A Day With(out) Data: A Participatory Visualization Recipe
- Jer Thorp
- Jul 8
- 5 min read
Last month I flew to Pittsburgh to attend an event called Disaggregation Nation! The convening centered around the need to break down government data into more specific subcategories, to ensure more equitable service for all groups. The Data Disaggregation Action Network (D-DAN), who organized the event, has been working to advance and implement federal and state policies as they relate to disaggregation by race and ethnicity.
I gave the keynote at last year's Disaggregation Nation! in Detroit, where I challenged participants to consider ways to bring the data that they were collecting back to the communities most impacted. I gave a lot of examples from my book, including Of All The People in All The World by Stan's Cafe and my own St. Louis Map Room project; engagements that break down expectations about what data "should" look like, and who might be able to participate in (or lead) "data driven" conversations.
When I was invited back to lead a breakout session at this year's event, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to put some of these ideas into practice. Even though I'd only have 45 minutes, I thought it'd be worthwhile (and fun) to see if we could make a collaborative piece of data art together.
The organizers of the event were not surprisingly very concerned about the number of federal datasets that were disappearing (or being disappeared) so we decided to focus our collaborative data vizzing on the idea of cataloguing all of the datasets that a person might touch in some way during a day; and implicitly the risk of those datasets disappearing.
I'm sharing what we did in recipe form as an invitation to do this yourself, to remix or modify the exercise, and to share your own recipes for lo-fi, participatory data activities.
A Day With(out) Data
Serves: 15-30 people
Prep time: 1 hour
Cooking time: 45 minutes (or more)
Cost: < $100
Ingredients:
1 round table
1 piece of cardboard or light-colored construction paper
4 pairs of fabric scissors
1 roll of double-sided fabric tape
1 roll of masking tape
10 Sharpie markers
Instructions:
Place the round table in your space with enough room for people to walk around it. Put some chairs nearby for those people who might want to sit and work or for people uncomfortable with standing for the full duration of the exercise.
Cut two sheets of the darkest felt color to fit the round table and tape it down using the fabric tape.
Cut a 12" diameter circle from the cardboard/construction paper. Using a sharpie, label it like a clock where the top is the beginning of the day, and the bottom is noon. I marked 4am, 8am, 4pm and 8pm as well as noon and midnight.
Cut the felt into equal-sized shapes in all of the available colors. I was inspired by the art deco motifs in our hotel and used shapes that looked like clock hands (or neck ties?). You could experiment here: teardrops, triangles, circles?
Put these felt pieces in stacks on another table or on a few chairs. Using a poster board or a piece of wall, make a key indicating which colors match to which category of dataset. I used these categories:
Yellow: Education
Orange: Health
Red: Justice
Blue: Civic Engagement
Purple: Economics
Green: Environment
Tell the participants that you'll be making a collective map of all of the ways data touches their lives over a 24 hour period. Ask them to think of a dataset (weather reports, flight schedules, school assessments) that they might interface with during a day. Tell them to pick a felt piece with the corresponding color category for the dataset, and label it with a sharpie and masking tape. Then have them place it on the table using the time guide that you made in step 3. Tell them to put more personal datasets (data from a fitness tracker) closer to the center of the table, and public ones (census data) closer to the edge.
Encourage people to add as many datasets as they'd like. Tell them they can be creative with the ways they place the pieces (someone put one dataset dead center on our table) and with the color categories (people in our group made striped pieces to indicate multiple categories).
Once people have finished placing the felt pieces on the table, have them gather around to "read" the visualization. What patterns do they see? Do certain categories occur more frequently at different times of the day? What happens in the morning? Or in the middle of the night? Ask them to look at the visualization in the lens of their own experience. What datasets that others added feel outside of your own experience? Which ones had you not considered that do affect you in important ways? This can also be a chance to talk about how people might have approached the exercise differently. Would they have used more (or fewer) categories? Or used the space of the table in a different way?
Take lots of photos! Share them with me!
Bonus: Ask each person to remove a felt piece representing a dataset that they think they'd be most OK with losing. Repeat this until all of the pieces are off the table. Which categories disappeared first? Which ones disappeared last? What does this say about the ways we support, prioritize or protect our public datasets?
This whole exercise was very improvisational. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do until I sat down and started cutting felt in the hour before the breakout. I did know a few things, though:
It should be lo-fi. I wanted the exercise to be low cost so that anyone could repeat it, and I wanted the materials to be friendly and explicitly not "data-y". My loose rule for this was that everything I used could be found in a kindergarten class's craft cabinet.
It should be participatory. Once the activity started, I wanted to be able to get out of the way. This meant the instructions had to be obvious and simple. It also meant giving people express permission to break the rules in ways that seemed to make sense to them.
It should be performable. I've done these kinds of exercises before and sometimes there can be a "ok, now what?" moment when the visualization comes together. So I wanted to have a way that the group-authored artifact could be performed. This was the one that I was still missing up until the very end when one of the participants suggested the last bonus step in the recipe above. Which was for me a great reminder that keeping the rules loose means that people can bring their own ideas and tactics into the process.
If you end up using this recipe, please tell me about it!