June Highlight - “Estranged”

It’s Summertime! A joyous, sticky time in which I wake up exhausted and can’t tell if that heat in the air is the season or our country continuing to burn down in 50 simultaneous ways (one of which being our refusal to acknowledge and address our worsening of the seasons).

Being as I am clearly in a festive mood, this month I thought I’d look back at a project that absolutely did not work. While at best the “success” of pieces can feel like playing the lotto (and at worst, like waiting for life to spontaneously arrive on a dead planet), I think it’s instructive to spend time thinking about the offers I made to participants, and what I could have done to better “position them for success—” a phrase I stole from a Salsa instructor discussing leading a follow, and now apply liberally to everything.

~

Estranged

I’ve been having conversations lately with artists about where a project starts for them, and how far our notions of “what society needs” can or should inform our work. While all that is a topic for a much longer discussion, it did remind me of a project I attempted in 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the United States Presidential Election.

On the election night in question, anxiety drove me to watch the entire process play out over broadcast, which put me near the front of the rollercoaster of watching channel after channel and pundit after pundit travel through waves of confusion, alarm, and shock. By the weary, bitter end of the night, I found myself fixated on a heavy thought: the country I lived in was not the country I had imagined.

To play all cards on the table - while I was not a fan of Hilary Clinton, I was (and remain) vehemently opposed to the policies, platform, and practices of Donald Trump. And however much I had been anxious about the possible results, the overwhelming reality of the actual result unmoored me. Insulated as I was (and still remain) by living in liberal cities on the east coast, having a very progressive and left-leaning cohort, and existing inside many layers of privilege, some part of me had not really accepted the possibility that Trump’s platform had as much support as it did.  

Over the evening-and-a-half long binge of election coverage, I felt myself begin to become aware that the strength of my reaction came in part from perceiving a gap in my understanding: I had no grasp whatsoever on the perspective of someone voting the other way, and that distance felt alarming. Elections had felt divisive for my entire adult life, with each since 2004 seeming to grow angrier and starker. But something about the 2016 cycle felt different. Still navigating the culture shock of reentry after living abroad for 4 years, I found myself experiencing a profound sense of being a stranger in my own country.

I wondered how much others might feel the same, for all kinds of reasons. I wondered what role Art could serve in this time. I wondered if my own work could really be anything larger in that moment than a salve to my own despair— and since I tend to choose feeling exhausted over feeling powerless, I decided I would try to find out. After a few days of working (and some healthy breaks of staring into the void), I wrote an invitation to a project I called Strangers:

Over 125 million Americans voted in the 2016 election. Who are they? The vast majority were split almost equally in support for two major candidates, as they have been for many elections in recent history. But can the entirety of the country be so easily divided into two equal and opposite camps? What do these voters believe? What matters to them? What are their lives like?

After a polarizing and unpleasant campaign, being able to speak to each other in an open, respectful space can seem a lofty goal. Instead, this is a poll that represents a first step: let’s meet each other again.

As a participant, you will be anonymously paired with another respondent on the other side of the political aisle. You will answer 10 questions, not on specific political issues, but about yourself and your own experience. The goal is not to argue issues or change minds, but to hear and be heard, in a space of open communication. These responses will be sent through a secure middle-man to protect your contact information. Once you’ve both written and received responses, you will be asked to decide together whether you want them posted publicly on the project website, to form a different kind of survey of the American Voter.

If you feel like you are surrounded by people who share your views, and you’re searching to hear differing opinions; if you feel you are more than the media stereotype of your political affiliation, and want a chance to represent yourself; if you can’t imagine how someone could have supported the other candidate, but you’re open to trying — this project is a space to do just that.

I think the very public discussion of “the failure of polling data” is what primed me to frame this as an exploration of a kind of “linked-voice polling.” The idea was to connect two people who expressed difficulty understanding each other’s political perspective, and to see what would happen if they committed to a practice of open listening. At the end of the process, their answers would only be published if both parties agreed. This was to provide a sense of security and privacy, but also was an attempt to introduce a (very low) sense of stakes: either we both get heard, or neither of us do.

Participants were then invited to provide as much or as little demographic info as they chose, with the promise that they would only learn/share answers that the other participant answered as well.

Finally, participants answered a series of 10 questions:

What was it like in the place that you grew up?

What are the two things you like best about yourself?

What makes you feel joy, in a way that doesn’t go away?

What makes you feel proud, in a way that doesn’t go away?

What makes you feel scared or anxious, in a way that doesn’t go away?

How do you feel your life has changed in the last 8 years?

How do you imagine your life in the next 8 years?

Can you please talk about three things you care about a lot?

What is something important about yourself that someone should know if they want to understand you better?

Could you tell me a little more about that?

These were designed to be a kind of invitation to encountering a stranger in a way that invited you to resonate with them. I think at the time I wanted to find out what if anything would happen if we saw a glimpse of the specific humanity under some of the political beliefs held by those “across the aisle”—or if such a thing was even possible.

Since you are also living in the same future I am (or if you’re not … call me?), I imagine at this point you are in no way surprised to learn that this project did not work at all. There are probably countless reasons for this, but I can point to three right away.

The first has to do with my network - as I mentioned early, I exist in overwhelmingly liberal spaces, and so inevitably the demographic information volunteered showed a very homogenous group of participants; they were overwhelmingly liberal, disproportionately from the performing arts, and out of 45 folks who applied, only 1 was not either a college graduate or currently in college. When it came to connecting poll participants across ideological lines, the math was an immediate non-starter.

I made efforts to diversify my polling group, including reaching out directly to friends with different views to answer or share the poll, and even distributing little leaflets with QR codes on a cross-country road trip when another project required me to drive from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. But even if these efforts hadn’t been laughably small, they couldn’t have surmounted the second major barrier of the piece: trust. I knew it would be a hard sell for participants to believe their views would be respected and heard (particularly for my friends from a conservative stance, as I had never been shy about my own political leaning), and I tried my best to create language and a process that could invite that trust (including the perhaps-absurdly-literal choice of coloring the webpage a blend of “Red and Blue”). But it wasn’t until my first attempt to match people that I understood how insufficient my efforts had been. One of only 2 conservative-identifying participants was a parent of a close friend, whom I paired with one of the first Liberal-identifying participant to complete their answers. As it happens, both shared some experiences with mental health issues to varying degrees, and I thought this might prove a point of connection. Instead, my friend’s parent messaged me shortly after, expressing that they felt judged by me to have been paired with someone “crazy,” and wanted no further part in the project. I was stung by how callous this view of their survey partner felt, but it also forced me to consider a lot of difficult questions: what was my agenda with this project? How much was I really listening, and how much was I trying to prove something? Who did I ultimately want to speak to—and what were they getting in return?

I never got the chance to find out, as that was the one and only pairing the project produced: none of the other conservative- or independent-identifying participants completed their response. That brings me to the third obvious flaw: as you’ll notice below, I made some fairly dismal design choices. For starters, this poll is not short. In an attempt to compensate for this, and as a bid to increase trust and acknowledge that I was asking a lot, most of the responses were optional, or open-ended. While this is an attempt to be considerate, it also means completing the form requires more reading and more decisions from a participant — and any designer knows that both of those are expensive asks from an unattended participant. I even gave participants the choice to not answer the 10 questions through the link, but to sign up and then complete answers by email later.

100% of participants took that option—less than 10% ever followed through. Among many things, I think this is a good example of how sometimes we can better position participants for success with restrictions than options. A more firm container takes away some of the thinking required, and provides a sense of momentum that allows us to commit to and follow through with things we might not otherwise complete (this even applies to traditional theater; I’ve sat through a few productions of Antigone, but you won’t find me read that play cover to cover without getting distracted).

Ultimately, I think good experience design is about inviting someone to do something new and challenging, then making the process of doing it achievable and rewarding. I definitely didn’t accomplish that —and in case my results don’t speak for themselves, you’re welcome to click through the site to see what else went wrong. I think you’ll also find a few interesting or even successful ideas sprinkled throughout, along with early versions of some things I continue to play with in my projects to this day.

~~

You can find the old project site here*— or find my new projects by just sitting back and letting Patreon continue to deliver. No matter what you do, I appreciate your continued support: thanks for being less of a Stranger.

*Note: for those clicking, just know that this project is (very) inactive, so there’s no need/cause to submit. Also, if “clicking through an abandoned Google Form” isn’t your idea of a fun time, you can also scroll through these screenshots to get the basic idea of the experience.

~~~