A reflection on hosting a Warm Data Lab in Ipswich and what it reveals about how we learn, relate, and make sense of complexity
The marina was drenched in the sun that Wednesday evening during Ipswich Thrive Business Festival. A group of people from diverse horizons, jobs, and countries gathered at the University of Suffolk’s Waterfront for a shared experience where stories grow and connect beneath the surface: their first Warm Data Lab.
In this lab, there are no test tubes or protective gloves. There is no fixed blueprint or pre-coded outputs. The focus is not on fragmentation or statistics. Expertise takes a different place here.
Grounded in a long lineage of systems thinking and inquiry, Warm Data practices seem to bring complexity science into lived, shared experience and mutual learning. So this is what we did:
A group of people slowed down for two hours and noticed how they relate.
I offered a story of home, great-grandmothers, first travels, toilets throning in the garden in our ancestors’ humble abodes, then rehomed in brand new bathrooms, for progress, convenience or care.
The story explored shattered beliefs, women’s liberation, and myths that we are sold and that can stifle us from a tender age…
I asked the participants:
“What is home in a changing world?”
They began to evoke personal stories in small groups through different lenses (history, health, technology, politics, ecology, science, etc.), and meaning, feeling, and memory started to move between people and across contexts, revealing small, sometimes cathartic nuances in life’s process.
Together, these people built relationships that build relationships that build relationships…
“What does it mean when I am far away from my native homeplace, and I feel cold in this new country? What is this cold telling me?”
“We gave shelter to people whose houses had been bombed, whose bodies were shattered, whose families had been annihilated. Home was gone, a black hole sucking what was left of life.”
“Home is no longer what it was, and I found a new family and my ancestry via technology”
“Home is an idea that keeps vanishing and resurrecting as I’m changing jobs, leaving places, as people in my family die or go and live abroad. As I’m growing older, my face is changing. It changes all the time. My body is home to my new self.”
What was shared could not be reduced to a single narrative, yet something collective was forming.
So what is home?
And between us… what counts as valid knowledge?
What we’re working with in a Warm Data Lab doesn’t settle easily into measurable, isolated, replicable, stable, extractable data or outputs. The space invites a shift in how people perceive relationships and contexts.
In this space, meaning doesn’t sit in individual statements or “what people think,” but in the relationships between contexts, histories, and interactions. When we try to capture and standardise those into data points, we risk flattening the very dynamics the process is trying to make visible.
What Lives Between Us as Knowing? And how does it behave?
For the students and professors in the group this week, it’s not that the way they do measurement or publish results is wrong; they just operate within a different frame.
Often, that frame assumes knowledge can be separated from the conditions that produce it. Warm Data Labs are working with the opposite assumption: that everything is entangled and can’t be meaningfully understood in isolation.
So for me, the value isn’t in proving or replicating outcomes, but in what shifts in how people relate, perceive, and make sense of complexity. Those shifts are real, but they don’t translate easily into metrics without losing something essential.
Symmathesy
Integrated in the lab is the final moment – the symmathesy* – a few minutes where participants share observations or reflections about what they’ve experienced, noticed and learned together during the story time.
“The thinking suddenly expands, I can touch it.”
“I had no destination to start with, and it felt absolutely fine.”
“From the very first minute, someone opened up with a moving story. I hardly heard their name. In fact, I don’t know about them, and at the same time, I know everything I need to know.”
“I understand ‘home’ from a different perspective now.”
“I can feel how women in my family were all caught between rigid myths and experiments. Experiments won.”
There is a temptation to turn these statements into “data”.
But the moment I do, it feels like trying to bottle something that only exists in the air between people.
Each Warm Data Lab is particular
It doesn’t lend itself easily to mechanised scaling. The knowledge that emerges in the room and its effects are observable, but they can’t be captured, stabilised, and extracted from context.
What grows there doesn’t transplant unchanged. It seems to live in the connections, in the shifting contexts, in the way people meet, and changes as they do.
At some point, I noticed my own need to understand loosening, and I wonder:
- What forms of knowing do I trust, and which ones do I overlook because they are harder to measure or explain?
- When I try to understand something complex, do I look for answers or do I notice how relationships, contexts, and perspectives are shaping what I can see?
- What changes for me when I experience knowledge through relationships rather than something organised and measured in isolation?
And you, what do you think?
There is warmth and magic in the way you shared your story and hosted the space in the lab, that is an antidote to so much ‘performing’ in life that tries to force a behaviour from people who ‘know less than me’. Instead, we are invited to be curious about each other’s stories, and the rich conversations that flowed from this were joyful and inspiring to be part of. Who knew the depth of the people in the room in 2 hours together? ~Esmee Wilcox, Director, Socially Adept
A POEM TO SEND US HOME AFTER THE LAB
Go Home
The morning’s clinking of dishes wakes the ghosts of yesterday.
Tiny threads of history wrapping around the arc of the day.
The traditions of tea, coffee, and breakfast in their details hold the whole story —
of why it is so hard to stop the wars and horrors.
No point in making big graphs.
No point in huge committees.
Those big programs only enhanced the disaster.
Go home.
Touch the ghosts, find them, notice them hiding under your sleeve and in your cupboards.
They are in the kitchen, feeding you daily doses of the past.
Comforting, familiar ideas of life where yesterday, the day before, and tomorrow are all alike.
Whispering away the shake of shifting paths in illusions of practicality and reason.
They say:
This is how it issssssssssssss.
No, it is not.
A visitor came …
When asked what he would like for breakfast, he said,
“Nothing special — just cornflakes and chocolate milk.”
Another visitor came …
When asked what he would like for breakfast, he said,
“Nothing special — just buckwheat and pork.”
After a while, all the visitors’ breakfasts began to reveal that each of us is living in a universe of our own, infected perhaps by culture, and built in experience and language.
Which one is the real one? Which one is right?
These are the trapping questions.
Humility. At breakfast.
Unfamiliar microthreads of possibility spread thinly over toast.
A sip of warmed confusion,
Scrambled know-how with a side of fried habits.
Go home, to where the ghosts make breakfast.
~Bateson, N. (2026). “Go Home.” In Belly. Triarchy Press
Read more about Symmathesy
For more about Warm Data, visit WarmData.Life
If you want to experience a Warm Data Lab in your setting, get in touch here.
