All around the globe, countries and cities want to know if people are happy and well. They try to quantify happiness and wellbeing using standardized scales (like how satisfied are you on a scale of 1-10) or generic indicators (like access to parks or primary care doctors). Only the generic indicators don’t tell us how happy or well people feel, and the standardized scales hold different meanings to different people based on their own lived experiences --  or whether they’ve had their coffee yet.

What would it look like for a city to engage residents in more humble and authentic ways, deeply listening to what wellbeing means to them?

Auricle is a partnership between the City of Edmonton’s RECOVER team and social design organization InWithForward to test a new form of listening infrastructure in, with, and for communities. We want to learn how to shift data from being a numbers-driven exercise, based on colonial ways of knowing, towards data as a storytelling experience, nourished by multiple ways of knowing and being. 

Wellbeing is about more than the absence of illness or the presence of material things, ancient, intuitive and local wisdom tells us. Wellbeing is personal, rooted in the different connections we feel: to ourselves and our bodies, to the land, to family and community, to the sacred, to culture, and to the human project of finding purpose and self-actualization.  

That means we can’t just boil wellbeing down to a number. And we think the ways in which we measure wellbeing need to themselves enable wellbeing. As in, they shouldn’t feel extractive, exploitative, frustrating, or meaningless. It shouldn’t feel like you’re having to contort your own perspective to fit with someone else’s categories and assumptions.

Six Rebalancing Acts