Here is the link to the Live Demo of the Johari Window if you'd like to try it out yourself with your friends!
Background
The Johari Window is a model used for self-awareness and improving interpersonal communication. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise. Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names.
As part of this exercise, participants are asked to describe an individual from the group using a set of adjectives. The individual is also asked to describe themselves using the same set of adjectives.
Placing these descriptions on a grid, the Johari Window reveals the gaps between the individual's self-perception and how others perceive them. What follows is a discussion among the group about the possible reasons for the gaps between their perception of one another and indeed, the very meaning of some of the adjectives themselves. What does it mean for an individual to be "complex" or "simple"? What does it mean for someone to be "silly" or "serious"?
Motivation
The idea for this project came about in March 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic while me and my fellow graduate students were sequestered in our own homes during the lockdown in New York City. As part of our coursework for the Collective Play course, we were asked to create a group experience for our classmates to participate in. I was reading Judith Donath's book The Social Machine and was inspired to think about how I could create a digital space that encouraged expressing vunerability and curiosity within a group of peers.
Framework
I used an Express Server and WebSocket.IO to create a framework that allowed for queuing behavior (that enables the selection of a random subject within a group) as well as voting behavior to aggregate responses.
The frontend is built using Vue.JS, and Tachyons for styling. The project is self-hosted on my own VPS.
Playtesting
The app was playtested rigorously over several playtesting sessions. These sessions were a great opportunity to get feedback on the exercise and to see how it was received by the participants. Here are some of the questions that I received about the exercise itself.
- What’s awkward for people about this process?
- "How can we give people permission to say something critical?"
- "The adjectives themselves. I worry about having too many options."
- "Are negative adjectives more judge-y than positive ones?"
In response to these questions, I trimmed the list of adjectives, updated the adjectives to be more balanced in tone, and reassessed the questions that I asked after the exercise and how I encouraged vulnerability as a part of the process.
Future Directions
I built this app to accomodate multiple rooms so that several groups of people could particupate in this exercise simultaneously, but never felt the necessity to turn it on. I think I might add it in the future in case I want to run it for a larger audience.
A really interesting direction that was suggested to me was to flip the exercise and allow participants to enter their own words and then have a discussion around how to arrange them in the quadrants. It could be a fun remix of the exercise that adds another layer of collaboration.