About

Your Digital Tattoo (YDT) is the practice and the network: researchers, facilitators, and collaborators who help people courageously acknowledge and work within and through continuous change, and develop intentional methods of care and repair to help people feel less alone, connected, and more courageous.

FOUNDING PRINCIPLE BIO

By day, Dr. Lauren “L” Vargas (she/they) is a digital dragon wrangler, storycarer, and time traveler with more than 20 years of experience exploring how people connect, communicate, and collaborate in digital spaces. As principal of Your Digital Tattoo, Vargas works globally with mission-driven organizations to cultivate more inclusive, regenerative, and future-conscious approaches to digital community, communication, collaboration, and strategic foresight.

Vargas is the creator of the ‘Take CARE to be CALM’ framework, a practice for individual and collective sensemaking that pairs Communication, Adaptation / Adoption, Resilience, and Empathy with Collaborative, Anticipatory, Let Go / Leaderful, and Mindful action. The framework supports people and organizations to navigate complexity with greater clarity, care, and intentionality.

As an independent researcher and practitioner, Vargas’s work as a collaborator, facilitator, and strategic foresight guide is informed by ongoing research and writing. An Honorary Research Fellow with the Institute of Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, she explores questions of digital maturity, with particular attention to hidden, invisible, and emotional forms of digital labor, as well as the relational and cultural dynamics that shape how people work, communicate, and collaborate in increasingly complex digital environments.

Alongside this nonfiction research, Vargas uses speculative fiction and scenario narratives to support strategic foresight and collective sensemaking. Through #BookDNA on Substack, short stories, and longer-form fiction projects, Vargas explores more-than-human worlds shaped by ecology, memory, and non- and more-than-human forces. 

Based in Leiden, the Netherlands, Vargas weaves together research, facilitation, futures practice, and storytelling to connect imagination, complexity, and collective sensemaking.

YDT PHILOSOPHY

We will not sacrifice our values of integrity, accountability, and inclusion for our bottom line or any other organization's. We work to live, not the other way around. We work from anywhere, as long as we abide by our (collectively understood and agreed-upon) boundaries.

The vision is not a 24-hour hustle business. We ask, repeatedly: what meaningful work might we commit to that still allows everyone involved to have meaningful lives outside the work?