
People felt grateful to see a space being held — I could feel the power of the conversation being had, and it was quite fulfilling. Made the work I put into the project worth it.
Surprised at how much the space could be transformed in such a short period of time (~1.5 hours).

Things that need work

An explicit time for sensing and noting the body. Separating out a space for reflecting on body and then stories. Needed a moment to facilitate noting the impact of the question on the body
Glitches. Stress testing with a bunch of phones. How to deal with browser incompatibility issues??
Finessing the questions. Some felt they were too wordy, and the sequence of steps was hard to follow based on the core question. More testing is needed here.