Cultural Trauma and Design
I’ve been exploring what frameworks are already in place to tackle cultural trauma as a design problem. The issue that I see at stake here is defining first what on earth is ‘the problem’ or even, if there is ‘a problem’. More generally, what is this thing of using design to solve problems? How can a designer even claim that his/her/their solution has ‘solved’ the alleged problem?
I’ll try to explain myself: I understand cultural trauma as a group-shaped, but individually experienced memory that has deep cultural and narrative underpinnings. The cultural component of trauma revolves around indirect manifestations of the trauma through displacement, such as higher than average levels of alcoholism or drug addiction in some marginalized communities. There is also a narrative component that pertains to the explicit awareness and willingness among communities to share stories related to the [traumatic] past. Each facet could be subject of different design interventions from the field of information.
The cultural component of cultural trauma is a concern for public health informatics. Typically, when trauma appears in this research is mostly linked to individual cases of trauma. Yet, the robus tradition of PHI in data science is an opportunity for the field to find patterns of trauma at a larger scale (by aggregating de-identified cases of specific traumas such as PTSD) to specific locations or events. This is one way of talking about collected trauma. That is, a collection of cases of trauma resulting from a common incident or experience, whose societal effects are larger than the sum of individual cases.
The narrative dimension of cultural trauma has been an extensive subject of attention for scholars from archival science and museum studies. The concern here often revolves around collection, documentation, dissemination and access to individual experiences, through means such as oral history, personal records or physical objects (e.g. clothing, household items or other memorabilia). Occasionally, computer scientists have dived into this space too with an emphasis in interactive storytelling. For instance, drawing from machine learning algorithms to develop AIs that reproduce the storytelling patterns of museum guides, delivering interactive experiences for computer-mediated storytelling in low-income countries, or exploring the expressive affordances of AR to help the public experience contested moments of history.
In the case of the behavioral dimension of trauma, I simply came up with an example of something I would love to see done. In practice, the focus in public health informatics remains towards trauma as an individual experience. In the case of the narrative dimension of trauma, the CS approaches have been interesting studies about the opportunities to tell novel and more expressive stories, but these studies do not explicitly address the issue of trauma, which in fact lies at the core of their problem spaces.
I think part of the issue I have with the work done so far is that trauma is not something to be fixed, but transformed. Trauma does not require “solving.” Individual trauma requires explicit acknowledgement, opening up space for grief, and creating a path towards healing. With cultural trauma… there is just not an agreement. Authors only agree in that cultural trauma is never ‘healed’, but instead superseded by other (less painful) social memories. There are certainly design frameworks that can be deployed to acknowledge rather than fix community’s deeply felt emotions and memories. Decolonial and critical approaches to design are meant to do this. Yet, I’m no aware of research that applies these approaches specifically to the realm of cultural trauma. However, I keep an eye for it.