If you happened to tune into our Fireside Chat you might remember hearing our publications director, Jason Forrest, mention that we saved cover design until the rest of the magazine was complete. We started out thinking that we wanted to use the cover as a collage of the wonderful visualizations within. As it turned out, that was harder than we thought. Our central challenge was how to select from among all the amazing work inside. We decided that making that kind of choice was in opposition to our desire to celebrate the community as a whole. Luckily, Julie had some other tricks up her sleeve!

The entire magazine is chock full of fun fonts. For one alternate cover concept, Julie showcased one of the coolest fonts alongside a list of all the magazine’s contributors. In this concept, she also tried out a range of masthead treatments. Initially, we were partial to the vertical treatment, but once we saw the option on the right (below), we changed our minds.

The next series of designs prioritized both the launch messaging and the issue’s editorial theme of “culture.” By now, we were all drawn in the direction of a clever illustration. Note the subtle, but significant, difference in the two horizontal masthead treatments. The one in the middle is just a little bit cleaner—that’s what we preferred.

We knew we wanted to produce a visualization of the magazine itself (a meta viz!), but due to time and resource constraints, we didn’t collect data systematically throughout the publication process. The egg chart was meant to represent the magazine’s launch, but the hard-boiled version didn’t quite land. And, eventually, Julie designed three different visualizations for inside the magazine, so we didn’t need the cover to fulfill that function.

When we saw the last concept, we all knew it was the one. It perfectly communicated hatching and dataviz in a simple and clever way that made us all smile; plus, Julie was able to tie in the chick reference with a small image on the magazine’s spine. We conducted several quick surveys with folks in our immediate circles and the results were unanimous: this was the one!

During the many months of magazine production, the editorial team met every Wednesday morning (for Jason, Mary, and Claire) and evening (for Julie) to review the page designs that Julie had completed that week. These meetings were our absolute favorite part of the publication process, and we look forward to them in anticipation of Issue 2! Hopefully, this article gave you a little peak into what fun we had whenever we got to review Julie’s delightful interpretations!

And, if you haven’t ordered your copy of Issue 1 yet, you can still get yours while supplies last.

The post You Asked for It: Nightingale Magazine Issue 1 Alternate Covers appeared first on Nightingale.

In our last installment, we suggested that organizational data visualization work can be light on methodology and we proposed a high-level framework to break the silos between practices, roles, and the people that inhabit them. Here we examine data literacy as foundational to achieving Information Empowerment.

Community research is a means of gauging data literacy–which we think may be an overlooked concept. Design assets like user personas and journey maps are tools that designers can use to link data collected from subject matter experts to development team activity. In this way, designers act as translators and even project managers. While it’s certainly possible to develop websites and digital applications without design and without community/user data collection, these efforts often miss their mark because they are not informed by context. Organizing around a specific initiative affords a literacy opportunity for both the community AND the practitioners. Roles like design and UX research can provide translation across the team. In the case study below, the designer, the UX researcher, the users, and the developers worked together to successfully deliver the creative brief.

What does it mean to organize around an initiative? As a case study, consider a municipal effort whose goal was to improve access to early childhood education and care for low-income residents. Pre-pandemic, one of Mary’s client projects was to develop a comprehensive resource for parents and caregivers in Detroit. The project involved streamlining the online financial eligibility inquiry and application processes. The visualization, in this case, was both a web interface and a mobile application. Early childhood education and care resemble a “marketplace” model in that stakeholders include parents and caregivers, service providers, and government funding sources. The project was conceived in response to nearly 60 percent of Detroit’s three- and four-year-olds who were not in preschool (source). A lack of awareness, complex eligibility requirements, and a burdensome application process were all contributing factors.

In an effort to improve our team’s data literacy, we sourced subject matter expertise throughout this process. We conducted three listening labs with Detroit parents and caregivers to understand what motivated or deterred them from seeking early childhood care and learning options, paying special attention to how they became aware of their childcare choices. In an effort to make it easier for our stakeholders to attend, these sessions were hosted at one of our client’s community care locations and we provided a child-friendly setting that included coloring books, crafts, toys, and refreshments. The sessions felt like a mix between a parent information meeting and a playgroup.

The listening lab findings were used to revise stakeholder digital journey maps, refine the tech stack, and identify data and operational infrastructure needs. By utilizing community-based participatory research practices, we were able to approach parent and caregiver participants with transparency and we revised our assumptions based on their input.

In the case study above, the data and development team had ongoing assumptions and knowledge that differed from the actual needs of the community. By finding a way to incorporate their users into the working methodology, the team was able to make a better product that spoke more directly to their needs.

Just as our data and development teams need to collaborate with subject matter experts – in this case, the caregivers directly – optimizing the impact of the communication also needs the expertise of designers to make the information accessible and meaningful. These are, in many ways, the most crucial steps in understanding, as it is the realization of the meaning of data and the relevance that allows for generating action. According to MIT, partnering with design and data visualization can help the 82 percent of organizations that struggle to harness their unstructured data sourced from text, audio, social media, customer reviews, etc. The project’s designer was able to source collected data to create the journey map, which was the basis for the eligibility model, and directed the backend development team’s activity. As such, we fulfilled the creative brief and streamlined the eligibility and pre-application process in a way that was inclusive, easy to navigate, and accessible.

Here are three steps to help break down functional silos:

1. Invite involvement from your subject matter experts on the collection methods, iteration, and interpretation of your data. Participants and community members can use this experience beyond the initiative and when consuming other visualizations or reports in the future.
2. Explain and educate about what you are trying to do and how you are trying to do it. Invite conversations on what you collected (and didn’t collect), how you analyzed it, and how folks can make decisions based on your findings or your visualization. This stance is essential to building trust.
3. Be flexible in your mindset so that you can incorporate feedback and iterate quickly.
4. Infuse patience and fun whenever possible – it helps us remember that we’re all trying to be respectful, mindful, authentically good humans.

Collaboration across your extended team, which can include the community you’re serving, helps to establish and reinforce project equity. Even the most skilled data practitioners can advance their own knowledge of data seeing it in context and by taking a more initiative-based approach to their work. In part one of this series, we asked: “If data is a currency, how do you spend it wisely?” In this example, the answer is by letting it compound.

What do you think?

1. Although this is a community-based example, how could you apply these same ideas in your work?
2. What are other mechanisms for developing and reinforcing in-context data literacy in your practice?
3. What are some of the barriers to this type of approach in your organization and in your daily work?

Share your thoughts with us at nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org.

The post Information Empowerment: A Reciprocal Data Literacy Case Study, Part 3 appeared first on Nightingale.

As we created the first issue of Nightingale Magazine, we knew we would share our learnings along the way, but now that it is here, the process has seemed so long, and yet so utterly natural that I fear my comments may read more metaphysical than practical. 

It all started with a simple idea – wouldn’t it be great if there was a magazine for dataviz? Over the years I’ve set out on more than a few entrepreneurial projects – record labels, music festivals, I even co-founded a startup a decade ago. I have learned a fair bit about how to establish a brand and then make progress towards lofty goals.  This is what I want to emphatically share with people – it’s not about dreaming the dream, it’s really more about having the confidence and persistence to make something happen.

Barring chance opportunities or unrealistic financial windfalls, making something happen is really a daily ethos of hard work and investing in people. Yes, it is a lot of work, but that work is deeply joyful. It’s a process of perpetual learning, of finding time to collaborate, and embarking on a journey of creating something together and this is where the investment pays off – in the act of co-creation.

Sure we learned a lot of practical lessons and made loads of mistakes. Sure, we squabbled about details – but we never compromised our collective vision to focus on the community and bring a new standard of design and editorial quality to our approach.

Let me end with a story of transparency and resilience. When we started we assumed that it would be easy to sell advertisements. Unfortunately, it turned out to be extremely difficult without having a clear example to point to – after all, a dataviz mag like were planning was quite novel. We put our heads together and realized that we could generate the necessary funds by appealing to the community with a subscription drive. That 1,000-member subscription drive was what made Issue 1 possible. It proved our financial viability and reinforced just how strong our community is.

Thank you all SO MUCH for your support, we are thrilled to continue on the journey with Issue 2! (And reach out to advertise – Ha! nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org)

– Jason Forrest

I’ll admit that, at the start, the prospect of developing the magazine was overwhelming. Several of the steps I knew we needed to take were things none of us had experience with and I couldn’t see the processes: developing a magazine framework, fitting specific content to design–and vice versa–at a sizeable scale, converting membership information into shipping details, and finding print and fulfillment partners that could ship to 53 countries in a reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost. Both the budget and the delivery timeline were essentially fiction until we had nearly completed development, which felt profoundly uncomfortable. 

Printing is a chicken or an egg dilemma (pun absolutely intended!): how do you know what quantity of a print run to commit to if you don’t know how many orders you’ll have? We had to start the process by fundraising to get a sense of the demand, but that meant delaying design. Getting truly started on the deliverables took several months and it pushed back our delivery timeline. We had TONS of content to choose from, but we needed to organize it, re-edit it for print, and obtain image rights — or replace images. We underestimated the coordination those steps required.

We did not underestimate the shipping challenge. We explored shipping from both the US and Europe and we found an awesome German printer with a shipping partner to handle fulfillment. However, shipping from Germany meant a tradeoff in postage costs in order to deliver outside Europe in a ~10-day window. (The alternative was 8-10 weeks and we were worried about subscribers that had already waited for months.)

We had always planned to package the kids’ content in a fun and kid-friendly way, but we went into the design without a set vision. Julie came through under extreme pressure with the wonderful ‘zine format, but that added some unanticipated time and cost. Finally, we faced some constraints using the technology platform we had to collect shipping details — the lag time to fulfillment meant that several folks had address changes. We were not prepared for the data cleansing requirements and, since we’d selected the fulfillment partner after we collected data, there were several data transformation steps necessary to meet the shipping label requirements. (I know many of you can relate!) Here, I am eternally grateful to Claire and her Excel magic.

It is against this backdrop that working with people you can trust and depend on is so critical. Together, we devised a content organizer from which we were able to better understand our progress and next steps. (We’ve got a version in place for Issue 2 and we are filling it up already.) We prepped digital content for print by mobilizing our editorial committee volunteers. We learned what we needed from each author such that we now have a print submission checklist to avoid having to go back to each of them several times We have a process in place for staging pieces in InDesign. We now know what works best when we’re communicating with our German printer and shipping partners. In fact, they helped us source sustainable paper and encouraged us to pay Mehrkosten: compensation costs to offset the emissions from printing so the magazine could be CO_² neutral. For Issue 2, we have a better idea of our deadlines and what we need to do to ship sooner. And, yes, we need to adhere to a hard deadline

And, as it turns out, that’s how you make something. Someone has the courage to voice a big, beautiful vision and other people have to begin to see it and commit their time and talents to it. Soon, a community supports it and patiently waits for it. And then it becomes tangible and we all get to hold it in our hands, beaming with pride. Thank you for your extreme patience. We hope you think it was worth it!

– Mary Aviles

We always knew the first issue would be a learning process. How do you make a magazine anyway?? We started out with so many questions, but eventually, we ran out of things to Google and had to just dive in and begin. I’m an inveterate planner who thinks everything ought to be organized by a color-coded spreadsheet, so the idea of trying to pull this off without a plan was terrifying to me. But there were no instructions to follow, so we just kind of… figured it out as we went. And it worked! (I feel like there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.)

Now, with some hindsight, I can say that two of the most important things you need to make a magazine are patience and perseverance. (But also a color-coded spreadsheet.) The process involved a ton of trial and error, iteration, and frustration, but also joy and excitement and inspiration. Every time something went awry, we made a note of it so we could do better next time. For example, a few things we learned: 

• Writing for print is totally different than writing for the web—don’t use URLs, keep the text shorter, and avoid in-line images. Each of our 40+ magazine articles had to be rewritten or edited multiple times as we figured out what worked.
• Think about the rhythm of the magazine—vary article lengths, layouts, and topics in a meaningful way. This is something we didn’t pay much attention to until we were compiling everything into a single document. By that point, we had limited ability to change things. For Issue 2, we will consider rhythm and flow from the outset.
• Figure out image copyright sooner rather than later. (This is now part of our initial communications with writers.)
• When you think you’re finished copyediting, read the whole thing again.
• Clearly communicate expectations around shipping and fulfillment. This was challenging for us to do for Issue 1 because we had no idea what a reasonable timeframe for making, printing, and delivering a magazine was, but we tried to keep our subscribers updated as we went. Next time, we’ll be able to set a hard deadline.

And then there are things we’re still figuring out—chief among them, how to manage an e-commerce site and the resulting database of global subscriber addresses. Data validation is nearly impossible when every country formats their addresses differently! If you have any ideas, please send them our way

In the end, bringing Nightingale Magazine to life was a huge challenge, but we are so, so proud of what we were able to pull off as a team. 

– Claire Santoro

When Jason, Mary, Claire, and I started this adventure of making Nightingale go print, we didn’t think it would take us approximately the gestation period of a beluga whale. Though here we are, one year later, reflecting on what we learned along the way. As many subscribers are still receiving their first issue in the mail, I feel more in the mood of giddily celebrating than peacefully drawing lessons from the road we took, but I’ll do my best. 

While Jason, Mary, and Claire were tackling the huge task of clearing out all the editorial content, I simultaneously started working on the design of Nightingale. I first defined its core values to figure out how these principles could be translated visually and then I broke it down into smaller design components.

One of the main challenges of our magazine was that Nightingale is a collective publication, a collective effort with many voices, many visions, and many designs. We needed to find a good balance between letting these individualities express themselves and building a cohesive ensemble. Rather than imposing a rigid design system, flexibility seemed a better option to build an inviting space for every kind of style and expression. I also decided to put a strong emphasis on fonts, using typography as the foundation of the magazine design. I feared that adding too many other visual elements such as illustrations would overwhelm the already profuse variety of the content. Typography seemed a good alternative: it allowed us to embody the singularity of each piece by using fonts embracing the subject of the articles (or even creating custom fonts for some) and also drew a bridge between every separated piece. Titles became strong and bold visual elements on their own, as well as highlighted entry points that guided the reader through the 130ish pages of the magazine. 

After having defined the look and feel of the magazine, I started designing templates for each type of article with a basic column-based layout to go with it.

All the volunteers were helpful, but especially Jason and Claire who undertook the long task of putting the text of every article into these templates and copyediting them at the same time. I took these working bases (InDesign files) to create each article one by one, trying to embrace every time what made them stand out and give justice to their authors’ vision. I would usually create about five articles a week that we would then review altogether every Wednesday during our weekly meeting. When all the articles were done, I gathered them into one complete file – the first skeleton of the magazine (a very exciting milestone!)- and harmonized them all together. A very long work of meticulous copyediting started for Jason, Mary, and Claire while I implemented all their corrections and made sure everything was optimized for printing. Then, it was time to send the final files to the printer in Germany!

As for any long-running project, everything seemed to take ages while being done in a blink of an eye. Though it may have been long and was a lot of work, now that the first issue of Nightingale is laying next to me, I only remember the excitement and joy of spending hours on Adobe creating each piece. My biggest take on this adventure would be that, even though planning is great and important, the most creative solutions are the ones you find while doing it. And I’m more than excited to find out more when creating the next issue of Nightingale!

– Julie Brunet

A limited re-print of Issue 1 is available now! Get yours while you still can — we sold out our print overrun in ~two weeks!

The post Nightingale Magazine, Issue 1 Retro: What We Learned appeared first on Nightingale.

Mindworks bills itself as both an interactive discovery center and a behavioral science lab. The venue takes advantage of optimal foot traffic via its retail storefront on Michigan Avenue, situated near public transportation and the Bean–a major tourist attraction. It’s window displays are designed to pique curiosity and invite passersby in. Visitors are greeted by a friendly “receptionist” who explains that the hands-on exhibits serve as active data collection for behavioral research. In fact, the staff are all behavioral science students and researchers from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business (the organization behind this operation). The receptionist also sets expectations for your time commitment–typically 30-to-60 minutes–and highlights the “merch” you can purchase with the points you earn for your participation.

This is not your typical research facility recruitment experience!

Giorgia Lupi fans will recognize her influence as she and her partners at Pentagram collaborated on the experience design, interactive installations, exhibition design, display system, environmental graphics, and visual identity design.

I found it both fascinating and delightful to introduce my kids to principles like choice architecture–plucked from the pages of Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge–in such an entertaining fashion. I especially appreciated the way the creators labelled nudges around the space, which served to both make the concepts real and model transparency. Efforts like these advance data fluency, especially among non-practitioner audiences.

If you’re looking for techniques for engaging your audience and you happen to be near Chicago, make time to visit Mindworks.

Thanks to Editorial Committee member, Chuck Burke, for reviewing this piece from the first-hand perspective of a UChicago staffer!

The post REVIEW: Mindworks – The Science of Thinking appeared first on Nightingale.

If you know anything about folks from the Mitten State, you know we default to identifying places by pointing to our hands. (I was delighted to learn, as seen in Alex’s book below, that there is a Hand Map for Detroit!) Detroit in 50 Maps offers a little something for everyone–whether you are a Detroiter, a fan of the Motor City, or a map lover. In fact, much of the book’s content resulted from engagement with city residents and organizations working to change what was happening in their communities. Alex wrote this book for them, too. 

When Alex and I spoke about the book recently, he told me that, while he didn’t intend it as bedtime reading, Alex was surprised by one set of readers who told him about their ritual of reading one map together each night before bed. He was struck by the magic of maps to illuminate and clarify things for readers that they’d heard about or known all their lives. People who Alex had worked with for years shared new realizations about issues like internet access or poverty rates or access to vehicles–”aha” moments that his maps inspired in ways that the data alone did not.

Alex shared that he has always loved maps, but in his role as a Detroit community health worker he realized that maps were how you came to better understand a city. His training as an anthropologist and later work as an epidemiologist provided an interesting complement of opportunities to use and talk about data and information. In his role at the health department, when his focus was on chronic disease and injury prevention, Alex began to realize that chronic disease was not the most pressing issue for families who were worried about food access and why the buses didn’t show up when they were supposed to. Engaging every day with Detroit families via home-based programs grounded his insights in real life. 

There are a range of narratives about Detroit, and many of them are bleak. What delights me about this book is how its various contextual lenses reveal the power of resilience. 

“Detroiters have endured. They have made their own food systems, built their own cooperatives, established numerous businesses and entrepreneurship incubators, and made a way out of no way. Resilience is an understatement in Detroit.”

Alex has heard from readers that have picked up on this positivity, too. For example, they may have heard that Detroit wasn’t well served by national retail chains, so they’re surprised to learn about the prevalence of community coffee shops, driven by residents’ desire for local meeting space. National media has given a lot of attention to Detroit as a food desert, but Alex’s book highlights an active landscape of independent grocery stores and community gardens. While many independent grocers struggle to stay in business, he shared the story of a group of Southwest Detroit residents who were relieved when their local grocery store closed. Ultimately, they “were glad to be a food desert” over dealing with a racist store owner who had treated them horribly. This same community resides in the most polluted zip code in Michigan, but were committed to finding a way to build a community garden. 

Maps are a critical tool for raising awareness and teaching data literacy. Alex recounted an experience teaching a workshop to elementary students at The James and Grace Lee Boggs School. The topic was Introduction to Understanding Data and, using an outline map of Detroit, he asked the students to put a pushpin on their home so they could see where all their classmates lived. One of the students reacted to this map by saying, “That’s not Detroit.” She had never seen a map of the city before and “her” Detroit–her experience of the city–was not much larger than her block. One of my favorite maps in the book, “100 Detroits,” perfectly illustrates this point by merging and overlaying the first 100 Google images that result from a search for “map of Detroit.” Your map depends on your mindset.

Interestingly, unlike other cities I’ve lived in, the boundaries of Detroit neighborhoods are hotly contested. This divisiveness is often driven by racial segregation. While Chicago’s neighborhoods are codified in the city charter, Detroit’s neighborhoods have been redefined over time–what Alex aptly refers to as “(dis)agreement lines.” Instead of identifying themselves by the name of their neighborhood, Detroiters will sometimes reference the cross streets they live near. Some sections of the city have multiple names, depending on who you ask, like the area referred to as “Cass Corridor” and/or “Midtown.” During interviews about what the area should be named, Alex asked a resident what they called the location, to which the individual replied that it didn’t matter because, “[White people] call it Midtown.” Mapmakers must consider their power and their responsibility to the communities they map.

The book’s endpapers contain some of Alex’s hand sketching. He told me that hand sketching is common practice in mapping; historically, many maps were hand drawn and copied via tracing. Detroitography features a varied collection of hand drawn maps of Detroit. Interestingly, professionally, Alex has had to live in the business intelligence (BI) space. As such, he sketches every dashboard before he makes it. I was surprised to hear this from a BI practitioner. I’d assumed sketching was more common to dataviz designers. But, Alex considers sketching a critical practice to conceptualization. He also teaches “Introduction to Data Visualization” at the College for Creative Studies. Here, he prioritizes a data literacy foundation, regardless of the design tool of choice, of which sketching is a component. Most of the students are in the Masters of Fine Arts program and don’t come from a graphic design or programming background, but they can sketch. Alex himself is not proficient in coding; he used Photoshop to create the “100 Maps of Detroit.” 

“I have a stack of my attempts to draw Detroit over the years because you’ll be in a meeting and you want to say, ‘I know that there’s data here,’ and draw it up quickly. That’s how I came up with these four basic geometric shapes for how to draw Detroit [in the endpapers].”

While only one of numerous forms of data visualization, I’m drawn to mapping for its ability to communicate multiplicity of place, identity, and perspective. By now you’ve probably gathered that I highly recommend Detroit in 50 Maps. Obviously, I’m biased ? As Ben Strak reminds us in his newsletter, Design Lobster, we need to be mindful of whose reality we’re mapping. And, on the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been considering the question, “Is a single map enough exploration for an entire lifetime?” Considering the diversity of perspectives in his book, Alex B. Hill suggests that there’s more than one lifetime’s worth of exploration available in Detroit.

You can buy your own copy from Belt Publishing or, from one of my favorite Detroit bookstores, Pages Bookshop.

The post REVIEW: Detroit in 50 Maps by Alex B. Hill appeared first on Nightingale.

For data visualizers, I thought it might be instructive to consider the upstream activity of data collection, which is a process fueled by questions. This article contains a mix of synthesis from folks like Sheila Heen, Erica Hall, Adam Grant, Dr. Tasha Eurich, Brandon Stanton, Rob Walker, Ximena Vengoechea, Rebekah Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek, and many others. It also reflects some techniques I’ve picked up after many years of trial and error conducting user research. 

Why bother exhibiting curiosity?  

Let’s base this discussion in our personal lives. Conversation IS our means of relating to others. A Harvard study of dating conversations (online chats and in-person speed dates, what user researchers refer to as dyads) revealed that people who demonstrated curiosity were more likeable. In online chatting situations, the folks who asked many questions got to know their partner better and were thus better liked. Among speed daters, those who asked more questions got more dates. In fact, asking one additional question of their conversation partner meant more second dates.

Note to hopeful online daters: follow-up questions are the most successful. They signal to your partner that they’ve been heard and that you want to know more. Plus, they’re often spontaneous and don’t require much preparation (provided you’re listening actively).

Where might we apply these findings professionally? What about during job interviews, networking at industry events, waiting for Zoom calls to start, or in proactive outreach to your less-frequent professional contacts?

But why are curious people more likable?

People like to talk about themselves. That same Harvard research found that 40 percent of everyday speech is spent telling other people what we think or feel—basically, talking about our subjective experiences. In fact, research shows that talking about ourselves, regardless of the platform, triggers the brain’s pleasure sensation.

Besides feeling good, asking questions also communicates humility—that you know the limits of your own knowledge. Inquisitiveness conveys a powerful combination of “soft skills”—empathy and curiosity—in addition to humility. Admitting what you don’t know gives others the chance to share their perspective AND can help shape your understanding.

Again, how can we apply these findings in our professional lives? Would it surprise you to learn that most people are too self-promoting during a job interview? Asking questions can help you better understand the contours of the opportunity. Even a question like, “what am I not asking you that I should have?” can reveal critical attributes when weighing decisions. The answers to these questions can help you evaluate prospective career shifts. 

You can be intentional about developing adjacent skills. Adjacent skills are those skills that border your existing capabilities and these can encompass “soft skill” development. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs, recommends brainstorming as many potential new skills relevant to your current role as possible. I applied this advice in my own career when expanding my market research practice into user experience research. Brandon Stanton, the creator of Humans of New York (HONY), is one of my favorite examples of wildly-successful adjacent skills development. When he began the HONY project, he was focused on developing his photography skills, instead he honed the ability to build rapport and tell stories that have the power to change people’s trajectories and beliefs–and these are the skills for which he has become known.

“I wanted to photograph ten thousand people on the streets of New York City. I had the added goal of plotting these photos on a map. It seemed like the mission of a madman, especially because I had no training as a photographer. But the impracticality of the goal served a purpose. It got me out on the street. Day after day. Not only learning to photograph, but also to approach strangers, make them feel comfortable, and engage them in conversation. Over time, these peripheral skills would become more central to Humans of New York than the photography itself.”

— Brandon Stanton

What value is there in learning to ask questions?

Asking questions can unlock value. Demonstrating curiosity about others can demonstrate knowledge to prospective clients and promote bonding among team members. Asking questions can uncover and aid in avoiding project pitfalls. The act of questioning can:

• Spur learning and idea exchange
• Fuel innovation
• Improve performance
• Build rapport
• Mitigate risk
• Signal engagement

And, this is a virtuous cycle skill: asking questions improves emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners. Try this: the next time you catch yourself getting ready to make a judgement try asking a question instead.

There are typically two categories of goals in questioning: information exchange and establishing a positive impression. Understanding your objectives can help you choose the right mix of questions. What do you need to know? What do you want to do with the answers to your questions? Different goals necessitate different methods of inquiry. Quantitative questions are typically close-ended. Survey questions are often quantitative, with answer choices like yes or no or questions that ask you to rank or rate your options. Qualitative questions are usually open-ended. They allow for a broader range of—sometimes unexpected—answers. Design researcher, Erica Hall, explains the difference between qualitative and quantitative questions like this: a quantitative question might be, “How much money are people spending on dining during COVID?” while a qualitative question is, “How are people deciding what to have for dinner during COVID?” 

Another way to think about your objectives is in terms of the type of conversation you expect. Are you anticipating a cooperative discussion? A competitive one? A bit of both? Framing—things like setting, tone, group dynamics, etc.—is critical to the effectiveness of your efforts. Think about establishing a disarming environment for asking questions. For example, I have found that I am best able to have hard or sensitive conversations with my kids when we’re in the car. We are less distracted. Neither of us can leave the “room” and we are both facing forward, thus we aren’t forced to make eye contact. 

If the conversation is competitive and you anticipate reluctance, NYTimes best-selling author, Sheila Heen, recommends starting with the most sensitive questions first. Her techniques include using direct, close-ended questions and phrasing questions so that it is easy for your conversation partner to respond affirmatively. For example, if you think a supplier is going to miss a delivery date, you’d ask, “So, it looks like you’re going to miss the deadline?” It turns out that people are less likely to lie in response to a pessimistic assumption. Conversely, in a tense environment, close-ended questions (e.g., yes/no questions) work better because they don’t allow for much “wiggle room.”

If the conversation is cooperative, but you anticipate avoidance, start with the least sensitive questions first, to build rapport. Use open-ended questions to draw your conversation partner out, and again, use negative assumptions to frame tough questions. Casual questioning works better when building rapport than using a formal tone. People are more responsive if you give them an out (e.g., there are no “right” or “wrong” answers, you can change your responses at any time). An individual in a group setting may respond differently than they would one-on-one. Quiet or closed-off respondents can derail group sessions or leave important topics unexplored. With that in mind, a skilled facilitator can vastly improve a group session like a workshop or a design sprint. 

What about the inevitable awkward silences?

Though much-maligned, silence is extremely useful in conversation—especially when awaiting the answer to a question. An extended pause can mean that the person is still processing. Pausing can encourage a mindset shift from fixed to reflective—resulting in expanded possibilities for both sides. Sharing silence can be a means of reinforcing rapport. Silence can create space that can change the tenor of the conversation. Sometimes, especially in a difficult conversation, silence is necessary to give a person the grace to calm down. As such, avoid the inclination to interrupt or move on too quickly. This is much easier said than done! Giving someone a chance to speak without interruptions is a gift. It requires patience and self-discipline. In practice, if the answer you receive is something like, “I don’t know how I feel about this…” a gentle nudge that can be effective without interrupting is, “Because?” This approach invites your conversation partner to finish their thought. 

What if you find it difficult to ask questions of others?

Fellow introverts, you may need a little more prep time before a conversation, or an alternative format to in-person. One resource you can consult is the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). You can use this technique to interview candidates, evaluate prospective service providers, or even develop a podcast interview. The QFT steps are:

1. Develop a list of questions
2. Categorize the questions either open end (qualitative) or closed end (quantitative)
3. Determine how you plan to use the question and, if necessary, change closed to open
4. Prioritize your questions: what do you need to know? What will you do with the information you collect? What answers will have the greatest impact? How much time do you have?

The Complete Guide to Writing Questions is another resource I’ve used, especially valuable when writing survey questions. Yet another option for building your question-formulation muscles is to practice active reading–which you can do by yourself and at your own pace, using your own library. Ask yourself pre-reading questions like, “What do I already know about this topic?” “Why would an instructor assign this book?” Summarize the text by writing questions in the margins. At the end of each paragraph practice asking the questions, “What does it say?” and “What does this mean?” or “Where could I apply this?” Write your own exam questions based on the reading. 

In terms of live interactions, in the pre-COVID world, I found networking at conferences drained my energy. To address this challenge, I learned to narrow my focus and pick out someone who looked uncomfortable with whom to strike up a conversation, usually by asking some questions I’d developed in advance. And, even though we have all become accustomed to video conferencing, you can still opt for other, less-intrusive types of interchange. One option is the good old-fashioned phone call. Like the kids-in-the-car example, a phone conversation can be less-intimidating. You can still hear people “smile” in their voice and this format may put your conversation partner more at ease–especially if the topic is sensitive. Live chats can sometimes be preferable to a written exchange, too. In an in-person conversation you can make mistakes and correct them in a way that you cannot in email or text. 

Though, text-based conversation has its benefits as well. Consider whether a text-based conversation or collaboration (e.g., using a virtual whiteboard or an activity-based, online research platform) would work–for even part of your questions. A text-based exchange may allow for interaction with folks who would be less likely to speak up in group settings or who are more comfortable expressing themselves in a format that allows for some on-the-fly editing. 

How else can you condition your curiosity?

I have found that self-reflection, or the act of asking myself questions, can help me overcome feelings of frustration and powerlessness. For example, Mariame Kaba (h/t Ann Friedman’s newsletter) offers these questions to ask yourself when you are outraged by injustice:

1. What resources exist so I can better educate myself?
2. Who’s already doing work around this injustice?
3. Do I have the capacity to offer concrete support & help to them?
4. How can I be constructive?

Similarly, the team at OpenMind has a tool you can use to ask yourself questions before navigating difficult conversations. Their Conversation Simulator gives you the chance to practice your skills in anticipation of your upcoming holidays with family, for example.

Data analysis cannot answer a question that you did not think to ask

Asking questions is a form of data collection. Most of what we’ve discussed so far are qualitative lines of questioning; these produce unstructured data. The alternative approach is quantitative inquiry, for example, sending out a survey. Those results are structured data. Quantitative approaches are thought by some to be more efficient or ‘cleaner’ to conduct. It is true that structured data analysis is often more straightforward. However, qualitative methods are more conducive to identifying faulty assumptions or prospective pitfalls. And, organizations are frequently surprised by how few customer or stakeholder interviews it takes to yield actionable insights. From a study cited in Harvard Business Review, the team harvested actionable insights about company performance after 18 – 20 interviews. In user experience research, we are often able to inform design and development decisions with as few as five users.

This same study found that client and manager priorities coincided only 50 percent of the time. The authors conclude that quantitative studies are usually written based on what managers think clients want. If you missed the mark on capturing those wants, the error is then compounded with techniques like ranking. For example, if the question asks you to rank requirements based on your own usage, but you are not the primary user of said functionality, the study results may suggest that you don’t care about something that you do indeed value, but for which you are not the primary user. Generative or exploratory steps can inform further quantitative options to help reduce the occurrences of questions you didn’t ask.

No one is omniscient. Yet, we are often making decisions with the best information we have available at the time. Asking questions to supplement our own understanding improves the quality of this decision-making process.

Now that you know how to ask questions, how can you pair that skill with listening?

Active listening can be transformative. Documentary filmmaker Valarie Kaur posits that, “We risk being changed by what we hear.” We are always listening to the thoughts in our own heads. Active listening requires us to quiet those thoughts. Listening, like allowing a person to speak uninterrupted, can change a narrative. One way to signal that you are listening actively is to repeat back a bit of what you heard the person say in a follow-up question. This essential practice gives the person a chance to clarify or correct their statement and it reinforces that you understood what they meant.

Journalist and author, Rob Walker, observed, “One of the wince-inducing rituals of my job as a journalist is transcribing interviews and listening to myself fail to listen.” As a user researcher who watches and listens to herself interviewing people regularly, I have made the same cringy observation in my own work. 

“…There’s always at least one moment when I miss a chance to pursue (or even step on or get in the way of) a source’s smart point or original observation by rushing to (try to) make my own. This is a failure of attention on my part—and a failure of humility, too.”

— Rob Walker

I have the opportunity to practice active listening frequently. When I cut someone off, it’s usually due to one of four things:

• I’m worried about the time (running over my promised allotment or feeling pressure to get specific information in the limited time window).
• I’m excited to add in something related to their point and I don’t want to forget it. It could help reinforce rapport (but not if I interrupt).
• I think I know what the person is going to say (and sometimes I’m wrong).
• I’m showing off (know-it-all syndrome). 

Look for low-stakes opportunities in your daily life to hone your active listening skills. Practice devoting your complete attention during phone calls with family and friends, with your kids, and in casual co-worker interactions (e.g., what did you do this weekend?).

How is listening foundational to productive negotiation?

Negotiating a deal or navigating conflict are skills which require training, according to The New York Times best-selling author, Sheila Heen of Triad Consulting. It is counter instinctual to give someone else the benefit of the doubt. Your best strategy for persuasion is to listen and learn. Developing your second-position skills—the ability to see someone else’s point of view—affords you:

• Insight into a person’s position and better understanding of their perspective
• Input on what’s fueling their feelings, what they care about, how much risk they’ll tolerate 
• Access to their feelings by either naming what you’re hearing OR sharing how you’re feeling
• An opportunity to shift your mindset away from getting an apology or advancing your agenda to obtaining a better understanding of what’s going on with your conversation partner

If the conversation feels difficult, it’s likely signifying something about you: you feel wronged by the discussion, you are reacting to the person themselves, or the content of the discussion is threatening your identity. If you need help identifying your own triggers, try asking yourself: “If I know nothing else about myself, I know that I am a BLANK person.”

Honestly, how coachable are you, really?

Seeking feedback is yet another way of asking questions. And receiving feedback is a different kind of listening. This reciprocity can be difficult. In a study by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone:

• 63 percent of human resources executives surveyed said their managers were unable or unwilling to have difficult conversations
• 55 percent of employees said their review was unfair and inaccurate
• 36 percent of managers completed appraisals thoroughly and on time
• 25 percent dreaded evaluations more than anything else in their working lives

Yet, people who seek critical feedback tend to receive higher performance ratings for the reasons we’ve already addressed. When you ask for feedback you communicate humility and a personal desire to excel. Try orienting your mindset to receive feedback as coaching or advice, even if that was not the spirit in which it was delivered. Unpack the information with follow-up questions, if necessary. Validate the feedback with input from those whom organizational psychologist and keynote speaker, Dr. Tasha Eurich, dubs “loving critics.” When in doubt, ask for just one thing (e.g., what ONE thing is holding me back?). Alternatively, organizational psychologist and bestselling author, Adam Grant, recommends motivating your evaluators to coach you by asking them, “How can I get closer to 10?” In applications beyond performance reviews, for example if you regularly deliver high-visibility presentations, you might try sending out a regular email to collect top-of-mind questions the week prior in order to address the answers upfront and avoid being caught off guard.

Prioritizing asking questions and listening actively can promote a culture of learning

Contrary to the misperception that they will look like they don’t know what they are doing, leaders who ask inspiring questions signal their humility, which instills trust. Questions like: “Where do we have the opportunity to deliver more value to stakeholders than we have in the past?” model that questioning is valued, especially if these questions are posited openly and often. Domino’s Pizza famously demonstrated this skill when they asked customers how their pizza tasted. When customers told them their pizza tasted “like cardboard,” Domino’s launched a public campaign to show customers what they were doing to improve the taste. In this example, Domino’s also demonstrated the importance of sharing the answers to questions asked to both communicate that they were listening and to jumpstart idea generation. 

And, speaking of idea generation, rather than running idea brainstorms, consider assembling a multi-disciplinary group to brainstorm questions and rank them in order of potential outcome. This mini-design sprint approach establishes a collaborative rather than a competitive environment, resulting in a sense of collective responsibility. Organizations that can learn rapidly and apply what they’ve learned tend to survive and thrive. 

In addition to the abundance of applications we’ve discussed in our professional lives, like job interviews, networking, performance reviews, negotiating, and concept development or prototyping, on a personal level, honing your curiosity exercises a growth mindset and provides daily opportunities for learning, joy, and transformation. Take a moment to ask yourself: what is ONE application where asking questions and attending to the answers would enrich my life?

Many thanks to Katie Kilroy and Data + Women Ireland for encouraging me to develop this material (based on an old blog post) into a presentation, which served as the foundation for this article.

Additional resources:

If you listen to podcasts, pay close attention to questions the host asks. Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, demonstrates his Q+A skills in his newsletter The Ink (interview format).

If you need inspiration, Rob Walker’s Ice Breaker of the Week is a running, crowdsourced list of great questions. Nightingale has fun exercising our curiosity chops in our Three Questions With… section.

I synthesized ideas from several books in this article. These include: Radical Humility by Rebekah Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek; Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen; Listen Like You Mean It by Ximena Vengoechea; The Complete Guide to Writing Questionnaires by David F. Harris.

The post Curiouser and Curiouser: Crafting Questions and Attending to the Answers appeared first on Nightingale.

Catch up on the conversation with part one. In the spirit of collaboration, we want to hear from you! We’d love to hear your thoughts via the three questions we’re added to the bottom of this article!

Despite the growing prominence of data visualization, our practice is surprisingly light on methodology. While there are many methodologies across sectors, disciplines, and teams for building alignment, many of them are also siloed by role and skill. Similarly, audience research (focused on users, consumers, patients, or communities) is a common practice, but is often “owned” by a single role or department.

Building a shared understanding is a process and a team sport. Taking a more holistic approach to organizing multi-disciplinary teams will help you to craft more focused, intuitive, and equitable data visualizations and to arrive at a shared understanding of how to communicate your data in a meaningful way.

High-quality dataviz and information design does not have to remain solely in the realm of media outlets and celebrity practitioners. Empowered information is the result of a team of people that take responsibility to commit to the nuanced meaning of the data.

Information Empowerment is an attempt to join some high-level frameworks in order to improve impact. In doing so, you can begin to bridge the divides that exist between practices, roles, and the people that inhabit them. It is an end-to-end process that connects the dots from how your data is captured all the way to how it is communicated to your audience.

Okay, let’s take a look at what we mean:

Simple enough, right? By starting with a foundation of data literacy, your team expands its understanding of the data by collaborating with subject matter experts, then applies design thinking techniques to prototype their work and test its effectiveness. Through this collaboration, you leverage the strengths of your team to amplify the impact of your data and how well it communicates to your audience. Additionally, the whole team learns more about the data (and each other), which broadens their respective skillsets. This kind of reciprocal investment in the people and process inspires a sense of collective responsibility, not only for the quality of the work, but also for the outcomes.

We’re advocating for taking a more holistic approach when assembling the “team” and defining the project scope. In order to build an accurate understanding of the data, functional practitioners (e.g., designers, researchers, data practitioners) need to collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs). The resulting collaborative environment creates a trust-based culture dedicated to a common goal and a guiding practice.

The above process is not necessarily linear, and the three core ingredients of Data Literacy, SME Collaboration, and Design Thinking can be applied in any order — and are often applied in parallel. This is not a bug — it’s a feature! The various steps may be shuffled or repeated in iterative cycles themselves; however it plays out, the goal is to dedicate your team to building a culture of understanding and a commitment to the ethical underpinnings of the data itself.

Leverage the strengths of the team to amplify your insights

To some practitioners, there’s nothing new here, but few teams leverage a defined process for empowering the influence of their work. Outlining a process for your team will help to keep the focus on your audience, their needs, and effective communication of the data. Information Empowerment can be applied to almost any kind of data use case (from business intelligence to research and development to data art and everything in between) and by teams of all sizes.

An early step in a data-driven initiative should include the identification of and outreach to subject matter experts who understand exactly what questions the data could answer, what the data means, how the data should or could be collected and socialized — and even how to refine project goals. Depending on the nature of the initiative, these resources could be internal (e.g., dashboard end users) or external (e.g., small businesses and community members).

Key to the concept is broadening our understanding of who constitutes a subject matter expert (a core tenet of Data Feminism). Data visualizations can be interfaces to expose injustice and inspire change. But, so can people. They bring context. They help prevent misinterpretation. For example, when data artist Jer Thorp was developing the Map Room Project, he reconsidered the potential for reinforcing damaging narratives related to neighborhood characteristics after consulting with Detroit artists, Complex Movements. 

The project encouraged visitors to consider multiple realities of where they lived. “On the maps they can come up with other ways to portray their neighborhoods beyond low-income.” Jer said. “Every map based on census data shows the poor neighborhoods in bright red…One of the guiding considerations came out of a meeting with Detroit artists from Complex Movements. They challenged us to consider how our project was reinforcing the master narrative. These institutional maps remove community from the commentary of their own lives. What other stories do the data tell? What about mapping the churches to illustrate the strength of the community?”

A common objection to SME collaboration in general, and design thinking in particular, is that it is time-consuming. The worry is that workshops, sprints, or research can elongate timelines and impact budgets. That may not be so. Graham Kenny, in Harvard Business Review, makes the point, illustrated by the case study organization’s surprise, that saturation — the point at which you stop hearing new insights — occurred after only 18-20 stakeholder interviews (in this example, the stakeholders were the SMEs).

Collaboration is not something that can be “tacked” on to a project mid-stream. It must be planned from outset. Reciprocity and role equality are necessary when collaborating with subject matter experts. Some subject matter experts, such as patients, nonprofits, and the communities they represent, can feel undervalued due to their lack of technological or methodological expertise. Likewise, certain analysts or scientists may not grasp the significance of design or their own expertise as a barrier towards other people’s understanding. Care should be taken to prevent team members from feeling disenfranchised, patronized — or worse, exploited — which can stem from a lack of understanding about the outcomes that resulted from their participation. In this process, every person should feel valued for the expertise they bring to the collective intelligence of the team.

In summary, Information Empowerment is a process that promotes collaboration to amplify meaning. By examining the context around the data and the real-world expertise that may accompany it, your team will instinctively make a more focused and human appeal. Who knows, you might even have fun doing it.

In the next installment, we’ll take a deep dive into Data Literacy as part of the larger methodology.

What do you think?

1. Where have you seen evidence of converging disciplines or practices within your work, if at all?
2. Do you have an example of your project taking a different course as a result of the contribution of a subject matter expert?
3. How would you interpret the diagram above related to your current process at your organization or work?

Share your thoughts with us at nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org.

The post Information Empowerment Bridges Expertise to Amplify Impact, Part 2 appeared first on Nightingale.

Jason comes from a design background. Mary comes from a user experience background. Jason is a ‘data IS’ person. Mary is a ‘data ARE’ person. Inevitably, during our work with Nightingale, we share thoughts on our day jobs and the perspectives of our authors. It was in these conversations that this theory began to form.

In the spirit of collaboration, we want to hear from you! We’d love to hear your thoughts via the three questions at the bottom of this article!

Humans are culturally conditioned to absorb a lot of information, combining different types of media and interaction patterns. Often accompanied by illustrations, photos, videos, and text, this information is intended to communicate complex ideas in a way that is clear and potentially interesting. 

Many of us use data to find some kind of objective truth. The collection and analysis of data has become a huge part of our business environment and culture, but collecting data is only as good as how we communicate it, so we regularly turn to data visualization to give shape and meaning to the information. 

The relationship between data and information can mean many different things to different people. We use data to inform across a variety of instruments and media, from dashboards and findings reports, to data journalism, digital platforms, and smartphone apps–all of these leverage data to create information.

Despite the growing prominence of data visualization, our practice is surprisingly light on process. While there are many methodologies across industry, discipline, and design, they are mostly siloed by functional area and expertise. In order to understand how to communicate data in a meaningful way, an end-to-end process needs to be adopted to present the full context of the information to its intended audience. We call this inclusive process Information Empowerment, but let’s take a step back first to explore some background.

If data is a foundational currency, how do you spend it responsibly?

Data is the foundation to gaining wisdom as a basic unit of information. In order for knowledge to manifest itself and influence outcomes, it needs to be understandable and easily communicated. Therefore, to evaluate, understand, and engage with our digital reality, we must improve our ability to interpret and communicate data. Our impact is rooted in data.

In order to communicate our data to an audience, we need to know who they are and speak to them in a language they understand. As Brookings Institute’s Alex Engler explains, “Even when well-articulated, the private sector applications of data science can sound quite alien to public servants. This is understandable, as the problems that Netflix and Google strive to solve are very different than those government agencies, think tanks, and nonprofit service providers are focused on.” In other words, there is no such thing as a general audience of “everyone.”

Converging principles

Across sectors and functional roles, there are many different principles that propose paths to sense-making. Among these are design thinking, co-creation, design for all, storytelling, and on, and on. Additionally, there have been many approaches for more equitable and intentional data handling often rolled into the heading of data literacy. 

Around the world, we see a commitment to user and customer-centric practices, and likewise, among data practitioners, recognition and acceptance of the complexity of data ethics have advanced. This sentiment is well expressed by visual storyteller Catherine Madden, “Data are people. Paid for by people. Collected by people. Analyzed by people. Shaped by people. Even with the best intentions data can’t be 100 percent objective, but we can prioritize equity at every step of the process and be transparent about the limitations.” So prioritizing for communication means putting people at the center of our ecosystems (customers, employees, residents, etc.) and appreciating the value of our human capital.

One of the groundbreaking ideas in Giorgia Lupi’s Data Humanism manifesto is the relationship between the data collected and the action taken by a human that is being recorded in the data. She elaborates, “Data represents real life. It is a snapshot of the world in the same way that a picture catches a small moment in time. Numbers are always placeholders for something else, a way to capture a point of view—but sometimes this can get lost.”

Likewise, anyone who has worked in data can tell you it can easily be misrepresented. Advances in data ethics, such as the intersectional approach by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein in their book Data Feminism, are helping to expand our attitude towards data collection and to inform more inclusive data science practices based on core data literacy tenets. 

Data literacy poses a particularly stubborn obstacle to realizing many of these principles. Some data literacy challenges can be traced to deficiencies in physical, technological, and cognitive areas. Infrastructure problems arise from legacy systems, ever-changing technologies, and the demands of rapid upskilling which can lead to significant difficulty in comprehension and accessibility for the intended audience.

One way to address physical and cognitive accessibility is to borrow from architects and urban planners who strive to design for all. Data journalist, Mona Chalabi, practices this approach by “designing for the least-informed reader first.” And, economist Raj Chetty “goes to great lengths to make his research accessible. He’s not just speaking to other researchers…He’s presenting information in plain language, in a visual format that one can understand within seconds.”

Borrowing from other disciplines and sectors like these is a means to achieving a broader perspective. Jason and Mary each have experience employing a method called combinational creativity, which involves sourcing existing ideas, and our own consulting experiences, to develop a practical process we refer to as Information Empowerment.

In our next article, we’ll outline this process for combining these various approaches into a high-level framework to guide teams towards mitigating these challenges–so stay tuned–but first, we’d like to know…

What do you think?

1. How do you think about making an impact in your work? To what extent is data communication a goal for you?
2. What kinds of challenges have you encountered trying to make an impact in your work?
3. How have you borrowed from other industries or ideas to meet your objectives?

Share your thoughts with us at nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org.

The post Information Empowerment is a Universal Theory for Data Design, Part 1 appeared first on Nightingale.

“A word-of-mouth conversation by a new customer leads to an almost $200 increase in restaurant sales. A five-star review on Amazon leads to approximately twenty more books sold than a one-star review. Doctors are more likely to prescribe a new drug if other doctors they know have prescribed it. People are more likely to quit smoking if their friends quit and get fatter if their friends become obese. In fact, while traditional advertising is still useful, word of mouth from everyday Joes and Janes is at least ten times more effective.”

Jonah Berger

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that, since Twitter’s emergence in 2007, social media listeners have been interested in digital network mapping. 

Mapping human connections has applications in other fields as well. During my recent summer vacation to Gloucester, Massachusetts, I explored the abandoned inland settlement of Dogtown and was fascinated to discover aerospace engineer Mark Carlotto’s book visualizing the social networks represented by the stone cellars that remain and what they suggest about the mysterious people who inhabited the area in the mid-1700s. 

In my work as an experience researcher, I often think about and explore relationships among social networks. For example, I studied the referral behavior within a local entrepreneurial support network to determine how to more efficiently serve aspiring business owners. In his new book, Mapping Affinities, Harvard University researcher Dario Rodighiero uses design to visualize the affinities that exist among scholars at universities, factoring in not only existing relationships, but also examining their potential for future collaboration. While I do not bring academic experience to my review of this book, I am convinced by Dario’s argument within it that visualizing affinities provides an incredibly valuable new means of quantifying scientific and academic practice.

“Visual mapping is the way in which insights can become observable.”
– Dario Rodighiero

Regular Nightingale readers will appreciate the historic dataviz contained in the early chapters. I was surprised to learn that today’s organizational charts can trace their roots to aristocratic family trees. Dario highlights the “impoverishment of visual language” with the chart’s evolution from one where individuals were cited to exemplify the characteristics of their ‘line’ to today’s organizational charts where individuals are anonymized by their titles and easily replaced. From there he explores how sociograms became artifacts used to represent degrees of friendship obtained via qualitative interviews and the eventual origin of network diagramming as a specific form of information architecture.

The rest of the book serves as a design and participatory research-driven ‘how-to’ for using affinity mapping in university governance. What began with the management of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) School to aid in decision making was eventually embraced by its academic community as a mechanism for self-evaluation. I was particularly interested in seeing the process, as it was so similar to how a user experience study is run. First, community interviews were conducted, followed by early sketches and prototype development, and then experimentation to test specific elements. The way the team considered and incorporated keywords was particularly instructive. (Keyword taxonomy is a topic I’ve wrestled with in my work. It can lead down a rabbit hole and is often highly subjective.) In this case, the team used keywords as connectors (as indicated in the lead article image above, more versions available on the author’s website) in their visualization to provide additional context for understanding lab collaboration.

During foundational work, I try to establish alignment on research goals by auditing what we already know, or the ‘known knowns.’ It was interesting to see how this practice looked on the ENAC School project as the team considered their available data sources.  Academic community members had the opportunity to hold back sensitive data and to review for accuracy. They developed a form to allow the addition of external collaboration, a source that was “missing data” in the original audit. They adopted a data policy to keep private data about funding that could have engendered resentment among labs. The team exercised intention regarding data visibility, validity, and creation–going beyond data quality to develop what seemed, to me, like a potential standard for data stewardship.

Proximity is a critical component of affinity mapping. There can be trade-offs between visual distance and readability. The team factored ethical considerations into design choices to avoid the use of the map as an evaluation tool. For example, the rings around the laboratories are of a consistent thickness in order to prevent comparisons about publication quantity. I love how several distinct visualization techniques were applied collectively. The final map incorporates Sankey diagrams, clockwise orientation of lab members (the most senior occupying the 12:00 position), color-coded nodes with varying thickness of rings for academic practice, oriented in a hexagonal pattern that supports zooming in and out via orbiting satellites that represent external collaboration.

I was particularly struck by Dario’s discussion of the relationship between design and reading. They are inextricably linked. 

Further elaboration of this idea could be promising in advancing data literacy/fluency/graphicacy (and validates the reading lexicon the industry has gravitated to in describing this topic area). 

There were three distinct audiences for this visualization: the scholars, the management, and the external community. The visualization took several forms, including as a physical installation supported by a dedicated event. In order to recreate the zooming functionality of the digital viz, audiences could choose to observe from the ground or balcony level. A future walkable visualization is even under consideration! Perhaps one of the coolest aspects of this case study is that the visualization from that event was repurposed into gift bags for individual scholars, depicting their position within the map.

After finishing the book, I’ve been reflecting on potential applications of the best practices Dario shared. The power of the affinity map is in its ability to reveal potential, encourage collaboration, and foster belonging. For organizations that believe their culture IS their strategy, what could an affinity map of your organization and its surrounding community help you to better understand? What practices are hidden that, if you could see them, would open up new opportunities and offer new pathways for enthusiastic self-evaluation among your staff? What kinds of changes would a new focus on individuals and their social ties inspire? How might you use this map to engage your broader community? I highly recommend Dario’s book for experience researchers of all types, as well as designers, organizational leaders, human resources and talent management, and for anyone who would like to further develop the collaborative potential of their own social ties.

In addition to purchasing a copy of the book, available in English and French, you can also download your copy of the book for free.

The post REVIEW: Mapping Affinities by Dario Rodighiero appeared first on Nightingale.

After announcing at Outlier that we were leaving Medium and that we were starting a print version of Nightingale, we put out a call for volunteers to get involved and received an overwhelming response. Since then, a core team of nearly 30 folks have dedicated countless lunches, evenings, and weekends across a range of time zones to launch the new site. Now we have three teams focused on editorial, design, and operations (check out our team page.) 

Yes, we are now FREE! Yes, all our articles on this site are free and open to anyone to read. There is no more paywall, and we will leave most of our old articles up on Medium as an archive. All DVS members have access to the Medium links on the DVS slack and we might just port over many articles to the new site per the desires of our writers (they have the last word).

While our push over the past few months has been mainly operational, we are also free to shift into a more design and editorial focus moving forward. Not only will we bring in a new creative director in Julie Brunet / Data Citron to help our brand evolve, but we also welcome Claire Santoro to help us organize sections and alternative content forms. In the next few weeks, you’ll begin to see how this evolution in the content will continue to diversify our discourse, extending into spotlights and more content for children and education.

Essentially, we’ve organized the site into three pillars: 

• Dataviz discourse and topical discussion
• Practical applications and how-tos
• Community spotlights that feature accomplishments like books, webinars, podcasts, exhibits, and cool projects

The new site also allows us added flexibility, which we’re embracing to introduce new short-form and image-rich content like Heather Jones’ cicada piece and fast takes like our 3 Questions With features. Stay tuned for all kinds of fun stuff like trivia, quizzes, horror stories, how it started/how it’s going, and more! And, if you have ideas for content you want to see, let us know!

Also – we are SUPER excited to introduce a new section: Kids Dataviz! Designed to showcase fun, creativity, and engagement, we kicked off this series last week with Julia Krolik’s article in collaboration with her son. This is a topic the editorial committee is extremely jazzed about and we see so many amazing opportunities to explore more! What about comics? Treasure hunts? Coloring books? We are building a dedicated team for this now, but we want you to get involved, so email us for details. 

There are many questions about Nightingale Magazine (that’s what we’re calling our print version) – and you can read more about our vision – but, we will be following up with more explicit details when we open up our subscription service in the coming weeks. We see this as an important opportunity to expand beyond our professional “bubble” and plan to launch our first issue later this year.

Finally, because Nightingale is free of the Medium paywall, we are also free to find and collaborate with Sponsors. Please consider helping us find sponsors willing to invest in the important work of sustaining this community resource. Our readership represents an extremely unique cross-section of people who care deeply about dataviz. Our community is enthusiastic and willing to dedicate significant time and attention engaging with high-quality content. As stewards of this audience, we are seeking like-minded sponsors who recognize this value. You can find a link to sponsorship opportunities front and center on our home page. 

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In May 2020, Joanna Hutchinson felt powerless reading The New York Times piece An Incalculable Loss, the now-famous, full front-page death toll of US lives that had been lost to COVID-19 to that point. Like many of us, Joanna struggled with the sheer scale of 100,000 lives. She was burdened by overwhelming grief. Joanna is a certified public accountant, a data person. But she never thought of herself as a data visualizer — she doesn’t have a datafam. Instead, she found an outlet for her grief in an unusual collective, among the paper-folding community.

What started as a way of grappling with her own feelings became 100,000 Folds, a collaborative sculpture project to commemorate those lost to the coronavirus pandemic. The topics of scale and community keep coming up in my social feeds lately, so when I read about Joanna’s project I set up a conversation with her to learn more.

Mary Aviles: Tell me about the project and your goals for it.

Joanna Hutchinson: The basic idea is that, along with my participants, we’re folding one piece of origami for each of the first 100,000 COVID deaths in the United States. The origami will be assembled into larger sculptures so that we can visualize this number. And, it’s also kind of unifying to bring each individual piece into a larger sculpture. After all, we’re in this together.

How it works is that I mail pre-cut paper to the participants and they fold it in an act of memorializing those we lost. Then, they mail the paper back to me to be assembled into these larger sculptures. Originally I thought of it as a project to remember the people that died. But, in talking to the people who have joined the project, it’s become important for me to think about those who lived. So many of the people who are suffering are still with us, both those struggling with the virus and those who have lost loved ones.

MA: Where did the idea for 100,000 Folds come from?

JH: I am a finance person by trade. I also have a background in art. In my spare time, I enjoy doing different projects, but I’ve never taken on something of this scale before. This started in late May as the COVID deaths were reaching the 100,000 marker. My job switched to remote so I was staying home and I was by myself a lot. I was grappling with all the uncertainty and the virus was so expansive and horrible. I felt so alone in my grief and then I read The New York Times article. I read each of those names and the descriptions. It was so poignant. 100,000 lives. That really hit me like a ton of bricks.

It was a huge number. I’m desensitized to how big numbers are, in a way, and this has really grounded me. I started thinking about one hundred thousand people. I will never know that many people in my lifetime. It’s just too big. I was thinking about the gravity of the situation. It was really hard, emotionally. Then I began to think about what I could do to remember those people. How could I memorialize them? It occurred to me that I could make something that had one component for every one of those deaths in order to visualize the enormity of the situation. So, that’s how it started. I was reading the news and I was struck by how hard it was to understand a number like that. And, since then, it’s only gotten much worse.

MA: Why did you select origami as your medium?

JH: I settled on origami because it’s simple. The forms that I’m using make a triangle unit. They’re relatively easy to make. I have used units like this in my artwork in the past and I like the simplicity of the folds. It’s repetitive. It’s comforting to make the same folds again and again. It’s rhythmic and sort of peaceful to fold paper. I latched on to origami because it kind of made sense in the same vein as Sadako’s One Thousand Paper Cranes. Origami has a wonderful tradition. And, you can create a lot of them.

I was originally going to fold them all myself, but then I did some calculations and figured that if I was consistent and I could fold every single day, it would take me at least four years to finish. Then, I thought, “Please let us not still be in this pandemic in four years. God forbid.” I just couldn’t take this on by myself. It was too big.

I realized that was a challenge that characterized the pandemic, too. It’s a global problem. It’s this huge thing that we’re all fighting together. I decided to make it collective. There are over 300 participants now. So far, I’ve sent out 140,000 pieces of paper.

MA: Who do you consider your community?

JH: First, I want to speak a bit about the reason that I focus on the United States. It’s not because I only care about my country. I think that, as a wealthy and powerful country, we’ve really dropped the ball on our COVID response. We’ve neglected people and they’ve died. We should have done better. It makes me angry to think about it.

It’s like a Venn diagram. There are some people that want to participate because they lost somebody or they feel deeply about the need to memorialize COVID deaths. People have written to me to say, “I’m doing this project to remember my mother” or “I’m doing this project because it’s a time for grief and I need an outlet for my feelings.” There are a lot of local participants here in Philadelphia. They seem to want to participate because it’s a local project and they want to chip in. But, there are some international participants as well. There are some who are artisans from within the paper-making community. Finally, there are also a bunch of people who make things and are more generally creative who are interested in the art.

MA: How have people heard about the project? What do you think drives their desire for affiliation?

JH: Helen Hiebert has a popular blog, all related to paper art, and she featured my project early on. I also work with a couple of local artist communities. The Soap Box is one of them. They are a print-making space and ‘zine library here in Philadelphia. They’ve been co-sponsoring my online workshops and promoting them in conjunction with the Rotunda, which is another space here that not only houses a lot of art-related projects, but also focuses on social justice and other things.

I hosted four workshops in 2020. I’m gearing up for more starting this month. Participants receive a small bundle of paper, I do a demonstration on how to fold, and I talk about the project. I reserve time for community building where we can chit-chat and talk about why someone might be interested in folding paper for a COVID memorial and about origami. The workshops absolutely help bring people to the project. At one point I considered stopping them to focus on getting the sculptures together, but there’s been so much interest. I think people need a place for collective mourning and COVID remembrance.

It’s been word of mouth, mostly. It makes perfect sense that there would be this sort of Venn diagram of different communities. Some people receive the paper, they do the folding, and they send it back. Some people send me updates on how it’s going and what’s happening and what they’re thinking and working on. I have people that have asked for more paper, so I have some repeat participants. A lot of people post on their social media about the project.

MA: What is your vision for the completed sculptures?

JH: I’m thinking that the sculptures will be a large urn shape. The shape is inspired by a design I made a couple of years ago. This sculpture has the same kind of units and I love the way they interlock. I’m playing with them interlocking backwards and how that can change the shape. I’m going to have so much material that I think it’ll be enough to make something person-sized. If my calculations are right, I can make two sculptures that are five- or six-foot-tall vessels.

There’s a place called Cherry Street Pier here in Philadelphia. It’s an open air place for people to gather. I love the idea of having my pieces there. They have studio spaces for artists and I could build the pieces onsite. Then, it would be open to the public. So anybody could go there and there’s no entrance fee or anything like that. I thought someplace like that would be really wonderful. But, because this is a paper sculpture, I’m concerned about having it out. I’m trying to build it in a way that can either be taken apart or moved.

I’m working on designing the infrastructure. There will be steel armature inside the sculptures. I’m working on designing that to be modular in some way so that I can have it in one place for a while and then it can move to another place. I’ve never made something this big so I’m really excited to start putting it together and figuring that out.

MA: How has this project impacted your view of COVID? How has this project changed you?

JH: I was looking for something personal in the beginning. And now I’m looking to give others the same outlet. Originally, I wanted something to work on by myself to work through my own grief. Now there’s this whole community that’s right there with me. It’s comforting to know that there are others, so many others. It also makes me feel a a great sense of honor.

You can find out how to participate in or support 100,000 Folds by visiting Joanna’s site.

Joanna is certainly not alone in her effort to memorialize COVID deaths. Her interview has me reflecting on the meaning of ‘community’ and what it means to be part of one. As suggested in her post below, strategist and early stage investor, Sari Azout, analogizes community with home.

100,000 Folds feels like a different interpretation. It feels like a group of people with disparate interests and motivations working toward a shared purpose. Outside of their collective participation with Joanna’s organization, they may never interact, but they still seem like a community. She has come to realize that lifting up the living, those seeking solace, has added a new dimension to the project. She extended her workshop series in order to help participants process their grief and find comfort among others.

Joanna Hutchinson is a version of a network weaver. Weavers, connectors, and navigators like her share the critical responsibility of establishing networks. They can build bonds among trusted messengers to form human systems. They cultivate weak ties — the folks we meet throughout the course of our day, through friends-of-friends, or through our extracurricular interests.

COVID has done a number on our weak ties. We’re not going to the dry cleaner or waiting in line for coffee or chatting up other spectators at our kids’ soccer games. Last fall, I facilitated roundtables with attendees of the Urban Land Institute’s conference. We talked about the value of weak ties in our personal networks based on Mark Granovetter’s nearly 50-year-old research. In addition to their importance for our career trajectories, weak ties are critical to our sense of wellbeing. The Atlantic recently covered this topic. The article’s author, Amanda Mull, writes:

The Atlantic article goes on to explain that the lack of communal connections can signal larger civic problems. It can indicate deteriorated social capital with dire consequences. In his book, Bowling Alone, Bob Putnam found that:

Think about what happens when you move to a new city. You have to figure out your new system. You have to choose healthcare providers you like, find a grocery store with your favorites, locate people you want to go for walks with, and draft your preferred take-out restaurant shortlist. These things don’t exist on a traditional map. Establishing even weak ties requires some personal investment. Isolation can evolve from not knowing about the communities that exist around you. Word of mouth and mapping can reveal these networks. Asset or ecosystem mapping is instrumental in revealing supportive networks (or critical gaps).

In 2019, the New Economy Initiative, an advocate for inclusive entrepreneurship in Detroit, mapped the entrepreneurial support network in southeast Michigan. Doing so helped them visualize referral behavior among their grantees. In other words, they were able to see how many meetings new business owners were having, with whom, and for what kind of support. These insights helped them connect with more would-be entrepreneurs and guide those folks through the start-up process and on to generating revenue faster.

Last year, I conducted generative and user experience testing for the United Way of Southeast Michigan during the development of their Connect4Care Kids resource. Parents and caregivers were especially enthusiastic about the Location Finder feature. For many, it showed them childcare options, near home, work, and school, that they hadn’t known about previously. Finding safe and accessible child care is, of course, vital to employment and adult education.

Asset mapping documents what a community has, rather than studying its needs. “Assets” can refer to both people AND place. These asset maps bridge the physical to the digital. Building and maintaining asset maps is a critical investment in human systems infrastructure. Data collection and the frameworks for network or asset mapping can be extraordinarily challenging and often require an understanding of local context. This seems like an untapped opportunity for spatial visualization. While 100,000 Folds doesn’t need an asset map to achieve its purpose, consider the work of community organizations and local governments on the 2020 Census. Asset maps, like this example from Google for addiction support, are invaluable to activating civic efforts like census counts or voter registration.

I’m grateful to my digital communities for helping me check in with all my ties, strong and weak, and for providing my kids with some welcome pandemic distraction. One of the many reasons I value my DVS membership is that I think of it as a multiverse of communities, offering a range of experiences and opportunities to develop meaningful bonds with my peers. Now, more than ever, we must rely on digital communities to establish social tethers. The people and the organizations managing our digital communities can learn responsible stewardship by studying place-based best practices. Data practitioners can broaden their view to understand their potential for contribution to the “ecosystem orchestra.” Through her work with 100,000 Folds, Joanna Hutchinson has demonstrated that you don’t have to go it alone, even if you can’t go anywhere.

Which of your communities has been a lifesaver during COVID?

Additional resources:

• danah boyd’s entire talk on the Future of Information (2018) is fascinating even beyond the citation above, for its coverage of “re-networking” and especially considering our experiences with social instability around the 2020 US presidential election.
• Find more information on/examples of asset mapping: City of Boise, HealthCity’s Participatory Asset Mapping toolkit, and Fair Count’s map of internet installations.

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Even when well-articulated, the private sector applications of data science can sound quite alien to public servants. This is understandable, as the problems that Netflix and Google strive to solve are very different than those government agencies, think tanks, and nonprofit service providers are focused on.

Alex Engler, Brookings Institute

Against this backdrop, Sarah Williams, an associate professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, has built a portfolio from civic empowerment. In December 2020, Sarah will release her first book, Data Action: Using Data for Public Good. She considers it “a manifesto for those who want to use data to generate civic change.” Recently, I interviewed her about her interdisciplinary expertise and the project work that informed the book. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

When did you start to think of yourself as a “data person?” Or do you?

Sarah Williams: I worked a lot on remote sensing and GIS (geo-informatics systems) very early on in my career trajectory. But I don’t think I ever thought of myself as a “data person” specifically. I always thought that I used data to answer questions that I was interested in. I think of myself as a landscape architect. I have a lot of interest in environment, climate change, and racial equity — that is, applying my skills as a data scientist on environmental and racial equity issues that shape our public landscape. I do think that I’ve been branded more as a data person because of my work at MIT and really trying to emphasize the need to use data to create policy change.

I also felt like there was a missing area, where when we talk about the ethics of data, or we talk about the use of data for both elevating certain positions but also oppressing, that there was perhaps this real hole in the current literature, so I became interested in this stuff. Maybe that’s how I became more of a data person as well.

You’ve worked in all different locations. There are various disciplines involved. Your projects have a variety of applications. I’m curious about the path from one to the next.

SW: I came into data science through geography. I was a computer science and geography major during undergrad. I think my projects have just been a combination of people reaching out to me and me reaching out to them. For example, I have a lot of work in the African continent, and that has to do with somebody very early on in my career asking me to get involved in a project with Nairobi. I developed a commitment to that region. At first, the goal was to improve the condition of the city of Nairobi, but then there was this realization that what we were doing in Nairobi could not only be applied to other cities in the African continent, but also in the global South in general. A lot of the work that I’ve done with informal transit really started there.

[Author’s note: The Digital Matatus Project is an open data effort that collects transit data from cellphones for use in mobile routing applications.]

I’ve also done quite a bit with criminal justice and criminal justice policy — looking at issues of equity and race. In fact, one of the chapters of my book covers the ways in which we can use data to help highlight some of the injustices that exist within our criminal justice system. That started as an area of interest and after I left grad school when I got involved in the Million Dollar Blocks Project and just kind of kept going.

[Author’s note: The Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center sourced inmate residential addresses from Bureau of Justice statistics data and census data to show blocks where more than one million dollars is spent annually to incarcerate residents.]

Recently, I’ve been reinvesting in restorative justice work. Right now, we’re looking at a visualization project that examines prisoners rights, especially related to workforce — how much they get paid and some of the injustice involved in the way those jobs are created. There has been recent coverage related to prisoners fighting fires on the West Coast, but then they can’t actually become firemen after their incarceration.

I’ve also been involved in “data literacy” projects. Data literacy needs to be included in our school curriculum. We use data all the time, and it should be a skill that we learn, just like we learn math. City Digits focused on using data as a way to teach youth about issues in their community, while learning math at the same time. We relied on the kinds of data points that were most relevant to the particular community with whom we were working, tying the teaching to a real-world subject. We worked with the Bushwick School for Social Justice and we embedded data literacy within the math curriculum.

We used maps quite a bit because maps are oftentimes fractions, right? And, we taught ratios and percentages — for example, the percentage of African Americans in a community. We also decided to pick a topic related to a particular issue that the students wanted to investigate. With one particular class, we examined lottery tickets, which also involves math. We could look at the percentage of people who buy lottery tickets and cover not only how much money they spend on lotteries, but also the probability that they’ll win. That way, we could demonstrate how to collect data or where data comes from, but then actually take it to the end and show them, using math skills, how that plays out.

How do you get non-data people over the relevance barrier? How do you get them to engage?

SW: So you mean like how do we move them from, “This is a stat or a number” to something where they can take action? It’s absolutely about visualizations. I’ll say it over and over again, the communication strategy is the number one way that I get people to understand the power of data. In almost every project that has been the case. Consider the Digital Matatus Project where we collected data on informal transit systems in Nairobi. Everyone knew that data was important because they’d heard data was important. They knew the hype around smart cities meant you must have data. The city and the officials were kind of loosely interested in the project until we created visualizations of the concept and showed it as one comprehensive system that they could use to make decisions.

It just transformed that project and really created something that the government, NGOs — everybody — could use because now they could understand what that data meant and what they could do with it.

Visualization is the number one way that you communicate the power of data.

Sarah williams

I talk about this idea in Data Action. Very early on, statisticians knew that they needed visualization as a skill to communicate their efforts. Building interdisciplinary teams is critical to making powerful visualizations. You need policy experts in the field who help contextualize the problem. You need data scientists who can help process that information. And then the designers and the communicators who can transform and translate those insights to the broader public. One further team member of critical importance, though, is the community represented by the data itself. The community feedback is absolutely essential. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in a meeting where the stats are wrong, and somebody from the community could have told them that right away, had they just asked.

Tell me about your experience with the networks that develop and evolve to continue to support some of this community work?

SW: In Nairobi, we have a center for the development of open data for transport. We additionally have one in Latin America, called DATUM, which is also focused on development of data for informal transit. The Latin American network was informed by the work that we did in Africa. To step back for a second, these are the main bus systems in most of the world. It’s only Europe and the US and some parts of Asia that have more formal systems where data are collected and can be analyzed. In these informal systems, the data just do not exist. So when we did the project in Nairobi, we sparked interest from a lot of people who wanted to do their own data collection. We started to help them use our tools for their projects. Then, those people started teaching other people. And, through that, we built this network. Then, we actually raised funds to keep that network going. As a result, now on DATUM, there are tutorials, links to resources, and connections with other groups that have done the work.

This kind of data collection is hard during COVID, but we recently finished a project in the Dominican Republic, that was informed by what we learned on a project in Mexico City. Now, I don’t have to be personally involved — the network can be teaching other parts of the network and people from the Latin American context can be teaching each other.

Part of what we recommend as critical to this network is connecting to local universities — having the local communities do all the data collection and work with students or others in that process. We’ve created training materials that go through how to get started and who to connect with in your community. For example, on the transit work, getting buy-in from the local transit system owner was a major first step. Typically, they have a union. It’s not just the government that you need to talk to, but it’s also making sure that you talk to the drivers, the actual workers, as you get started.

Where are some opportunities you see for addressing inequity with data?

SW: We live in a world where we think data is everywhere. One of the things I talk about in the last chapter of my book is missing data. We have so much missing data, and that missing data tells you so much about what we’re interested in, what we care about, but also it can really lead to inequity. As practitioners, we talk a lot about showing observations in data as being inequitable, but what’s missing can be just as inequitable.

Ghost Cities was a project a funder brought to us. The guiding question was: how can we create socially-equitable real estate in China? These ghost cities that have been manufactured in China are going all over the world and they’re not equitable. They create huge risk in the real estate margins. We set out to explore how we could we address it with data.

[Author’s note: Researchers scraped data from from Chinese social media open access API’s, including Dianping (Chinese Yelp), Amap (Chinese MapQuest), Fang (Chinese Zillow), and Baidu (Chinese Google Maps) to evaluate community viability and score foreclosure risk on the Ghost Cities project. The model identified areas without amenities and allowed the team to map these over-developed locations.]

How have you been able to open policy dialogues or get invited to those tables?

SW: A lot of my projects are kind of bottom up. On the Digital Matatus Project, we didn’t have the data we needed to answer the questions. But, we were constantly building dialogue on transportation. And, on the Ghost Cities work, which was also bottom up, I really had to go after it, really leverage my connections and start talking to people in China. But, the biggest door opener was when we made a website where people could visualize our analytics and play around with them.

After trying to get a sit-down with academics and real estate agents and getting nowhere, the visualizations helped a ton to allow for that dialogue to happen. It was absolutely a marketing vehicle. In all of the data visualizations that I’m doing, I’m advocating for something. My bias is all over it. It’s fine to just say it’s a marketing thing. It’s a communication device. It is also a transparency device. It can build trust. In Ghost Cities, I allowed the Chinese government to explore the data and the model behind my work. There was instant trust — that doesn’t always happen when dealing with government bodies.

Alright, now tell me a bit about the book; let’s give Nightingale readers a preview.

SW: I frame the book with a historical perspective – examples of how we use data for good and bad, so that when we talk about good and bad uses of data, the meanings are clear. I hope that people use the book as a methodology for how they can create change using data.

There are three really important components to that:

1. I advocate for collecting your own data and using data that’s out there creatively, bringing both qualitative and quantitative data together.
2. Sharing and visualizing are critical.
3. I also emphasize that building interdisciplinary teams is the most effective way to create data for policy change.

I end the book with a discussion on the future of data and society, asking some larger questions such as: “Are we data colonialists?” Data access is being consolidated, and not just by the government anymore, making regulation more difficult. Private companies play a large role in decisions that are being made with data. I hope the book challenges people to consider the ways in which they can use data for action in their own communities.

[Author’s note: Data colonialism refers to the process of appropriating data for the purposes of extracting value rather than to, as a government might, establish societal safeguards.]

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good will be available from the MIT Press in December, 2020, and can be purchased from a variety of retailers.

For more information about Sarah Williams’ projects such as Million Dollar Blocks: background on the architecture and justice and the pattern, as well as details about the scenario planning used by the project team. Here is an online visualization of Chicago’s Million Dollar Blocks.

Here is some additional detail about City Digits: Local Lotto.

More about the Ghost Cities project can be found here and here is a video explanation of their amenity model.

Derek Poppert provides a useful primer on public tech here. And, WIRED has a recent take on anticipated industry growth here.

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