Mapping Affinities: Democratizing Data Visualization

The important process of flattening and decentralizing organizations starts first by understanding their structure. Mapping Affinities by Dario Rodighiero introduces an important network visualization model to map large organizations in order to foster collaboration and autonomy. This is a much-needed effort.

— Manuel Lima

The diagrammatic mapping produced by Dario Rodighiero’s designs combines the complexity of esoteric insight with the clarity of rational logic. This well-formulated approach promises to produce ways of ‘reading’ massive quantities of current data so that its statistical richness becomes graphically legible. In the process, the transformation of mere information into schematic visualizations exposes latent, actual, and potential affinities through a practice suggestive of digital alchemy. This is fascinating work, full of possibilities.

— Johanna Drucker

Introduction

Today, organizations are more than ever complex systems. They are so large, ramified, and intertwined that their organic structure seems like a tangle of activities. Day by day organization members contribute to keeping these structures alive with their actions, behaviors, and thoughts. Organizations rely on these daily practices.

Sociology aims to untangle the network of daily practices through the analysis of the digital traces that members leave on the cloud by using desktop computers, smartphones, Wi-Fi networks, identity cards, and online services. The challenge is to recompose structures and behaviors using the data that its members left behind, in various forms and places.

Understanding from daily activities how an organization fluctuates deeply interests the management. The way in which employees work is fundamental to making decisions and planning the future. In particular, managers are interested in having a global perspective to optimize the performance of their employees as much as possible.

The concept of performance deals with the challenge of obtaining the very best from the organization, and management often uses indicators to measure their employees’ performance. Today, however, two interesting things happen: one is that indicators are moving from tabular to graphical form, the other being that the same indicators are at the disposal of everybody as a form of transparency and self-examination.

Nowadays, performance not only interests corporations but also universities. In academia, scholars are often assessed through their publications using the h-index or the impact factor. Directors use such metrics to recruit scholars and, in turn, the same scholars try to improve these metrics to be positively evaluated. This bidirectional use clearly shows that academia adheres to performance-based logic.

Current academic policies do not usually take into account a dimension that plays a critical role in scholarly dynamics, the affinity between scholars.

This book focuses on the concept of affinity and the ways to visually represent it. Affinities are diversified and take many forms: from common interests to committee memberships, from teaching activities to publication co-authoring. Affinities are also multiple as scholars share different kinds of them at the same time, reinforcing their overall ties.

Affinities can be classified as actual and potential. A certain number of potential affinities indicates a predictable tie between scholars; these affinities might be representative for common interests, interdisciplinarity, intellectual culture, professional career, or scientific journals, conferences, and committees. Potential affinities become actual ones when a collaboration takes place; it may be the case of co-authoring a paper or supervising the same doctoral candidate. As a consequence, affinities offer two different dimensions: one is solid and composed of ongoing collaborations, the other is projected towards the possible opportunities to explore the academic environment.

The metric of affinities is crucial for academic organizations. Translating affinities into a visual representation draws a space where actual and potential dimensions can be combined. Contrary to the other metrics that reinforce the ranking between individuals, the logic of affinities is a tool to explore the present for future planning. The attempt is to represent the academic dynamics to foster new synergies. With respect to the logic of governance, planning these synergies is in the interest of both managers and employees to enable top-down as well as bottom-up initiatives.

The metric of affinities has to be, therefore, at the disposal of the whole collective to visually lead individuals in personal choices.

This book is the result of five years working at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), during which the problem of mapping affinities was addressed through a design approach. This problem was tackled by visual means, which represent the only solution to manage the enormous mass of data that humans are increasingly producing. The innovation of this work does not stay in the problem itself but rather in the reconciliation of humanities and technology through a new European Bauhaus.