Digesting Outlier – Part One: The Panel

Outlier put out a lot of food for thought. I’m using these posts to digest what I took in and process it.

I’ll start with the part that ultimately kicked off the conference for me – the Codesign panel I moderated. Other posts will dig into talks as a listener.

Before the conference, I had a lot of thinking to do. Part of this was homework and preparing for the panel. The other part was something perhaps a lot of us take for granted – what on earth do I put down for some of these intake questions?

Inward: The Self

I attended this conference as just myself. Sure, you think, we all do. Except, folks, we don’t. We’re usually tethered to an organization, looking to get into position, a student, or some other type of affiliation. This affiliation signals to others who we are, what we do, and helps narrow our interests and draw in others.

I went with nothing else appended to my badge. I was a moderator of a panel, which people saw quite early on in the event. I asked questions throughout the days and I approached folks periodically. I also spent quite a bit of time getting coffee.

The reason for attending untethered is multifold – hold on, it’s about to get deeply existential here for a minute:

• I’ve spent too much of the last few years helping others die. If you follow this blog, you know I’ve spent too much time around death too often anyway. This changes you, in some ways adding a burden and releasing others.
• Some of this is a maturation point: I’m old enough to have found my way through multiple careers. I know how to adapt. I know how to take what seems like deeply disparate ideas and bring them together. I thrive in fuzzy lines. Sometimes, the lines are so fuzzy that others can barely see them.
• I have accolades that provide a level of comfort. I wrote a book. I’ve collaborated on research papers. I’ve consulted for a decade and been within analytics for even longer. I cofounded and left a company. I have recognition from Tableau for my work.
• I’m embracing (another) phoenix period in my life. Sometimes, when so much around you burns, you dive headfirst into the flames and embrace reinvention.

The last factor, particularly, intersects with the theme of the conference – reimagining our work. I won’t use those exact words again, but the idea will pop up. Blame Covid and the 2022 marketing spin of “reimagining” everything. My inner grumpy cat will not abide.

Call attending as just myself my own version of playing with this theme. Who will I be where I eventually fully re-emerge?

Outward: The Panel

If you’ve not already, take a look at the speakers and panelists at the conference. Explore the talk outlines. (If you didn’t attend the conference in some way, I don’t know how or if you can access the talks. As a moderator and guest ultimately, I’ll defer to them.) I found the sessions to be a real treat.

I was moderating the Codesigning panel. I took time to acquaint myself with their work prior to the event. It was truly a life-giving exercise. Here’s a glimpse:

Dr. Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is an award-winning climate journalist, a professor, a Samoan, and a Chieftess from the island of Savaii. You’ve potentially come across her work in the Guardian or other venues. Lately, she’s also teaching others about Indigenous data and how it’s created, handled, honored, and shared. I watched several talks of hers, including this one which I continue to think about.

Jose Duarte is a Columbian designer, founder of Easydataviz, and the creator of handmade data visualization toolkits he’s shared throughout the world. To me, he’s like Banksy, but with data. He brings a playfulness to his work, sparking conversations in novel ways. He’s brought his work to the streets throughout South America and other places. This talk is a great way to get a sense of his work.

Carni Klirs is a Washington, DC-based Creative Director at Graphicacy, a musician, and producer. He has over two decades of experience translating topics into visually driven data stories. You’ve likely seen his latest work, Seeds to Harvest, featured at IIB Awards this year or heard his music. He used his Master’s thesis to explore punk visually, which you can find in this intriguing talk.

Audience members told me later they weren’t sure how these 3 very different speakers would blend and, that on the surface, the speakers seemed too wildly different to play together. The reality is you don’t make a band (usually) with all the same instruments (unless you’re Apocalyptica). The panelists each brought forward ideas around multiple ways of knowing, multisensory engagement, and leveraging many voices.

Lagipoiva challenged Western audiences to think differently about data, ways of knowing, and on the ways of representing and encoding information. Information isn’t just historical, but spiritual and tied to the land (and, as some of her examples showed, the body itself). She provided a framework for how she thinks through Indigenous data. She showcased a Marshallese stick chart, as well as Samoan tattoos, including her own. She urged folks to collaborate with Indigenous experts and to truly listen and engage.

Jose started his talk by immediately bringing the audience into the discussion. He handed out physical pie chart tools and asked questions around data literacy and navigation of South Americans. The answers in the room varied wildly as participants turned the dial and held their answers in the air. He then walked people through participatory data visualization and how he brought data to the streets quite literally. He ended with a manifesto, urging others to find ways to bring more people into data conversations.

Carni showed practitioner audiences how they could draw from the earlier talks and put these ideas into practice. He showcased an example and his process, drawing from visual metaphor and showing how to cocreate with clients. Audience members could see how he started with a wide breadth of ideas to rapid examples how each concept could be translated. He then showed the process of converging around an idea, how it was refined, and eventually deployed live – sound and all.

The benefit of moderating a panel is you get to ask all the questions. My inner 4 year old couldn’t be happier. I was able to dive deeper with each person around the themes that I saw.

Reverberating: Putting Yourself In

As the moderator, I was able to ask Lagipoiva about putting herself and her voice into her journalistic work. So often we data workers are scared to inject bias. Perhaps, the question really needs to be what bias are we creating when we keep ourselves out? Lagipoiva highlighted navigating the culture and language – she discussed how the Samoan language itself could represent information and how someone entrenched in the culture could accurately decode distance from the durations and repetitions of the words.

For monolinguals, this point might seem astounding or like a magic trick. Languages can encode numerous details that don’t always get rendered in interpretations or translations. It’s why learning additional language(s) gives you more than new words, but new ways to think. It also adds to Lagipoiva’s early point about why collaboration is key.

I was able to dive a bit deeper with Jose about modality and using that to get more data and more involvement. He discussed how the physical approach meant he could only reach so many people at once – the digital side of his intervention allowed him to broaden that reach outside, while the physical conversation helped inside.

Multisensory experiences led me over to Carni, the artist and musician. While he sees the disciplines as separate, intuition brings them together. Sometimes, you just know what feels right. Carni was able to voice a point that I suspect many practitioners can relate to: how do you systemize intuition? When we’re doing the work, we can build our own internal systems. How do we hand that off to others when we’re managing or leading. We discussed how to use metaphor to translate and help collaborators voice their impact.

Translation and intuition led the conversation back to Lagipoiva. She highlighted the difference between Western approaches (ex: the planned timetables at The Guardian) versus the on-the-ground experience reporting at an atoll nation. Those on the island have their own time table, which means using nuance on how best to gather information, rather than imposing your own structure. She ended on how intuition and multiple ways of knowing gets cultivated, how we train and hand ancestral knowledge across generations. She showcased how we experience information across all senses from birth and take it in.

I was able to turn this conversation back to Jose, who I feel strongly activates intuition through play. He mentioned how his industrial design roots and communication degree fused into his work. He uses play to break through boredom and fear – it’s practical, but it also brings down walls. We looked at how he staged his interventions, including going to stores to get on-the-ground knowledge to best understand how to involve people.

These types of experiences change us. Carni, with his Seeds to Harvest project, took a novel approach to bringing his client’s voice in – having them participate fully and guide. I wanted to know how it changed his approach and how he would take that forward. He discussed how he’s further democratizing projects and trying to leave space for more open-endedness. Does this sound a bit like Jose’s use of play and trusting collaborators like Lagipoiva discussed? He’s continuing to explore how malleable his work can be.

I followed up Carni about his scripts. He talked about priming and the sharing of knowledge. He discussed lifting up the client so they could fully participate. Call this the final chorus, the point where all instruments enthusiastically play. By centering voices, valuing all types of knowledge equally, engaging where people are, we can reach our stakeholders in new ways.

Lagipoiva opened us and I also wanted to give her the last word. You see, in addition to journalism, she’s also teaching and leading hackathons. She left with a call for us to reconsider (or reimagine, if you must) what we consider to be data in the first place. For those of us accustomed to working in digital spheres (raises hand), we miss out on data that exists in other ways. She reiterated what we’ve also heard from Jose – that digital data was limited, so the role of Indigenous and local knowledge played a key translational role.

Ripples: Parting Thoughts

I’ve spent time letting each person’s thoughts sit with my own. Carni, for example, reminds me of a version of myself – someone with access to skills that are different yet collaborative. For Carni, it’s music. For me, it’s interpreting and American Sign Language. We draw from these skills in ways we may not consciously realize, letting them surround and enrich our work.

Lagipoiva and Jose inspire my work in new ways – both in my conversations with them, this panel, but also their other talks. In Jose, I found a kindred spirit in playfulness and coffee. He’s serious about making a big change and he finds a way to implement it in a way that lifts up his heart and so many others. I attended Sophie Sparkes’ workshop and definitely pulled in some ideas from Jose with some my examples being folded sheets of paper. I’m considering how else I can bring data to where people are.

Just like with the panel, I’ll end with Lagipoiva. In other talks, interviews, and articles, she discusses how Samoan culture handles death. For reasons listed much earlier, this topic is on my mind and a point of connection. What I find in her approach to data work is perhaps a bigger answer than work process questions. Instead, it’s a bigger theme of how do we live as whole humans in the first place? How do we take knowledge that lives in us – carried across time – honor it and live well? How do we write ourselves – and others – in?