Design anthropology and new modes of storytelling

You describe yourself as “an anthropologist turned creative director” – are you the only one?

I don’t really know! I used to feel like the only one, but I think these days there’s been a really interesting cross-pollination. Design anthropology is its own field and there is an incredible group of academics across the world doing really interesting work in that space.

How does anthropology shape your creative work?

Anthropology is fundamentally about how people make meaning from their experiences and their interactions with each other. We hear this term all the time now, but it really is a deeply human-centred discipline – it’s about how culture is created, how knowledge is socially transmitted.

It’s very fundamental to my work, but it’s not something I think very actively about any more. It’s a way of seeing that influences how I approach creative problem solving – human focused, but sensitive to all the different ways of experiencing and seeing the world.

Lots of the work you do is thinking about the future and you’ve written that to do that, people need to “comfortable with uncertainty.” How hard is that and how can people get better at it?

Writing that people have to get “comfortable with uncertainty” comes from my own deep discomfort with uncertainty! The speculative work I’ve done, starting at the RCA, I found really challenging, the idea that one could imagine in a space of total possibility.

It’s something I have struggled with a lot in my own practice. I find the act of scenario-building a really useful way to tackle it, playing through all the different possibilities and trying to create tangible ways of encountering those possibilities.

I think ultimately that’s what design is – creating something that allows people to bump up against an idea and assess it. Whether it's something they like or dislike, there’s something there to make sense of. The more you can facilitate encounters with these possibilities, that starts to close the gap between what feels vast and unknown and what we feel we can understand.

You spent some time at Vice, an organisation whose reputation has been tarnished a bit now. But for a time it was doing really exciting, groundbreaking things – did it feel like that at the time?

It really did and that’s why I ended up going over there. From a distance I felt, “Urgh, Vice, it’s a bit much.” But I had a friend who worked there who said, “There’s something cool going on, just try it.” There was a very palpable energy, which was both the blessing and the curse. It came from a lack of structure and organisation, so you had these really young, really smart people with incredibly diverse backgrounds.

It made working there really exciting. You felt like something cool was going to happen that day, you were going to crack an idea or create some new video format for social. The Wild West feeling of no rules definitely contributed to that creativity; the sense that there really was no wrong answer.

You went from this Wild West environment at Vice to the New York Times, which has this massive history and is known as The Grey Lady. How different is innovation in an organisation like that?

Totally different! It’s funny when I was at Vice, while the no-rules openness of everything felt exciting and creatively fuelling, there was something about that I found deeply discomforting. I’m a rule-follower, I like things to be really organised, I am very rigorous in my approach and I like things to be quiet when I’m working, so sometimes that environment at Vice was frustrating.

But at the New York Times there is an incredibly focused and rigorous way of looking at problems. The Research and Development (R&D) team is charged with looking at how emerging technology can be applied in the service of journalism. We help solve existing problems in the newsroom with new tools and technology, but we also build new capabilities for the newsroom.

Is your work proactive or reactive? As in, do journalists come to you with a problem or do you go out and try and get them excited by new technology?

It’s a little bit of both. We have reporters in the field and R&D is charged with looking at fundamental challenges like how do we get media back from the field quicker.

But we are also thinking about the way people are consuming media now and how these new technologies can be applied to create really compelling new reader experiences.

It’s interesting you say “compelling” reader experiences. Do you have to be wary of not making something gimmicky?

Totally. What we do in R&D is incredibly reader-focused, so if it’s not adding value to the reader, and enhancing their experience of a story, then it’s not worth it. One of the things we are working on is 5G, and we have a 5G Lab that is anticipating the various effects that technology will have across media, in particular looking at 3D content and how to deliver that in a seamless way.

That’s a huge challenge, because a 3D model is billions of data points and it’s incredibly heavy. There’s a limit to what we are able to share with readers, because we can’t create experiences that work for some people and not for others. So that’s a huge benchmark, making sure we are not leaving anybody behind by adopting a new technology and saying, “Well too bad. If you’re not on a desktop, you can’t experience this cool new thing.”

These things serve as checks and balances in terms of not doing tech for tech sake. There are various alarm bells that start to go off when we go down a certain path, if we are doing something because we think it might be cool, not because it’s going to add reader value.

I have an image of the R&D lab as this group of mad scientists sitting in the middle of all these very serious journalists. How much are you encouraged to think in playful and creative ways?

R&D is fundamentally about trial and error. We have the cover to do that experimentation and know that some things won’t work. The ability to fail, and fail often, is at the centre of what we do, and being comfortable with failure lends itself to a certain personality type, a certain openness to trying new things. That ethos is very much embodied in this group of people.

Is there a way to tell the difference between a mad idea that is a brilliant idea and a mad idea that is just a mad idea?

I feel like all ideas are a bit of both. Ultimately our job as creative people and technologists is to steer it into the mad-good not mad-bad space.

Could you talk me through a specific project you’ve worked on at the NYT and how new technology shaped that experience?

We published a story back in September using this new photogrammetry capability we have been developing. Photogrammetry is taking still images of a space and stitching them together into a 3D environment.

The mission of the Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. So we are always trying to find ways to bring the reader closer to the story, to understand more by providing different kinds of experiences. We’d been thinking about how we can create 3D environments that allow the reader to inhabit a story differently and we were in the middle of incubating this tech when Hurricane Dorian hit.

One of our team members went out to the Bahamas with the Graphics desk and he was able to use a drone to capture hundreds of still images of the devastation in a shanty town called the Sand Banks. We ended up creating a 3D model from the images we took, and worked with Graphics to combine that with video footage to frame a number of stories about individuals in that shanty town. We used the 3D model as a guide, a way to zoom out and see the scale of the destruction as well as to situate these very intimate portraits of individuals whose lives and homes were literally turned upside down.

It has all the hallmarks of a new technology and there’s a lot of things we are working now to improve, but it’s a great starting point for what photogrammetry might be able to do.

So what you do isn’t about dropping new technology into articles, it’s rethinking what journalism can do and new ways of actually telling stories?

That's exactly it. We are very careful to say we aren't the journalists, we build the capabilities and hand them to the journalists. We are trying to build a seamless process that enables any journalist across the Times to say, “I want to try that. I want to tell this story that way.”

Does that include VR? We used to hear loads about VR but not so much any more. Is VR over already?

I don’t think it’s over. We are doing a lot of work with volumetric capture and there will be more VR experiences in the future. But the way people experience VR is still pretty wonky – it feels quite forced a lot of the time and disorienting. I would say there is more to come.

A few years ago in an interview with Debbie Millman you said that “Brands need to show they are in it for some larger purpose than profit.” It feels like you were ahead of the curve and now every brand can’t wait to tell you about their purpose. Has it all gone a bit too far?

We are very much in danger of that. The turn towards purpose in branding comes from a good place in a lot of cases, but the fact it’s so ubiquitous is an acknowledgement that things are pretty fucked out there.

I’m trying to think of a brand I can point to and say, “I feel like they are not bullshitting us.” But it’s hard to do that right now. I am very jaded. I think a lot of the time, the purpose-driven, giving back narrative feels like an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes, so companies can continue to do the bad things that they do.

I feel pretty passionately that this sort of marketing tack has been played out and we need something different. I don’t know what that is, but I think it’s a more truthful, transparent acknowledgement that a lot of these brands have done things to perpetuate, or exacerbate, or in some cases originate, major environmental and economic problems in America and abroad.