Code for Victoria 2016 fellowship.

Team biodiversity.

All the biodiversity feels

All three biodiversity fellows had a meeting in Bairnsdale on Tuesday the 16th of August. There were a number of Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning staff, one person from birdlife one from field naturalists, and one person from biological consulting company wildlife unlimited. This was our first user research session.

The raw data was transcribed from post-its in the meeting into this trello board.

There were three exercises. We started with an exercise in which participants voiced their emotions about biological data and the Victorian Biodiversity.

They were asked to note things on post-its that made them sad, glad, mad, or confused. This design was borrowed from the most reputable psychological research organisation in the world, pixar, and it’s movie “inside out”.

You can have your say here…

Afterwards we compiled a folk taxonomy to understand what emotions are dominating. Folk taxonomies are interpretive visualisations that describe variation in the use of language. The emotions of madness and sadness dominated the start of the meeting, represented by red and blue. Indeed, one could be forgiven for seeing a little of the beginning of the coming of age story from pixar reflected in this image.

emotionsTaxonomy

The coming of age narrative doesn’t only describe why madness and sadness are so prevalent, it also informs how we might approach the issue. There are many different systems, with various uses to different people. They have been in limbo for decades. We don’t need to fix one confusing form, we need to help the information systems to ‘grow up’.