Transdisciplinary Design

Is there sacred attention online?

Posted on December 14, 2017

On November 10, 2017 my friend Daniel died from a stomach virus that spread to and infected his heart. He was 31-years old.

In reflecting on his tragic passing, I hope to honor and elevate his memory. This experience opened up important questions for me about the intersection of design and religion in tragedy, community-building, and in the ways that people grieve and rebuild in the digital age.

Studying design has given me the foundation to see religion as “technology.” In my efforts to emotionally and intellectually process this tragedy, I’d like to deconstruct these intersecting technologies in their expression online during and after Daniel’s death.

When I first read Jamer’s quote: “To meet a designer is to meet an optimist,” it resonated so deeply with my experience of people of faith, and I think there is something powerful in deconstructing the source/technology that undergirds this optimism of both the designer and the pious person.

In this extremely cynical and uncertain world, optimism is scarce and I believe it is important to capitalize on it however and wherever we can for the future of the word.

An untimely loss and an inspiring communal moment:

Daniel was a prominent member of the Jewish community. (His real name has been changed for the purposes of this blog post).

Over the course of twenty days, Daniel, an athletic, young father, fought for his life through three open heart surgeries. He is succeeded by his two young daughters and his beautiful wife who is expecting their third child.

During the 20 days of Daniel’s battle for life, his wife, Rebecca, waged a global online campaign, imploring the Jewish world to pray and/or do good deeds for Daniel, with the tag #DanielStrong. Thousands of people prayed and organized local events to do charitable deeds together in the merit of Daniel’s recovery. Metaphysical transactions with a digital record.

After Daniel’s death, the community mobilized a new campaign, under the name #Rebeccastrong, to raise $1,000,000 in an online crowdfunding campaign to support her and her children in the transition of the loss of her husband. This campaign was successfully funded by people across the world; the first of its kind that I have ever seen directed towards a single individual in this community.

Unpacking Religious x digital technology at play in this:

It is clear how the digital age has afforded us new opportunities to ask for help and receive support. I’d like to also call out the religious technology at play:

• Prayer
  • For hundreds of years, Jews have traditionally recited the psalms -in their original sequence as a protective ward in times of crisis. Because it takes an individual a day or longer to read through it one one’s own, it is often coordinated between a group of people in order to complete all of the readings. This information architecture makes it incredibly efficient to coordinate prayer.
  • In times of emergency such as this, there was a global-group of strangers who coordinated through a custom website that allowed people to “reserve” which psalms they were saying and/or be assigned not-yet-read psalms on behalf of Daniel’s recovery. Thus, this “prayer technology” is rapidly mobilized and coordinated given the information architecture.
• Charity:
  • While traditionally Jewish custom has valued anonymity in charity, I believe that the success/speed of this million dollar campaign for Rebecca and her family was only possible because of how it capitalized on a kind of social-media-mindset of making people feel seen in their actions. People were given the option to make anonymous donations, but most (including mine) were entered with the donors’ name and a message of condolences.
    

My take away is that when these spiritual practices happen online, moving what used be more private into a completely public space, its ethics change. A god-centered mindset is replaced or morphed into a distributed, human-centered mindset.

In what ways might digital technology hinder or compromise this deeply sacred experience of honoring someone at the end of their life? And what ethical questions does this kind of phenomena produce?

For the purposes of this post, I am using “sacred” in the following way:  “Sacred means revered due to sanctity and is generally the state of being perceived by religious individuals as associated with divinity and considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion; or inspiring awe or reverence among believers.”

• Communities convene online to support people in times of crisis. However, people are never taught how to respond to the psychological load that comes in these moments, and our interfaces do not give us the agency to determine this load/ decide what is an optimal way for us to engage with this news. Tragic updated are often distributed in a newsfeed, sometimes packaged between nonsense cat videos. If people are going to use digital interfaces for sacred acts, how do we redesign that experience to honor an individuals’ attention/intention: what comes before it and what comes after it? When and where does this choice get made?

Certainly an information system that is designed to optimize compulsive consumption is not sacred. In the social-media system,  the only way we create any separation between content is with a “like” button to elevate it from the otherwise infinite scroll. What would it look like to think of a newsfeed in the context of the sacred and profane?

Separately, my question to religious leadership within this community is what are the future implications of this online community response, considering notions of representation, ethics, and morality?

If this enormous campaign is mobilized for one individual, how can this charitable impulse and impressive coordination be leveraged for/by the community for other tragedies/humanitarian responses?

What are the insights for designers, beyond this community?

“As with the ubiquitous image of the isolated polar bear on a cleaved ice flow that has become a synecdoche for an environmental catastrophe, the scope of which we cannot comprehend, we concoct overly simplistic and inapt depictions because the conceptual scale of these hydra-headed problems surpasses our ability to respond. They have taken on a scale that goes beyond the grasp of the human mind’s finite ability to hold connections, relationships, and variables together in one frame. But rather than just freeze in the face of complexity, it is revealing to dig a bit deeper into scale and its behaviors so that we may begin to formulate an escape from its paralyzing effects.”

This quote effectively frames how horrible human beings are at perceiving issues of scale. I see the response to this singular tragedy as a collective (unconscious) response to our usual paralysis in the face of wicked problems. It is a catharsis. For designers, I think the implication is that designers need to work harder to frame issues in more intimate context in order to trigger a momentum/ groundswell of action. Scale is simply too intimidating.

Secondly, I think the implication for designers is to consider how long it takes to nurture widespread cultural practices/beliefs/ use of technology. The religious technology of prayer and charity that made this mass-response possible, began hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Without them, collective action does not have the same coordinated effect.

Moving forward, I’d like to continue to investigate the following:

• Where and how are digital technologies and religious technologies in harmony/conflict?
  
  • Where does something new emerge between them? I want to heed Dunn and Raby’s provocation that  “We need more pluralism in design, not of style but of ideology and values.” In this sense, I believe Designers need to borrow or steel from religious histories and practices.

• • Currently, our digital lives often sabotage our agency over our time and erase the sense of endings (infinite scrolling). How can our designed interfaces reflect the natural cycles of the world, of life, the sacred in time?
  • How can they better respect us in the ways we want to engage in networks of emotion, of grief over the loss of a loved one, of joy of the preciousness of life?
    

Hannah Roodman

Design as Future Making, 236