Tooth & Nail Mapping, Growing a Collective Web
Type: 2020 DESIGNxRI DFWD Resiliency Challenge
Date: 11.2020 - 12.2020
Client: TOOTH & NAIL COMMUNITY SUPPORT COLLECTIVE
Team Lead: Ayako Maruyama
Team Members: Xue Gao, Athena Zeros, Eliza Squibb, Nick Leite
Responsibilities: Background Research, Interviews and Regular Meetings with T&N, Problem Scoping & Crafting, Concept development, Playbook & Guidance Design
Tool: Hand Sketch, Figma, PowerPoint
Growing a Collective Web is a mapping practice set, including a playbook and toolkit, we create a map with metaphorical reminders about the health of the Tooth & Nail ecosystem, facilitating the distribution of labor within the collective while centering care for those involved. This project is a part of the 2020 DESIGNxRI DFWD Resiliency Challenge. Our client is a collective that provides health and healing support for the community. Based at a herb garden around Providence, they offer first aid and healing justice training, gathering and sending medical & herbal supplies to resistance camps.
When the pandemic began, T&N members suffered from isolation and separation because all the projects on hand had to be paused without a certain restart time. Therefore, T&N sought ways to reconnect with each member as well as keep the organization running and growing online. They also see this as an opportunity to rethink and evaluate their current organizational structure and hope what our team offered could be used in both in-person and online situations.
Mapping To Interpret T&N Role Chart (Eliza)
Tooth & Nail Community Support Collective Mission
T&N is a land-based community support collective that centers BIPoC, Trans,
and Queer people by providing opportunities to learn about different ways to heal and feed ourselves, our community, movement spaces, and frontline resistance efforts. We center plant medicine, food + land justice, and reclaiming ancestral plant knowledge.
Background Research
Herb Garden
Street Medicine Care
Understand Non-hierarchical Structures
Before doing the actual talking with T&N members, our team did some mapping practice of T&N’s structure. The focus is to understand what are the departments and roles in the collective and what is the relation among each of them.
Mapping To Interpret T&N Role Chart (Xue)
Preliminary Survey
After establishing our basic understanding of T&N’s structure, our team run several zoom meetings with T&N members as well as sent questionnaires to understand people’s thoughts, expectations, and concerns towards the collective.
They also shared three central questions to consider while approaching this design challenge. These central questions addressed broader ideas such as culture-building, service design, and communications within the collective.
Culture-building: How do we retain our stories, document how our collective shifts, and internally share who we are and who we hope to be?
Service Design: How can we use technology/systems to share the labor of operating as a collective?
Communications: How can we better work together across physical and digital spaces?
Mapping To Interpret T&N Role Chart (Nick)
T&N Member Personas
Pain Points
Having a tool showing people what’s their own agency within a collective, if I know what can or can’t do, I know what power I have.
I like knowing what’s the big picture…
How does this little part fit into the big picture…
How does the thing I do impact the people around me?- Vanessa
We noticed some overarching themes repeating throughout our conversation:
Desire to acknowledge each other as unique people: Centering Care
Acknowledging one another through work: Labor Distribution
Desire to visualize the relationship between the Land/ Collective Farm and what it takes to run the farm, the people involved and their labor, and the Collective’s mission.
Interpretating and Summerizing Our Conversations with T&N
Strategy, Design & Test
Problem Statement
Create a map/tool that can...
visualize the tasks/roles that make T&N Collective function
help people see each other so that they
understand what their fellow collective members are working on
communicate and coordinate among smaller teams
Check-in about whether task assignments are reasonable/ the labor distribution is healthy
Uplift the T&N Mission and visualize…
the Land / Collective Farm
metaphors inspired by the ecosystem of the Collective Farm
intentions to break down larger societal barriers like capitalism and racism
intentions to diffuse daily obstacles that create confusion/ tensions
that when people take on these roles/tasks, they bring resources to/from the network
when we check in about work/roles that is a process of caring for our collective members
Scenarios & Concepts
After narrowing our focus down, we began to visualize concepts that reflected the collective’s structure while serving as a tool for centering care/acknowledging labor contributions
Throughout our conversations with T&N, metaphor stood out as a way of talking about the collective & its individual members. Conversations about natural structures, the interconnectivity of mycelium, and ecosystems influenced our initial approaches to the design challenge.
Given the limited amount of time for the design challenge, it’s very important for us to understand our design priorities.
We began to explore visual structures that highlighted communication pathways within the collective as a way of visualizing energy flow & coordination. This took forms both in role-centered visuals and individual-centered visuals, which would highlight individual tasks, skills, aspirations, and how an individual would fit within the greater picture of the collective. Using these ideas and communicating with the collective, we began to move forward into more focused prototypes & experiments.
Mapping Through Metaphor (Xue, inspired by the ecosystem of the Collective Farm)
Mapping From Individual’s Abilities (Xue)
Mapping From Individual’s Abilities (Athena)
Mapping Through Metaphor (Xue, mycelium as outer connections inspired byT&N’s members)
Prototypes and Experiments
Then we started to merge our conceptual diagrams altogether. We experimented with the T&N role tree, trying to use and test it when we were in the zoom meeting with T&N. We experimented with the individual ability one, and saw where it could fit into the role tree and even the larger ecosystem.
T&N Ecosystem Interconnectivity Mapping (Xue)
Role Tree Mapping (Eliza)
Individual Abilities Mapping (Athena)
Feedback from T&N
Final Deliveries
From our prototyping, we gathered what was emerging as the most cohesive and functional key features. We put these explorations as layers, looking at the organization in the larger context, its place in the community, the organizing systems within, and then the individuality of each collective member.
To facilitate the use of these tools, we created what we’re calling a “Playbook” and a “Toolkit“, editable doc or slides, that can be printed on office paper, and serve as a guide to framing and facilitating these exercises during team organizing meetings.
Final deliverables are made to be completely accessible & adaptable. Googles slides and documents that can be printed and modified. We laid everything out to the best of our understanding, but the collective needs to work through these exercises to integrate them and create an accurate reflection that they identify with fully.
