The “purpose-driven life” that they describe includes going to university, being part of his community, doing varied work, being with animals, and playing music. I sketch the life that is already partly happening, and also the part that hasn’t yet been clear. As one mom said, “In this process we are creating the future we want by leaning into this vision as we create it.”
I am drawing as fast as I can, trying to keep up with the accruing vision of his friends and family—a job, music school, friends, communication, safeguards, an apartment, a roommate. Three typical kids who have shared inclusive classrooms with him for most of his life have come tonight to propose that they share a place together. “Why not?” they ask. I am drawing apartments, parks, musical instruments, a dog—someone stops me. He doesn’t like big dogs, only small dogs. I use a sticky label to cover up the big dog and draw a smaller one. Brent smiles and nods. He’s been heard. Other corrections come fast and furious—the boys don’t want to live on the tree-lined suburban street I’ve drawn them, they want to live downtown. The trees become street lamps and buildings. His parents frown a little, but stay brave. They’ll get behind whatever he really wants and this is obviously it.
It all means he will not attend the small local college they planned for, but the bigger urban university. Given a clearer vision, they’re happy to let go. I draw Brent in the big city. Ideas are hurtling across the room at me, people are laughing, their voices soaring, coming together in a kind of web of hope that catches me up. Brent is laughing too: his life is looking amazing.
Sometimes I am surprised to see what I’ve drawn when it is done. I am not the only one. Brent, expected to stay for a maximum of 20 minutes, three hours later is still grinning and nodding and high-fiving his friends.
Aaron Johannes • Sensemaking through Arts-Infused, Person-centered Planning Processes
In how many situations are we given the gift of spending time talking about a kind of heartbeat life—music, people, connections, meaning? These are the kinds of icons I get to work with:
And when people have agreed that this kind of icon can represent them, we arrive at a PATH that looks something like this:
A year later, I run into Julie, who does not have a disability but has been stuck for a while, without clear aspirations. Since we last saw her, she’s quit her job, she’s created a different role in her community, she’s got more animals, and she’s part of two bands, both playing lots of gigs. As people do, she wants to report back on the progress of the vision we shared that day. We often are gifted with calls from people we’ve planned with to tell us where they are in these newly clarified plans.
PATH was invented by Marsha Forrest, Jack Pearpoint, and John O’Brien in the 70s (Sanderson, 2000). As with many transformational discoveries for people with disabilities, PATH comes out of the work of Inclusion Press (www.inclusion.com). It was one of the early alternatives to the kind of planning that was happening in special education and services—planning driven by professionals, filling out pre-determined forms using “specialist” language embedded in rigid roles. The role families and folks with disabilities had been given was to passively attend as professionals worked through a number of domains by tallying up at what was problematic in each one. In comparison, PATH was a sequence of open ended questions that assumed everyone in the room—including the person with the disability—had input that mattered.
The originators of PATH wondered: What might happen if people were encouraged to dream? If there were ways to record their dreams which everyone could see and understand (no matter what their literacy levels) and ways to plan to get from where they were to where they wanted to be?
PATH is almost always co-facilitated with a graphic recorder and a facilitator and is designed to be a simple process that amateurs can use (amateurs—from amat, to love).
Begin with a dream: A PATH starts with the facilitation of the person’s (or group’s or project’s) dream: what does it look like? If you could have anything—no holds barred—who would be there? Where would it be? What would surround it? How would it feel?
Looking back from a future time: The facilitator then moves to the “positive” and “possible” section. Sometimes we do a quick guided meditation about taking a time machine into the future and looking back on what dreams we’ve accomplished in a given time (say, two years). While the dream section might have included things that seem impossible—someone who can only move one finger wants to work and be self-supporting—in this section things must be doable. Within two years what might be accomplished towards this dream? The person might “remember” (from their future time machine) that they got a part-time job. Questions to deepen this might include: Who would they be working with? What kinds of things might they be doing? Someone in the group remembers that their church needs someone to staple the newsletters each week—it only takes one finger… Possibilities accrue and each question, each detail, builds a picture of a desirable future.
Aaron Johannes • Sensemaking through Arts-Infused, Person-centered Planning Processes
NOW: We move down to the “NOW” section—how are things right now? What feelings are people having? For Brent’s family, speaking out of their knowledge of him, there was excitement about the future that felt even more “positive and possible” given the full house of all the people who responded to the invitation to his meeting – this act of planning for the future is in itself an act of creating that future by bringing these people together.
WHO: Social constructionist Kenneth Gergen writes,
... virtually all intelligible action is born, sustained, and/or extinguished within the ongoing process of relationship… [and] there is no isolated self or fully private experience. Rather, we exist in a world of co-constitution. We are always already emerging from relationship; we cannot step out of relationship; even in our most private moments we are never alone. (Gergen, 2009)
When I am teaching the idea of “theory” to college students I start here. The “theory” of capitalism is that we are individuals, alone, competitive, responsible only for ourselves; the theory of social constructionism as defined by Gergen and his colleagues is that we are each part of a network of relationships. A PATH is an opportunity to invite those others in, often for the first time, and welcome them to take roles in people’s lives. Person-centered planning activates our tribes.
Building strength: As we look at the emerging PATH graphic it becomes clear that a new picture of a possible future that matters is happening before our eyes. We are looking at real “positive and possible” change. Gergen has recently written about “future forming research” and this is a small domestic example of that larger idea.
Step by step: The first of these is “first steps”—what few things might we do in the next week or so that will lead us into this future? After this, things are broken down into manageable chunks—it might be four months, or six, or even a year. The idea is to create the milestones for the emerging plan, as if one is looking back from the viewpoint of having accomplished those goals.
In these sessions, which can be a few hours long, new relationships are formed, and old relationships are transformed. A new future is depicted, and it is one that the person (with their network) can visualize with the help of graphics and facilitation.
Aaron Johannes • Sensemaking through Arts-Infused, Person-centered Planning Processes
What had seemed impossibly ambitious becomes, somehow, possible. A few years ago, Liz, a woman with Down syndrome learning to facilitate PATH in one of our workshops, ended up facilitating a PATH for me. I began talking about my work-life and she put up her hand and said, “Stop: Let’s come back work later if we need to.” So I started talking about holidays I hadn’t been able to take, art galleries and countries and cities I hadn’t been able to see yet… we never did talk about work. And, over the next 24 months I went to 11 differen
t countries, took 18 holidays with people I loved (using up all my vacation time for the first time in decades) and saw thousands of works of art.
While it was my ambition to travel the world, in the PATHs of people with disabilities we realize that our assumptions of what our lives can be like—that we’re going to work and have jobs and relationships, for example—are not true for everyone. What we think of as a given wealth of choices is really a privilege. Thus, a PATH, for one person and their network, becomes an emancipatory action—part of a political movement that clarifies, on the wall of someone’s home, with people who care about them, that we might become more equal, in just a few steps. The insanity of supports that do not allow for choices about where people live, who they live with, where they spend their days, and who supports them becomes evident, and radicalizing. PATH is part of a social transformation movement.
Sometimes I imagine all these wall-sized drawings layered over each other and coming together in a kind of infinite collage of possibilities that create a kind of chorus, demanding systems and governments to change and foster a transformed and welcoming world for us all.
AARON JOHANNES, Director of Spectrum Consulting Collaborative, partners with people of all kinds to provide workshops and community based research and is an instructor with Douglas College’s Child, Family and Community Studies faculty, where he is constantly amazed by the students. His MA is in Integrated Studies in Equity and Education and he is a PhD candidate with the Taos Institute / Vrije Universiteit Brussel, researching what works best to support marginalized people in leadership. Facilitating planning for people, teams, and projects, problem solving through dialogs, graphic facilitation, and world cafes are some favorite activities. Tweet me at @imagineacircle, visit www.imagineacircle.com, or email [email protected]. All graphics are licensed under creative commons and may be shared, unaltered, for non-commercial purposes with attribution unless they feature other persons than myself.
To learn more about PATH check out www.inclusion.com for books and tools.
Dancineering, Researchals, Bodystorming, and Informances
Movement-based approaches to sensemaking and transmediation through contemporary dance
Christopher Knowlton
I started dancing while studying engineering as an undergraduate, which led me to ask: Can we understand the body the way we understand engineering and science? After all, isn’t the body just another physical system, governed by the same rules as the rest of the universe? After plenty of “no”s, I found an enthusiastic “yes”: a burgeoning field called bioengineering. After graduating, I moved to Chicago to pursue a PhD in biomechanics and to research orthopedic joint replacements. Thanks to Chicago’s terrific dance scene, I kept performing as a freelance dancer and creating my own work. But I never thought I’d merge the two fields. Here’s my exploration of movement-based sensemaking through contemporary dance.
Dancineering
Two years into my studies, my dancer and scientist friends alike bombarded me with a link to John Bohannon’s brilliant 2011 TED talk Dance vs. PowerPoint, a modest proposal.1 In it, he suggests that speakers could abandon slideshow presentations as visual aids and replace them with dancers, while the stunning yet simple collaborative choreography of professional dance company Black Label Movement swirls around him to demonstrate precisely this point. Having sat through years of tedious lectures and an equal number of frivolous performances, this choreographed talk affected me like few before—and obviously appealed to people in both fields. The talk mentioned a contest called Dance Your PhD, an international competition run by Science Magazine that asks PhD students in science-related fields to explain their thesis to a broad audience through a dance film. I eagerly took up the challenge.
After assembling a cast from a collective of dancers known as The Dance Team, we got to work in the studio. I briefly summarized my thesis, let the cast ask questions, and then described a different aspect in more detail to each dancer. I pointed out specific words I found important and let each person independently build a movement phrase based on that information. After about ten minutes, I would circle around to each dancer, observing, asking how they were understanding what they were doing, answering questions, soliciting feedback, or suggesting movement and edits. Toward the end of rehearsal, we taught phrases to the entire group that we felt had solidified. This is a fairly standard contemporary dance approach for collaboratively generating choreography through improvisation, simply adapted to the subject matter of my thesis.
I encouraged them to disregard familiar dance aesthetics for something more demonstrative, matter-of-fact, and straightforward. In fact, my dancers laughed when they caught me praising them by saying, “That’s effective.” At the time, I only knew I wasn’t looking for “good” or “pleasing”; I was looking for useful and communicative. We had three rehearsals, each two and a half hours long, before filming the entire work in six hours on the final week. Taking cues from John Bohannon’s talk, I scripted subtitles that would more precisely frame the choreography to guide the viewer’s understanding. Though the final film utilizes many cuts, we intentionally choreographed the dance so that it could be performed live, with one or more of the dancers speaking the subtitles. Our film Multiactivity Wear Testing of Total Knee Replacements became a finalist in the 2012 Dance Your PhD contest and can be viewed on Vimeo.2
Christopher Knowlton • Dancineering, Researchals, Bodystorming, and Informances
Researchals
Not long after finalists were announced, we were invited to perform at the 2013 TEDxWindyCity talks in Chicago. I proposed that instead of my thesis, we would summarize every speaker’s idea in one live performance. If we could make a dance about the mechanical testing of orthopedic implants, why not these subjects?
Unlike my thesis, I was not intimately familiar with these topics, and I certainly was never going to become an expert in microeconomics, gender studies, education, entrepreneurship, environmentalism, photography, and more within a few months. But I didn’t need to become an expert; we had set out to help make these speaker’s ideas more accessible to the broader public. I met with each speaker to hear them informally explain their work and to ask my questions. All the while, I paid special attention to the gestures and imagery they used. I often asked what a given idea looked like or what an abstract concept felt like. Mostly, I tried not to let learning get in the way of understanding.
Concurrently, my dancers and I worked in the studio, in what they fondly began calling “researchals.” I assigned two topics to each dancer and provided them with speakers’ blurbs, bios, videos, conversation notes, and the internet. After they studied for a while on their own, I answered their questions as best I could and relayed what else I knew. Using different colors, I asked them to highlight words or short phrases that 1) helped them understand, 2) they could see or do, and 3) resonated emotionally. Once they felt able, I had each dancer explain their topics to another dancer, encouraging them to physicalize the gestures and images they had encountered while learning. These conversations led to the dancers discovering parallels between vastly disparate topics, either between some mechanism of two systems or between the imagery used to portray them. One example of this can be seen on the following page. In one talk, graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck drew stacked lines to represent the inundation of linear textual information that we experience daily. A video for another talk showed workers stacking boards in a warehouse as Elise Zelechowski of Rebuilding Exchange described diverting useful resources from landfills.
Photo courtesy Pivotal Productions
Photo courtesy Pivotal Productions
Photo courtesy Rebuilding Exchange
Christopher Knowlton • Dancineering, Researchals, Bodystorming, and Informances
With the simple action of stacking dancers on top of each other, we embodied the constant s
treams of texts, the accumulation of waste, and the sense of overwhelm and unsustainability from each. We were at once language, materials, feelings, and people. This is the power of abstract contemporary dance performance: the ability to have multiple meanings simultaneously. We found these moments crucial in delivering a high density of easily understandable information, as the final performance would have to transition chronologically and cohesively from talk to talk.
In 12 researchals of two or three hours each, we repeated the process of transmediation that we had discovered for Dance Your PhD by translating the ideas on the page into movement phrases in order to realize our live performance. We again framed the choreography with a script, spoken by a live orator, and used costume colors to help the audience demarcate our transitions between topics. A film of 10 Talks in 10 Minutes Through Dance is available on YouTube.3
Three months later, we were invited to produce a new, similar performance for the Illinois Art Council’s 2013 One State Together in the Arts, a biennial state-wide arts conference modeled on the TED format in Moline, IL. A film of this performance is available on Vimeo.4
Bodystorming
Unbeknownst to us at the time, the methods and choreographic tools that we had been playing with in the studio for transmediating ideas bear some striking resemblances to an emergent practice in the mobile design world known as “bodystorming.” As a juxtaposed complement to brainstorming, bodystorming asks that designers of technological solutions (i.e. mobile devices, apps, and ubiquitous computing systems) observe or embody the user experience in a setting similar to the one in which it will be used.5 Trust me, the irony of using an embodied practice to develop a disembodying product is not lost on me. However, the three modes of bodystorming described in literature are thought to reinvigorate the creative process in many ways. By being there (so-called “design in place” or brainstorming “in the wild”), designers can better understand the nuanced contextual factors where people might use their technology.6 Bodystorming also allows for rapid implementation of rudimentary versions of ideas (“prototype in place” or “strong prototyping”) that can provide immediate and insightful feedback in a way that a studio/office setting cannot.7,5 Finally, experiences can be simulated, investigated, evaluated, and communicated by instructing end-user representative, role-playing designers, trained actors, and even children with a simple prompt, scenario, or narrative and allowing the “scene” to play out (“embodied performance,” “use-case theater,” or “experience prototyping,” depending on whom one asks). Overall, bodystorming is thought to provide a more directly observable and explorable problem space, help prevent ideation and groupthink, facilitate rapid group communication and consensus, elicit tacit knowledge of the problem, provide immediate feedback of ideas, improve empathy, and create a memorable and productive experience for all participants, all of which may spark new ideas that were perhaps undiscoverable through traditional brainstorming.8
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