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“What happened?” questions for evaluation

To evaluate your project, your can choose the relevant questions to assess what happened per impact dimension. These are descriptive questions drawing from observations, participant quotes, focus groups and more. Especially valuable are insights about what happened that was not anticipated — including insights in dimensions that were not an initial focus. The questions below are just meant to provide some guidance and inspiration — you don't have to answer them all. You can elaborate as much as you need.

Do people describe bodily reactions, tied to emotional responses? How?
Do people describe reactions to experiential environments?
Do people report on unfamiliar, first time experiences of embodiment?
Do people report on tensions, conflicts or contradictions, and struggles to integrate experiences?
How do people relate their experiences to their life histories?
Do people ascribe meaning and value to shared embodiment if this is relevant to your project?
Can you observe a heightening of emotional energy, or do people report on an increase in emotional energy?

Do people report that their knowledge and understandings of the world have changed?
Does your data include people’s descriptions of having gained new knowledge, or new perspectives that they were unfamiliar with?
Have people learned something about a topic they did not know about before, and does the data indicate that this learning has been important to them?
Do they mention re-framing their understandings of the world in some way?
Do people report having learned from each other?

Are people reporting on engaging with or creating new images or stories that they have not encountered before?
How do these new images or stories relate to their previous ideas and images of the future, present, or past?
How do these new images or stories relate to concrete actions in the past or present?
How do these new images or stories relate to people's values and concerns?
Do they appear to generate emotional energy - do they resonate with participants/visitors?
Are people developing new capacities for individual and collective imagination?

What expressions and practices of care are part of your project — in its materials, in interactions that are part of the project?
How is caring expressed among those present — and toward beings and environments that are not present?
How do people describe experiences of caring and being cared for as part of this project?
How do people reflect on what insights caring and being cared for give them about their role(s) and relationships in the world?
How do people describe their emotional energy around the project's engagement with care?
How does care generate trust and safety for people?
What normally under-recognized emotions and experiences are given space and support through care?

Does your project create new symbols of social relationship, group solidarity, and standards of morality?
Does your project bring new groups of people together that are connecting to each other in meaningful ways - focused on intentions, values and emotions?
Does your project facilitate the expression of values, emotions, concepts and intentions that become the focus of group organization?
Does your project let people experiment with new forms of organizing?
Do people express intentions to create new forms of collaborating and organizing due to their engagement with your project?

Do people report your project as having provided them with inspiration (emotional energy + ideas, insights)?
Did this inspiration lead them to:
a) replicate the project elsewhere (scaling out)?
b) change the organizational or institutional conditions to help spread the ideas, imagery, stories, methods or principles of your project (scaling up)?
c) adapt ideas, imagery, stories, methods or principles of your project to help create change other in contexts such as policy/strategy (scaling across)?
d) use skills and capabilities gained through your project for other change activities (scaling through)?
How did the shape of existing and new networks play a role in spreading inspiration?
What is the role of individual relationships and small groups in spreading inspiration?

What parts of your project involve co-creation? Is the process itself also co-created or open?
Are participants involved in co-creating the purpose of your project?
Are participants involved in selecting the methods of your project?
What pre-existing notions about the world are being challenged, integrated, or adapted?
How do people report the role of co-creation in feeling ownership, agency and control over your project?
Do people report having learned new skills for collaboration?
How do people involved with your project reflect on their own position related to other co-creators?

Do people report feeling empowered - do they have a sense that they might have an impact on the world? An increased sense of competence? A sense of connecting to meaning? Do they have a sense that their choices have opened up?
Does your project involve the creation or adaptation of symbols, language and images that have the potential to mobilize attention and resources - such as the media, powerful institutions, spaces, and politics?
Is there evidence of heightened emotional energy around the people engaging with the creative practice that relates meaningfully to reports of empowerment? How does this emotional energy relate to the symbols, language, images etc. created?
How does this project offer skills and insights for people to organize and empower themselves?

What evidence can you find in the ideas, approaches and activities proposed or undertaken by those involved in your project that seek to disrupt or subvert existing systems, practices and ways of working?
What ideas are central to your project that subvert existing structures?
Do people practice with any skills around subversion?
How do people reflect on the ways your project either disrupts/ subverts their ideas and perspectives?
Conversely, does your project allow people to perform or express themselves in ways that subvert or disrupt dominant systems and ideas?
What materials, texts and expressions are created by participants and how do these signify the disruption and/or subversion of dominant systems and ideas?

“So what?” questions

These are questions related to societal change, meant to be more critical and evaluative — including questions about who was and was not involved, what could be expected to happen in the future, and what could be done differently. These are meant for reflection, not judgement. The questions below are just meant to provide some guidance and inspiration — you don't have to answer them all. You can elaborate as much as you need.

What values about what the world is and what it should be does the embodiment represent? What values are missing?
Who gets to participate in the embodiment? Who does not? Why?
What bodily experiences and experiential worlds are being made available? Which ones are not present but maybe should be? What about those of other species?
Is there evidence that embodiment has truly helped people access more diverse ways of being and knowing, in a way that has changed their lives?
Is there evidence that embodiment has provided people with more emotional energy in a longer-term sense?

What values underlie the new things people are learning?
Who gets to participate in the learning, and if relevant, the teaching? Who does not? Why?
Whose knowledge is being made accessible? Whose knowledge is not made accessible? Why?
How might the individual and/or collective learning change people on the longer term?
Is the learning likely to lead to new individual and/or collective skills and capabilities?

Who is represented in the stories and images that are engaged with, either as creators or as characters/ perspectives? Who is not represented?
How do these new images or stories relate to existing societal imaginations of the future, present or past? What values underpin these imaginations?
Do the images and stories challenge existing societal imaginations or re-articulate existing but alternative imaginations? Or do they represent something entirely new?
Are there indications that new images or stories might gain more collective and/or institutional support?

Who is being cared for? Who is doing the caring? Who is not being cared for but maybe should be? Who should be doing the caring?
How does your project offer specific engagements with care that would otherwise not be possible outside of this practice?
How are experiences of caring and being cared for expected to open people's perspectives on the political possibilities that caring creates?
Are there indications that the forms of care in this creative practice might become more widespread?

Who is involved in the engagement or creation of shared symbols and representations of emotions, values, intentions and concepts that might form the basis for organization? Who is not involved but perhaps should be?
Do the shared symbols and representations that may form the basis for organization persist over time?
What is unique about this creative practice in terms of its ability to facilitate social organization?
Is there evidence of new networks, collaborations or organizations that have emerged concretely as a result of the creative practice?

Who is involved in the spreading of inspiration? Whose ideas, images, stories, methods are being spread and amplified? Who is not part of the spreading of information but maybe should be?
Does the spreading of inspiration through various types of scaling lead to concretely changed practices and action?
Is anything important lost in the inspiration of practices by others? Does your project get absorbed by mainstream systems or does it change mainstream systems in a meaningful way?
What is unique about this project that allows it to inspire and scale?

Do the co-creative aspects increase the emancipatory character of your project? In what ways does it fall short in this regard?
Whose perspectives are included and not included?
Do the co-creative aspects improve the insights and knowledge created through your project?
Do the co-creative aspects increase the possibility of stimulating real action?
Has the co-creative process led to new connections among people?

Whose perspectives, experiences, concerns and ways of being are being empowered through your project? Who is not included but maybe should be? What about other species?
Is there evidence that more individuals and organizations, the media and powerful institutions are adopting and mobilizing symbols, languages and ideas that were previously marginalized or disempowered?
Are resources being mobilized to empower marginalized people and groups?
Does your project connect to any windows of possibility - key events in wider society that offer opportunities for change?

Whose realities, activities, views are being subverted? Who is doing the subverting? Is there harm possible in terms of who is subverting and being subverted?
Do any conflicts arise? What are the conflicting positions?
Do activities come out of the engagement that are likely to subvert current systems?
Do subversive ideas, metaphors, images and other elements of your project resonate with wider societal contexts - in the media, public discourse?
Is there any evidence of actual change to systems some time after the project has begun?

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