2. VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE

Witnessing, visualizing and comprehending, making tangible, evidencing

As mentioned before, the political process is very hard to be understood. It’s seen as secretive, obscure, and using a difficult language. Visualization of processes increase comprehension by allowing people to understand the whole. For example, when a citizen is asked to participate in a consultation, what happens afterwards? How is the decision made? What are the variables influencing decision? Visualization of processes increase understanding of how to give valuable input, and increases confidence that the input will not get lost in bureaucracy and will have effective use.

In a more abstract meaning, visualizing is a form of acknowledging. We need to be able to visualize minorities, the multiplicity of opinions. To understand scales, make comparisons. To identify patterns, and develop our own conclusions and understanding of facts. Coleman, 2008, talks about the concept of witnessing, in a way a form of seeing and be seen; of being witnessed by either the power elites or other citizens. “The notion of citizens as witnesses is powerful, implying that democratic citizenship can only ever be realized through mediated communication. … As Ellis argues, the paradoxically distanced and involving nature of witnessing “implies a necessary relationship with what is seen.”(Coleman, 2008)

Creating forms where a citizen can visualize himself as part of a process is a form of creating this idea of witnessing. Seeing oneself represented in a collaborative city map, for example, symbolizes presence, an acknowledgement of the existence of a person and the representation of his/her needs. Aggregating representations, like mapping and visualizations, increase comprehension of dispersed voices and facilitate a commonality of understanding and experience. Collecting dispersed citizens opinions from social networks (through hashtags) and displaying them as official, is a form of visualizing and acknowledging those opinions as legitimate.

Creating evidence in the public space makes these communication processes more graspable. Public space actions makes the government and participation more tangible, and works as a touchpoint. It can simply show information about city budget, or be combined with an online platform and show messages from citizens, reinserting the virtual contributions back to the city’s public physical space.
For example, a touchpoint could be a space designated for public expression, where citizens could write down on a wall rants, concerns, opinions, and passersby can read and collaborate. That serves as a symbolic space dedicated for encouragement of public expression, and which can work as a touchpoint for acquiring information regarding forms of participation, or accessing information relevant to citizens. It becomes a reference, a place for orientation that is focused on the citizen.

Another form of creating evidence of the communication process is thinking about how it could attract media. Creating graspable simplified representations of information that can be further explored by media is a form of evidencing citizen inputs. That does not mean the information itself is simplified, but the forms of representing them are. For example, indexes that show the overall satisfaction of citizens towards environmental policies, and which fluctuate according to participation in an online platform (which in turn reflect reactions to current news), are a form of generating evidence that can be used in news pieces.

Either in the physical space, or in the virtual, the processes of communication need to be brought closer to the daily lives of citizens, be more visible, tangible, and require less effort to access, reaching citizens where they are.

1. ENVISIONING FUTURES

creating and experiencing alternatives, sharing them communally

One of the observations made throughout the research was that the young people had a hard time trying to think of alternative futures for interaction with government, even when they were encouraged to think of something completely disconnected from reality and futuristic. They know it should be something different from now, but lack a direction to set courses of action for themselves.
Design processes can facilitate imagining utopias, envisioning alternative futures, which are important for understanding our present, and for setting courses of action for the future. As Regula Stämpfli said in a personal interview: “All the theories are there but we don’t have the visualization yet, because if we could visualize we would have tools.”

Projects that allow ourselves to be immersed in a different reality can help us visualize directions, and serve as guidance for change. One example of this are alternative reality games, such as World without oil, a collaborative simulation of a global oil shortage. The game collects stories of people who are living in this alternative reality, and the results obtained with it allows us to peak on the challenges we might face in the future, and even get some solutions. It was a very interesting example of engaging people into discussing about a public problem in a way that is also attractive for them. It is an educative tool that change the way people perceive their actions in everyday life, where they imagine a future for themselves, as well as a tool to collect valuable information.

This disconnection to reality, where people step out and try to think of different situations and contexts gives us a different take on solutions, and more resources for thinking about alternatives for the present. For young people, this creative task besides being amusing, gives them positive aspirations and likely gives them incentive for taking action.

Besides alternative reality games, envisioning futures can be done through ideation workshops and creative narration/storytelling. For educational strategies, instead of telling students how governance systems work, giving them a task of creating their own alternative fictitious governance system would put them in a position of understanding in a wide scope how these work, experiencing it, and having a creative opportunity to come up with solutions and ideas for the future. These types of educational activities creates positive associations with the theme of governance, which is a theme that young people prefer not to deal with.

In countries like Brazil, where education about politics is not usually part of schools curricula, material for class work could be created and made available for schools. Downloadable toolkits with material and instructions would capacitate teachers to run these workshops in class. If given correct incentive (from government or institutions who organize this), the results of these workshops can be shared in an online platform, and as a benefit to the schools, prizes or exhibitions can be realized. Done seriously, these results can stimulate public conversation. Similar actions could be done for an open public, with encouragement of creative narrative and storytelling, or video competitions about “how the world (and governments) could be in 2050”, for example. To make it feasible cost-wise, partnerships with private sector can be done, and instead of money, prizes can be internships at companies, since the biggest concerns of young people are employment and career. Advertisement could be done by power users from twitter/blogs, which would be easily attracted, since this is a socially relevant issue.

This kind of idea input could generate amazing ideas, and start to create a collectively shared future direction. That could as well be done freely, in collaborative platforms, where people are invited to give solutions to problems. The government can be open about certain problems it has difficulties solving, like “How can we reduce waste disposal in a certain area?”. If this is done authentically, if governments step down to a position of asking citizens for help, and if it in fact reaches people on their everyday lives, people will likely participate.

Other actions that encourage envisioning futures could be done in public space, with financial support to designer and artist projects. Whichever form is used, the idea in this conceptual directive is that values are presented and shared with the community, so courses of action can be driven by these.