A data visualization ritual for community belonging

A data-driven ritual that supports community belonging resulting from a previous independent study.

The semester before I started my thesis work, a good friend of mine in the graduate design studio shared an anecdote about a tradition one of her old workplaces had. They had an appreciation day for each employee. Once the obligatory ironic “over appreciation” jokes had been made, people shared earnest appreciate for that employee, displaying effective forms of care. This simple ritual of appreciation transformed the spirit of the office.

After hearing this anecdote, I wondered if there was something transformative about this type of practice. In my research, I found that rituals, the behaviors we repeat everyday, help to define our lives. they are manifestations and amplifications of our worldview.

In particular, understanding how our worldviews manifest at scale, or in groups, becomes key: how we think as a collective brings unsustainable and oppressive systems into being [2]. In transition design and beyond, noticing our patterns of behavior and thought are considered key in creating the conditions for change towards a life-affirming world [1]. The ritual of noticing is a critical site of transformation.

Beyond an individual form of noticing, rituals that allow us to reflect together are key in creating the conditions for change. In particular, systems thinking consultant Margaret Wheatley writes:

“Human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change — personal change, community and organizational change, planetary change. If we can sit together and talk about what’s important to us, we begin to come alive. We share what we see, what we feel, and we listen to what others see and feel” (Emphasis mine) [4].

In my previous independent study, I looked at what kind of rituals, driven by conversations and supported by data visualization, would craft community belonging through noticing patterns of thought and behavior. I focused on the community of graduate students I was studying with, particularly because we shared a studio space that we learned and worked in together every day.

Using consultant and community scholar Peter Block’s writing on community as a guide for structuring conversations, I found that a ritual that involved both reflection, or a chance to define and externalize our experience, and relating, a chance to express how our experience is similar to others, were key in creating a sense of belonging [3].

Data visualization serves as a helpful prosthetic in this ritual in two key ways. First, the data visualization provided something beyond a blank canvas to aid in the process of reflection [6]. Indeed, guided prompts and forms embodied a way of reflecting that community organizers such as du Plessis and adrienne maree brown deem helpful [1,5]. Second, the data visualization displayed back these reflections in a structured, yet anonymous, way, providing a starting point for the conversation and a digital artifact to remember it by [6].

I imagined this way of melding ritual and data visualization could create the conditions to shift our experience of the studio into a life-affirming one:

“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” [6].

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

These lessons about rituals of noticing and reflection and the role data visualization can play to amplify them will serve as a starting point in my thesis. With these in mind, I am defining the the template ritual for my thesis as follows:

The ritual has two stages, reflect and relate/support:

1. Reflect: Participants, silently and individually, respond to a prompt (about the community they are a part of) with their experiences. Different response types are recorded: a one phrase summary (text), the story behind the summary (long form text), and the patterns of thought embedded within the story(text, categorical). Each of these response types reflects a particular mode of accessing the same experience in the community. Further, response types mapped to emotion may be employed here (for example, a measure of “tension” or “weight.” Responses may be recorded on a single computer / phone that is passed around, or multiple phones simultaneously.
2. Relate/support: Once all responses are recorded, each participant can verbally express their own story / how they relate towards each other’s stories. Further, they can share tools for coping with the experience. With each expression of support, a scribe can record these ways of relating / supporting, which can be reflected in the visualization.

I will use this ritual moving forward, which will become more specific as I develop an understanding of what kind of ecological metaphors may be useful.

Sources

1. du Plessis, H. The Mindset and Posture Required to Engender Life-Affirming Transitions.
2. Scharmer, Otto, and Katrin Kaufer. Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies. San Francisco.: Berett-Koehler., 2013. Print.
3. Block, P. (2018). Community: The structure of belonging. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
4. Wheatley, M. J. (2010). Turning to one another.
5. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
6. Collective memory and data visualization: an independent study. Cathryn Ploehn. https://medium.com/@cploehn/collective-memory-and-data-visualization-an-independent-study-55e66a94fbaa