To do Values-Based Data Science & Design well, you need to learn to see the rich backstory behind every one of your values-driven acts.

It's easy to see the peak experience of living by a value: the moment when you chose to be vulnerable, or stepped up and took responsibility, or experienced the kind of creativity with your colleagues that's so meaningful to you.

But this is just the tip of an iceberg. Living by our values is a collaboration between many selves, on many timeframes. Only by getting the whole iceberg in view can we see what it means to design for values.

I'll give some examples, then introduce our main practice to surface the iceberg and generate design ideas from it.

Example #1 — Honesty with Anne

I'm sitting with my friend Anne, about to give her some honest feedback.

<aside> ☝️ The Tip

I'm nervous, but I tell her the thing. She understands me and adds some new perspective. I feel safer with her. I trust her more.

</aside>

<aside> ✊ The Iceberg

1. Relationship building. Before I could be honest with Anne, I had to build up a relationship that works for honesty. A relationship where (for instance) we have a track record of supporting each other, even after sharing difficult things.
2. Information gleaning.
   1. Before building a relationship, I had to ascertain she was a good person with which to build such a relationship: that this stranger is the kind of person who cares about things like building relationships, and being honest.
   2. Even in the moment, before being honest, I need to know some things: for instance, is this a good moment?
3. Reflection. I need information inside myself, like: what are the feelings I'm trying to communicate? How sure am I of what I'm about to say?
4. Mood setting. Maybe we were at a party, and to tell her something, I had first to locate a quieter room. Maybe we were in a group and I had to get her alone, or verify that others in the group are also people I can be honest in front of. This requires social skills, and knowledge about the setting.
5. Social Navigation. I can keep going backwards in time and find more backstory: before deciding to build a relationship with Anne, I had to meet her! I was networking, I knew about parties with honest people at them. Etc. </aside>

Example #2 — Creativity with Andy

Every few weeks I call with my friend Andy and we share where we're stuck on our projects, and give each other ideas.

<aside> ☝️ The Tip

On the call, we practice a kind of creativity we both value.

</aside>

<aside> ✊ The Iceberg

1. Relationship building.
   1. Context. Andy and I share a lot of context: we both have backgrounds in cognitive science and computer science. We share many of the same friends and values. We also know a lot about each other's projects: he's taken a version of my class; I've read a lot of his writing. So our ideas about one another's work are less likely to be naive.
   2. Safety. We've also created a lot of safety in our relationship. I'm often scared to say critical things when someone presents their ideas. I don't want to offend them. Andy and I have built up a track record of being critical with each other's ideas, but in a light-hearted way. That makes it feel safe for both of us to grow our tree of ideas, and also safe to prune it when things are going in the wrong direction.
2. Social Navigation. Andy and I operate outside of traditional academia, but we try to be somewhat scientific. We met through para-academic communities of people like that, which are hard to find out about and to gain access to.
3. Mood setting. At our best, Andy and I find a pace to our conversation that allows for a good mix of thinking and speaking. We had to figure out how to do this: we mostly go for walk-and-talk phone calls, rather than sitting and staring at each other on zoom. We pause a lot, so we can be thoughtful.
4. Reflection. Both of us have spent years developing reflective skills to do this kind of thinking. We consult our intuitions and have faith that vague misgivings will form themselves into sentences, in time to be shared and understood. </aside>

Surfacing the Iceberg

Most people see just the tip of their own actions. By doing the exercises below, you'll start to see the whole iceberg.

And two things become clear:

• First, the iceberg is where most social designs fail. In most online social environments, most workplaces, most community structures, etc—it's impossible to get the information you'd need to be honest, to set up the context for creativity, to build the right relationships, to navigate socially as you'd need to, etc.
• Second, our meaningful experiences owe more to social design than we think. The "tip" moments I had with Andy and Anne aren't especially designed. But the backstories are all about social designs. Carefully designed social spaces, practices, networking events, etc, led to these meaningful moments.

So, let's learn to surface that iceberg. We do it in three stages.

• Stage 1 — An absurdly detailed story is written, about a time you were able to live by a value, including everything you needed to do in the backstory.

• Stage 2 — That story is picked apart, pulling out the "Hard Steps" of the value.

  <aside> ℹ️ Hard Steps

  Sub-actions, necessary to live by a value, which are hard to do in some environments.

  </aside>

• Stage 3 — That analysis is used to generate design ideas, which we call "sketches", that design for the iceberg.