Designing Data Dramas to Build Empathy to Nature through Collective Acts

Abstract

Environmental data may play a part in urban planning processes, especially where people collect and use it to evidence negative impacts of proposed development on nature. However, the utility of such data is only as good as people’s capability and willingness to make sense of it. Data storytelling is a common technique for making data easier and more relatable to a general audience, yet such approaches still place the audience in a relatively passive role which may impact the depth of understanding gained from the data. In this book chapter we will explore data drama as an active and collective way for embodying and understanding data. We locate this arts-based genre in relation to the fields of applied drama and theatre and drama education, critical pedagogy, arts-based research and data science. The imagination, emotions and feelings (affective and nominative dimension to learning) are as central to the arts as cognition and rationality (cognitive dimension to learning) are to data science. What the combination of specific arts and data science practices through data drama offers is access to the domain of affect. By this we mean that general sense of feeling that we experience each day that can affect our perceptions, behaviours and thinking, as well as the ways in which we interact with others, the planet and the sense of agency we have in doing this. We will thus demonstrate how data drama may be used to build empathy towards the hidden concerns that the data can reveal. As such, data drama can be utilized as a way for exploring more-than human aspects of urban development. We demonstrate our approach with reference to an activity framed as happening within a future water laboratory in which participating school students seek to learn about and ideate solutions for water pollution in a city lake in Finland.