What Can Surrealism’s Exquisite Corpse Tell Us About Affinity Mapping?
While collaboration is the process of working together to complete one or more tasks, it can often become boring, sterile or overly-planned out. What if I told you that there is not only a way to improve your collaboration skills, but to have fun and be creative while doing it as well?
“The game should be played for some length of time to arrive at the most curious results. The questions, as well as the answers, are to be considered as symptomatic.”
— J. Levy, Surrealism
What initially attracted me to a possible career in UX were its foundations in an evidence-based approach to problems or challenges combined with a design implementation process steeped in imagination, creativity and collaboration.
Being collaborative is an incredibly important skill to have as a UX Designer. And while it tends to be relegated to the periphery when potential employers or recruiters are weighing a job candidate’s qualifications, it is invariably the most important skill one can possess when working on one or more teams.
As I became more ensconced in the particularities of what a UX Designer actually does through my immersive course, I was struck by the similarities that certain UX methods shared with an artistic process born of yesteryear. The research synthesis method Affinity Mapping, in particular, bears an incredible resemblance to the early-twentieth-century Surrealist movement practice known as the Exquisite Corpse.
Affinity Mapping and the Exquisite Corpse
For those that are not familiar with either concept, allow me to explain. Affinity Mapping is a research method that reveals underlying themes or trends from large sets of qualitative data that is generally conducted with a group. If you have ever seen images of people messing around with post-it notes, you at least know what it tends to looks like.
According to Poets.org, the Exquisite Corpse is
“a collaborative poetry game […] played by several people, each of whom writes a word on a sheet of paper, folds the paper to conceal it, and passes it on to the next player for his or her contribution.”
This game is also conducive to drawing or sketching as well. Coming from an artistic background myself, I am familiar with both of these technique variations and tended to practice it with friends for the fun of it or with artistic collaborators as a means to produce camaraderie and to discover a group’s working dynamic.
Of course, the most obvious differences between these synthesizing methods are the intentions for practicing them and what results are produced. Affinity Mapping is intended to produce meaning out of an accumulation of varied information. The practice of it further refines information to help make decisions and inform design directions. The Exquisite Corpse, on the other hand, is intended to produce an aesthetic effect. While this effect can be absurd, random or mesmerizing — it is always surprising. It was devised to help artists and their audiences break free from the same old conventions and expectations and to perhaps usher in new ways to create art and to foster alternative forms of art appreciation.
So What Can Surrealism’s Exquisite Corpse Tell Us About Affinity Mapping?
While Affinity Mapping and the Exquisite Corpse yield different results and are practiced for different reasons, I think these processes complement each other in how collaboration and varying perspectives can be harnessed to reveal unremarkable themes and trends or what is otherwise invisible to us at most times of our everyday lives.
And while I still lack the day-to-day experiences of a working UX Designer, I have Affinity Mapped enough throughout my immersive course and during various personal projects to realize that confirmation biases begin to creep in no matter how aware of them we might be. The fact of the matter is, we possess this and other forms of biases due to having to rely everyday on our subjective perceptions of the world. And while it may be enough to be aware of them to stop oneself from giving into a bias, it certainly is not when conducting data research synthesizing methods like Affinity Mapping.
Hence, it is important to realize that collaboration with others (and the differing perspectives that we all contribute) helps to reveal those elements that otherwise go unnoticed or helps reduce our tendency to give too much primacy to those elements that we prefer.
The Exquisite Corpse Can Aid Us in Building Collaboration Skills and Gaining Perspective
Understanding the Exquisite Corpse or even playing it yourself with others (which I highly recommend) can help bolster a group’s working dynamic as well as make ourselves aware of each other’s perspectives. The Exquisite Corpse allows for a rather contradictory moment of individual creativity while also adding to a larger collective work. And this is exactly what is occurring during an Affinity Mapping session. While, of course, you are whittling away at large amounts of data to make sense of it for a client or business need, you are also making prominent the user narratives that only existed up until then in rarefied ways. And this could only have come about through collaborative work with those that do not see the world in the same way that you do.
