Quick Participatory Doughnut Mapping

Mapping perceptions and experiences to make a quick Doughnut Portrait for your place

Posted by the DEAL Team May, 29, 2025 6 likes

v1 (June 2025)

About this tool

This is a printable workshop canvas of an adapted Doughnut, to be used in participatory workshops, where a quick perception-based Doughnut Portrait of a place is created.

Participants are invited to map how they feel their place is currently doing across the social and ecological, local and global dimensions of the Doughnut. This can be for a neighbourhood, town, city or another scale of your choosing.

Participants map their perceptions by using red or green sticky dots - placing a green dot in the “safe and just space” of the Doughnut where they feel their place is doing well, and a red dot in the ‘shortfall’ and ‘overshoot’ areas, where they feel the place is not doing well. And as they place their dots, you can have a conversation.

The workshop sheet and how a Quick Doughnut Portrait could look like

This outcome is quick, collective, workshop-based version of the Data Portrait tool. But unlike the Data Portrait methodology, the aim isn't to create a precise Doughnut Portrait, rather the process helps to start conversations, get quick visibility about what matters in a place, raise awareness of these things, inform wider participation processes, and help communicate the value of a Data Portrait.

The workshop canvas features adapted version of the Doughnut, that draws on all four lenses of the Doughnut Portrait approach, meaning you can look at both local and global perspectives for your place.

The dimensions (the words in the boxes, like 'employment' and 'clean air') are also adapted so that participants can make a judgement based on their own lived experiences. The benefit of this is that they don't need to be familiar with, or have access to, formal data or statistics.

Variation of the workshop sheet and how a Quick Doughnut Portrait could look like

How to use and adapt the tool

Materials

The printable workshop canvas is available in an editable powerpoint format.

You are welcome to adapt the dimensions (the words in the boxes, like 'employment' and 'clean air') based on your own needs and context, but we ask that you please keep dimensions for both the local aspirations and global connections. On the sheet, you will see some possibilities on alternative dimensions you could use.

You can print out the workshop sheet in A0, A1, A2 or A3 format, and will need red and green sticky dots (standard 10mm ones for the A3, and 10-30mm for the bigger formats, you can determine the size based on your sheets and the number of participants).

Workshop format and content

The workshop can be done in different ways, and you are welcome to experiment. Here are few examples and suggestions:

a standalone 10 minute exercise as part of a longer event, where participants in a workshop gather around a big printed sheet and map their perceptions and experiences with sticky dots, resulting in a quick Doughnut Portrait.
a standalone 1-2 hour workshop, where different working groups create different Portraits through table discussion. Each version can then been compared in a whole room discussion, with the aim of agreeing a Portrait that resonates the most, or focus the discussion on the themes where the mapped lived experiences significantly vary.
an exercise as part of a wider Doughnut Portrait process - where a draft Doughnut Portrait has been created, and the workshop serves to enrich a Doughnut Portrait, or raise new questions. For example, it might reveal gaps or differences with an existing Data Portrait.

Download the tool

You can view and download the tool directly from Google Slides, or download it in a Powerpoint format at the bottom of this page.

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Sharing back

In the spirit of reciprocity, we would appreciate it if you share back your experiences and adaptations when you use a version of this tool - as a written story or in the Photostream, so that others can learn and get inspired from your work. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the tool - get in touch.

Visual example of similar workshop in Riga (City of Riga and NGO "Green Liberty") Photo credit: Paulis Jakušonoks.

Visual example of similar workshop in Glasgow (More here: doughnuteconomics.org/stories/community-portrait-of-glasgow)

Acknowledgements

This tool was designed by Leonora Grcheva, Kate Raworth and Ruurd Priester (graphics) from the DEAL team, with support from Rob Shorter. We would like to thank the Glasgow team for the initial inspiration for the tool, and the Riga team for providing photos and materials from their own version of the tool.