Monthnotes April 2025

Every month or so, I share a quick digest of what I've been working on and reading. Here's the latest. More in the series here.

A big highlight of this past month for me was running a workshop called "how to do creative work in a climate crisis". I pitched it to the folks at Malmö's STPLN co-working space back in January, and they liked the idea, and I've been working on it since then. Finally I got to run it for a sold-out crowd of 25 people on 8 April, just two days before Sweden's Overshoot Day on 10 April.

The workshop is aimed at people who run small creative businesses or nonprofits, and it's divided into two halves. The first half is called "how not to make things worse", and it focuses on crafting a sustainability policy that can be used to say no to work and practices that you don't feel like you should be doing. The second half is called "how to make things better", and it focuses on the role that art plays in scaling up climate action by drawing attention to problems, drawing attention to solutions, and helping people fall in love with nature.

It went really well. Lots of good conversations - at one point I was wandering around the room, and one table was talking about flying, another was talking about AI, another was talking about materials, and another was talking about not working for certain industries. One attendee told me afterwards that it's so rare to be able to have conversations like this without feeling like you're being judgy. So I think it really brought people some value.

I'd love to run it again, so if you know anyone who you think might have an audience that would find the workshop useful then please tell them about it!

Another highlight is that the results of the first Data Sonification Awards have been released! This is the awards programme that I've been working on for the last 18 months alongside Sara Lenzi and Paolo Ciuccarelli.

We looked at existing awards programmes in other fields, and what our goals were, and we created something that I think is quite interesting. It's not really like an Oscars-style awards program, where you pick the best X of the year. Instead it's more like a Michelin Star thing - there are criteria, and if your work is good enough you get awarded.

There are three categories - art, communication and analysis (which includes academic and industry work). To figure out the criteria for each category, we appointed three committee chairs - Jamie Perera handled art, Jordan Wirfs-Brock handled communication, and Myounghoon Jeon handled analysis. They assembled a group of experts, and came up with a set of criteria. We got 81 entries for the first year of the awards, and all of them were then compared against the criteria, with three independent volunteer judges looking at each entry. If two of them said it met the criteria, we awarded it.

You can go to sonificationawards.org to find the winners list, and see the criteria. There's some amazing work among the winners this year (including four Loud Numbers pieces), and it's so great to have the state of art of sonification all assembled in one place. It's been a huge success - we're really happy with how it went.

Next up, we're going to do a little retrospective on how we could run things better for next year, and then begin the process of updating the criteria. If you make sonifications, then on the website you can sign up to get notified when we open the next round of submissions, and if you might be interested in joining one of our expert committees for next year, you can find our email address there too.

I did most of the data work behind this Guardian op-ed from Deliveroo rider Shaf Hussain, who's demanding better pay and working conditions following the news that the company has finally made a profit. Here's a little snippet:

The dangers we face when riding are not recognised in our pay. Base rates were cut in 2019, resulting in widespread protests, with couriers in London reportedly earning as little as £2.90 a delivery. Research by Possible, in partnership with my union, the IWGB, suggests that about one in five couriers in the gig economy make the equivalent of the London living wage.

Read the rest here.

Are you subscribed to Data Curious? It's a newsletter from Ben Dexter Cooley, my collaborator on The Carrington Event last year. He's just moved it from Substack to Ghost (something I will always applaud), and it's one of my favourite things that regularly lands in my inbox. If you like discovering new ways of telling stories with data, creating human experiences with data, and building community resilience through data, then you're going to want to go sign up.

I just did my latest Triannual Review, which long-term readers will have seen me talk about before. Every 100 days, I take a few hours out to run through a document which has a few questions in it - based somewhat on the system described in The Anatomy of Equanimity. It's essentially about having a goal, figuring out some things that'll take you closer towards that goal, and then doing them slowly but surely.

This regular check-in with my past and future selves is something I've been doing for almost six years now, and I've found it hugely useful. It's great to step back from the panics of the moment and realise that things are going fairly well and I'm making progress on things that matter to me. It's a huge part of my medium- and long-term thinking and wellbeing, and I frequently recommend other people give it a try too. So here's me recommending that you give it a try.

Update on project "make a small physical device that plays ambient sonifications of local API data. Weather data, air quality, ISS position, earthquakes, etc".

I've been diving into Pure Data, using this excellent series of small, short tutorials. I managed to create a nice, undulating, ambient soundscape that plays fine on my computer, but when ported to the Pi it only plays for a second or two before stopping. I need to hunt down that bug. Maybe it's just poor performance on the Pi Zero?

Once that's resolved, all that remains is the sonification work - picking the datasets, and mapping different data values to different sound variables. The fun bit! Oh, and building some sort of enclosure for the whole thing (which Silfa has been doing some great work on prototyping).

Update on project "a choose-your-own-adventure way to navigate through poetry on the web, where it's possible to get stuck in, and to escape, narrative loops". It's done, and it's now officially called Siktdjup.

We've just submitted it to the Finnish magazine that will be publishing it, Kontradiktion, so I don't want to share it here and spoil their exclusive. Instead I'll write about it more in next month's newsletter, but if you can't wait then keep an eye on my increasingly-dormant Instagram account for release promo.

A quieter than expected April has allowed me to sign up for a workshop being run by a professor that I know at Malmö University. It's called "Forbidden Music", and it's all about banned instruments, genres, songs throughout history. In the workshop, we'll be making instruments that address some of the themes that emerge through our discussions.

I've only been to the first (of six) classes so far, which asked us to bring an example of an instrument or song or genre that was banned. I picked UK Drill, a subgenre of rap music that has been systematically censored in the UK for almost a decade. The police frequently take down songs from social media platforms - every single one of the 992 requests that the Metropolitan Police made to social media companies and streaming services to review or remove music content between June 2021 and May 2022 involved drill music – and those requests resulted in 879 removals.

Not only are musicians' songs removed, they're sometimes used as evidence in criminal trials - treating the lyrics like confessions of guilt, rather than musical storytelling. And even when not seen as confessions, the music is regarded as dangerous. For example, one of the most influential drill artists is called Digga D. In 2018 he was convicted of conspiring to commit violent disorder, got a year in prison, and after that, for seven years, he had to notify police within 24 hours of uploading any music or videos online, and have the lyrics approved to make sure they didn't incite violence.

These are kids who are already marginalised. They're now being censored and criminalised for telling the stories and realities of their lives through music. And this is taking place in London, today.

Okay, that'll do for this month. I'll leave you with this website that reviews different kinds of apple, which has no business being as good as it is.

See you in May.

Duncan