What is the impact of Generative AI and related technologies on research photography? Will it undermine the need to collect original photos? Or extend their impact?

Despite being a niche topic, research photography makes an interesting case study because of its relatively high return on investment compared to other data types and the broad impact from emerging technologies.

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Previous articles in this series covered first principles, explored the impact of Generative AIs on the evolution of understanding, introduced the concept of organisational data metabolism as a way of thinking about an organisation’s propensity to effectively ingest different types of data, before unpacking the foundational value of original photography. These are all topics that I’m researching for my next book on human and organisational sensemaking, a follow up to The Field Study Handbook.

How asks evolve

Research photography is one of many qualitative data-gathering methods. To understand how it is used today, we can consider the kinds of qualitative research projects that are commissioned by organisations.

As qualitative research teams demonstrate their value (or otherwise) to their clients, demands on their time typically evolve from tactical requests such as “Help us fix this” and “Help us make this” to more strategic ones — the most common being “What should we make?” with insights and recommendations grounded in user needs and behaviours. The following framework was originally proposed by my manager at Nokia Research Panu Korhonen, which I’ve extended to encompass Studio D client asks from the past decade.

A milestone for the research team occurs when requests shift from tactical requests to more open-ended, strategic questions. Whether this leads to a “seat at the decision-making table” depends on many factors such as demonstrating enduring value, political nous, and integrating well with other organisational functions. The more open-ended the starting questions, the further upstream in decision making process the team moves, the greater the number of organisational functions that it potentially affects.

Starting assumptions

Before we move onto future scenarios I’ve seeded a few assumptions drawn from a reflection of why our practice norms settled where they are today, combined with extrapolations of current trends. Of course these are open to debate and many other assumptions can and should be considered.

Qualitative sensemaking assumptions

E.g. historically, well run qualitative research has provided an nuanced understanding of “why” people behave as they do, whilst well run quantitative data delivers on the “what” and “how”. AI seems well poised to tackle “what if” questions with some important caveats around the black-box nature of their training data and inherent, difficult-or-impossible to mitigate biases. My assumption is that commissions for field research will gradually decline (in relation to other research methodologies) as more of our daily lives shift-to and are queryable online — but that organisations will continue to value the nuanced “understanding why” perspective drawn from in-field data.

Cultural assumptions

E.g. mainstream access to vastly more content of which the veracity is more difficult to gauge. However, in certain scenarios, a higher tolerance for errors will be considered acceptable trade-offs against convenience and speed (the impact of this on what products are released on the market, and the speed of trail and error in the market place is worthy of a separate article).

Our community values information accuracy but, as practitioners who study the human condition we also recognise that person-to-person transmission of information is inherently prone to distortions from intent and fallibilities in recall. I posit that we’ve always lived in a disinformation landscape, and the current turmoil is from the shift to new gatekeepers of the “truth”, the increased scale and the speed at which disinformation is disseminated.

Organisational assumptions

E.g. the speed at which new technologies are adopted is accelerating.

Whilst deploying new technologies organisation-wide is non-trivial it is influenced by employee’s practices outside the workplace. This influence is especially true of practices drawn from social media adoption since a deep understanding of these platforms — and the new technologies, features, and assumptions they deploy — are gained from hands-on use and abuse. Motivations for using social media varies across generations as a reflection of the the motivations at different life-stages (Armstrong, 2016, Chipchase, 2021). This creates a “generational mindset shift” of employees who are “natives” versus “non-natives”, and as more senior staff make way for new employees it becomes easier to challenge deeply held assumptions of best practice in a given domain.

Technological assumptions

E.g. that Generative AI can produce photos, video, audio, text, code and other content types; more “localised” AI models based on country-, regional-, and political-leanings, religious belief systems; more refined content fingerprinting and content tracking; more evolved augmented reality (plus a few niche virtual reality use cases); plus widespread consumer-grade tools for mapping spaces using Lidar and related technologies.

There will continue to be inherent unaddressed biases in the generative AI models, and its an open question what future level of transparency they will provide to their training data and processes, mandated by regulation or by societal pressure.

Regulatory assumptions

The regulatory environment for AI is still nascent, although based on past stances the relative emphasis I’ve assumed are:

• US: emphasis on business opportunities, then socetial wellbeing,
• China: emphasis on protecting the state, but otherwise pragmatically business first,
• European Union: emphasis on quality of life, then business opportunities.

The European Parliament’s AI Act (2024), currently going through ratification includes provisions relevant to this article including: the labelling of AI generated and manipulated imagery; that data sets (include those built on generating images) are “relevant, representative, free of errors and complete”, taking into account the intended purpose (Edwards, 2024); and limitations e.g. on police and some other uses of real-time facial recognition systems.

Each country/trading block is juggling a different set of stakeholders and threats, and other approaches to regulation will emerge. India, Pakistan and Japan make strong alternative case studies to consider because of the issues they are facing, attitudes to privacy, and the role of the state.

Current research photography workflow

In the current research photography workflow we assign one person on the in-field team as “data manager” whose role includes the oversight and delegation of photography management tasks. This role typically takes about 10–15% of their time, in addition to other project duties. For example, each research team member interprets the value of a photo differently, so the data manager is responsible for ensuring each member of the team — both locals and international staff — systemically reviews, cleans up, tags, and prioritises photos that their interview team has collected.

Legal and moral consent, reviews

We require our photo archive to only contain photos from interviews and personal spaces that we have participant’s permission to collect. The full circle photographic data collection process goes some way to addressing this issue, and include two distinct review processes for photos that are worth highlighting:

1. Legal review. This is relatively straightforward — one either has data consent that gives permission for the organisation to have the photos and puts boundaries on their use, or one doesn’t. Photos without data consent either require a follow up request to the participant for consent, or are purged from the archive.
2. Moral review. For photos that we have legal consent, we also conduct multiple rounds of moral reviews that essentially poses the questions: “How would this person feel if this image of them and the contexts in which they were photographed were used by organisation?”; “What are the risks to the participant if our organisation has these photos?”; and “What steps can be take to remove these risks?”. Sometimes the moral review results in compelling photos being deleted, at other times personally identifiable information (PII) is filtered out, and sometimes we present compelling photos in an abstracted form i.e. through an illustration.

Seven emergent scenarios

Based on our our prior assumptions and existing workflow, we can imagine possible scenarios and propose a new workflow. These examples are selected from over thirty that flowed naturally from writing this article — I’m anticipating many more to be generated from attendees of the Photography in the Paradigm Shift Masterclass that I’m running in May.

Scenario 1: Adding a “localised” layer to existing generative models

Generative AI models can be trained on hundreds of millions of photos and other data, so the number of photos collected on a single study — 10–15k on a typical Studio D project — is a drop in the ocean. That said, my hunch is that this is still sufficient to train or tune a “localised” generative AI that improves the relevance and value of the outputs of its more general underlying model. Once a localised generative model is built for a specific domain — such as an industry, business unit, or domain they can be reused and periodically updated.

This approach doesn’t address the biases inherent in the underlying model, but may mitigate outputs be more representative and relevant. Of course a qualitative research study doesn’t just generate photos, but can include interview transcripts, video, audio, sometimes also analytics and other contextual data — all of which can be used to refine the localised model.

How long is a localised model likely to remain relevant?

One way to consider this question is through the Shearing Layers framework proposed by British architect Frank Duffy. It recognises that certain things like the structure of a building changes slowly if at all, whereas other layers such as building services, the layout of a space, or objects that populate a space will change at a faster pace. Adopting this framework, our localised generative model will contain some layers that are effectively out-of-date within a few years if someone wanted to generate a new, current situation, whilst other layers will likely outlive the organisation that deploys the model.

Knowing that photos and associated data will be used to train AI models — with all the responsibility this entails — will affect the range and type of data collected, and how it is collected.

Scenario 2: Applying a localised Generative AI

How might a localised generative AI model be applied in an organisation?

Whilst the veracity of photos forms the current basis of the researcher/audience social contract, the norms of downstream organisational teams support ways to to apply the localised model for showing e.g. prototypes in new contexts, scenario planning, provide stimuli for marketing and communications.

Scenario 3: Abstraction and in-house styles

If photographic-style Generative AI imagery retain all the aesthetic values of our localised training archive then the results are inherently problematic — presented with the look and feel of an authentic photo they break the research/audience social contract. Watermarking and captioning outputs as AI-generated are clunky solutions that in many cases depreciate the value or human-collected data and deliverables.

The social contract between a creator and their audience is built on a shared understanding and adherence to the norms of their domain. For the research community this includes data consent, PII clean up, minimal manipulation, and transparency on where the dat was sourced. Breaking the creator/audience social contract without good reason i.e. delivering sufficient value, results undermines trust not just in a single piece of content, but potentially the whole research approach. There’s a lot at stake.

To maintain trust I anticipate organisations will settle on the following generative applications for research photography:

• Obscurification For example, consistently removing PII from a scene, or in situations where the presentation of the original context is paramount, consistently replacing a real participant’s face with an artificially generated one to protect their identity.
• Generative Style Guides In the same way that organisation’s have in-house guidelines for an their look-and-feel identity that applies to their website, documents, apps, and advertising campaigns, organisations will develop in-house style guides for AI generated imagery that reflects their organisational values and aesthetic. A major benefit of this is to signal that “images in this style” are artificially generated. There can be multiple overlapping or distinct Generative Style Guides across an organisation — such as one for research outputs, product, scenario planning, communications — generally reflecting the needs and norms of each professional community.
• Abstraction Signalling that an image is AI generated for example to protect identities, or to make the outputs representative of a broader range of people. Using Scott McCloud’s illustrations from Understanding Comics (1993), and starting from a project photo archive we can dial the level of abstraction of Generative AI outputs to be representative of between tens or billions of people, depending on what is required.

There are strong legal and moral drivers for adopting in-house styles and abstraction for Generative AI outputs, namely:

1. the social contract (and sometimes legal requirement) to indicate how an photo or photography-style image was captured or generated, and,
2. the moral and legal requirements covered by the data consent.

Scenario 5: Photo and Photo-like Classification System

To better maintain the integrity of authentic photos being presented alongside AI generated photo-like imagery, a classification system is also required to communicate, amongst other things:

• the source/s of photos and photo-like images, including insight into training data and other contextual information,
• the level of manipulation e.g. retouching or filters (in widespread use today), inpainting or outpainting.
• for Generative AI outputs, the list of prompts used to create the image, and,
• the style-sheets and abstractions that were applied.

I anticipate public domain classification systems — analogous to a combination of EXIF meta-data standards, Creative Commons for copyright, and the Chicago Manual of Style for written content. Some organisations will develop their own classification systems that reflect their localised needs.

Scenario 6: Data consent & participant rewards

Current data consent and participant reward protocols will need to be updated to account for wider scenarios of data use, new forms of value creation, and the longevity over which data will effectively live on in an organisation.

Scenario 7: Mapping then generating spaces

That consumer grade Lidar and similar technologies enable researchers to generate 3D models of spaces with minimal disruption to existing research protocols (there is speculation that OpenAI’s generative video-from-text tool Sora was trained on data that includes game engines). These 3D models can then be applied to more accurate, nuanced outputs, including high resolution photo-like video and photo-like imagery.

Reflecting on the scenarios

If, like me, your initial reaction is to recoil at some of these scenarios and how they undermine the hard-fought norms of today’s research community, consider how we have already accepted degrees of photo manipulation, abstraction and support reinterpretation within our practice — such as the use of archetypes, or the use of photos without captions.

Updating our photography goals

Today, when we conduct field research our broad goal with photography is “to build a representative, accessible and versatile project archive of high quality, appropriately sourced research photography”.

In the medium term we might want to adapt this goal to include:

• “defensible”, i.e. it demonstrates the rigour applied to meeting thresholds of “representation” and “appropriate sourcing”, since the data (photos, video, 3D models) collected can be applied by a wider variety of situations. Being able to explain decisions is not new, but the legal implications from regulation will likely heighten the need for defensibility,
• “and other assets”, e.g. interview transcripts, or the collection of 3D models of the spaces that our research participants inhabit;

Updating the photography & generative workflow

Based on these scenarios, we can reimagine the research photography workflow that has the potential to affect every stage of the existing process, and extend its value further into the organisation. They assume that AI and other advances in computational processing will become entrenched in everyday tools from smartphones (and cameras), photo management tools, sharing platforms, to localised generative AIs.

Closing thoughts

Exposing these ideas to a wider audience has been a healthy forcing function for me to crystallise ideas for my next book on human and organisational sensemaking, and connect with other members of this community facing similar issues.

Some of the scenarios I’ve outlined here may come to pass whilst other’s will not. However I believe the underlying rationale for proposing them will continue to be relevant and provides plenty of scope to explore alternatives.

It seems like every professional domain is undergoing a paradigm shift as they seek to understand the roles that can humans play in an age of AI. The qualitative research community has valuable skills and perspectives to contribute and better navigate the changes ahead — given that we revel in complexity and in extrapolating second order effects.

If the qualitative research community wants to continue to be asked to identify and solve strategic questions, we need to think strategically about the opportunities and threats to our own practice, re-evaluating why we have adopted our existing norms — and propose new ways forward. The benefits of our contribution go well beyond our working horizons, affect how others domains can frame what all peoples should expect from emerging technologies.

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If you enjoyed this article, I’d appreciate you putting the word out.

Finally, if your interest is sufficiently piqued in this subject please join the Photography in the Paradigm Shift Masterclass where we’ll cover the topics covered in this series in more depth.

Foot Notes

On motivational drivers for use of social media platforms… this 12-life stage framework (Armstrong, 2016) is a good starting point, if one recognises variations in this model due to cultural context and personality differences. For example, forming an identity during adolescence, finding one’s tribe in early adulthood, or maintaining a work network during mid-life.

On organisational assumptions… “generational cycles” of practitioner mindsets seem be contracting, which can have a profound impact on “organisational wisdom”, and likely reinforces the importance of defining values and purpose to maintain organisational stability and coherence.

On systematically understanding sensemaking approaches and outcomes… there’s a dearth of case studies and peer reviewed papers, so I’m leaning heavily on conversations and experiences over the course of my career.

On the power of abstraction… one of the reasons why I commissioned Lee John Phillips illustrations in The Field Study Handbook rather than print the original photos that they were based on, is that the photos represent my experiences, whereas illustrations provide latitude for readers to imagine themselves living those experiences.

On Frank Duffy’s Shearing Layers… the concept was expanded upon by Stewart Brand who proposed the more widely referenced Pace Layers concept.

On the creator/audience social contract… In selected circumstances the creator can subvert the norms of a domain or genre, and this can still be considered acceptable by the audience if it later demonstrates additional value from that subversion. A mainstream equivalent might be a noir detective TV series that follows the expectations of its genre, but that shifts to an intrepretive dance for its closing scenes

On legal and moral photo archive reviews… a hat-tip to the former Head of Legal at frog — Cyrus Ipaktchi who proposed framing all data as potentially toxic — and therefore capable of contaminating an organisation — something that has guided my thinking about suitable data-handling processes over the years.

On the book writing process… I’ve been working on this for two years thus far, and it feels like another ~six years will be required to wrap my head around the many domains that human and organisational sensemaking touches upon.

References

• The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life (2016) Thomas Armstrong.
• Life Stage Social Media Adoption (2021) Jan Chipchase, unpublished.
• EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence (2023). European Parliament
• The EU AI Act: a summary of its significance and scope (2024) Lilian Edwards, Newcastle University.
• China vs US Approaches to AI Governance (2023). Adam Lu, The Diplomat
• Understanding Comics (1993), Scott McCloud.
• Evaluating the accuracy and quality of an iPad Pro’s built-in lidar for 3D indoor mapping, (2023) Tee-Ann Teo & Chen-Chia Yang, Developments in the Built Environment, Volume 14.

Original photos by author:

• Customised rickshaw mud flaps, Hyderabad, India.
• Takeout, Pudong, China.
• K-pop advocates, Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China.
• Lashio wet market, Myanmar.
• Disembarking passengers, Daocheng Yading Airport, China.
• Media stand, Shanghai, China.
• Camp Nou, Real Madrid versus Barcelona, Spain.

The future of research photography was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The concept is drawn from the Studio D publication Sustainable Data, the uses the analogy of data-as-sustenance for an organisation. In the same way that a person’s food intake impacts their longitudinal health, an organisational data-diet impacts the health of an organisation. It recognises that as much as we understand how fast- and heavily processed foods (and their data equivalents) deliver short-term wants that these aren’t necessary healthy for long term needs.

For example, the condensing of data into an analytics dashboard makes it relatively easy to consume, but the reasoning behind why the dashboard was created and the organisational processes that it led are based on reasons that are not longer relevant or understood.

This framework can be used to explore questions such as:

• “how does our organisation’s “Data diet” bias us to certain (often short term) outcomes?”, and,
• “what is a healthy mix of Data to draw upon for what we are trying to achieve?”

Whilst these questions might seem relatively straightforward for a given task, the framework recognises that longitudinal investments that organisations make in people and processes can lead calcified choices where practitioners are explicitly and implicitly incentivised to not question the status quo, may not have an adequate understanding of why that status quo came into being, and shy away from more suitable alternatives.

The process of “calcification” include:

• the inherent nature of the organisation at different stages of its evolution, particularly the shifts that occur as it scales and optimises for efficiency,
• organisational structures, units and reporting lines,
• incentives, rewards and admonishments,
• the language and cultural differences in approaches to Data inherent to business units and teams, and a willingness to step our out comfort zones by engaging with non-traditional types of Data,
• the defensibility of decisions.

The term data can be widely interpreted. In a previous article I make the distinction between lowercase “data” that refers to atomistic units of data — such as a raw, unprocessed data from an app or service, or in the case of qual research the first pass of the interview transcript, an unedited video recording or photo. Alternatively, uppercase “Data” is used to encompass other stages in the evolution of understanding including information, knowledge and insight.

One way of thinking about the differences between qual and quant data is that:

• quant measures the known world i.e. things that are considered “measurable” whereas,
• qual data probes the unknown such as understanding the “why” behind behaviours, reframing questions, or generating a list of caveats to that help us better appreciate analytics.

Whilst quant data is widely engrained across business units, qualitatively sourced data is typically limited to design, product, brand, marketing, communications, human resources, and some user research.

What’s next?

I’m interested how advances in AI and computational processing provide new ways to draw value from Data—the subject of my next book on human and organisational sensemaking.

I’ll be using the impact of AI on photography as a case study, because it is largely siloed in organisations, but at the same time the sharing of photos can be considered a human universal.

Foot notes

Studio D has just launched our 2024 masterclass line-up which we’ll run in May, with early bird tickets now available. It includes a new session focussed on Photography in the Paradigm Shift to help sensemaking practitioners navigate the threats and opportunities from AI. It might seem a niche topic, but the lessons learned apply to all types of Data.

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Organisational Data Metabolism was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the one hand, strong frameworks generate new perspectives and insights for the research team and drive the strategic narrative of research deliverables in the client organisation. On the other hand, weak, inappropriate frameworks draw down limited team resources and build false confidence that will be exposed in front of clients.

This articles describes the Studio D process called Framework Darwinism to generate a strong framework portfolio to drive client research engagement, understanding, and affect decision making.

This article is part of ongoing research for my next book into human and organisational sensemaking. It first appeared in our Radar Newsletter #40.

What it is. Who it is for.

In Studio D we’ve developed a process called Framework Darwinism to build a stress tested framework portfolio within the flow of fast-paced research projects. Our process is optimised for teams with diverse cultural backgrounds, domain knowledge and skills, and often includes team members with no prior framework generating experience.

Surface early, iterate, prioritise, focus

Frameworks are typically generated during the research write-up phase, the logic being that this avoids the team clinging to half-baked conclusions that bias the broader data analysis. The challenge of this approach is that during the melee of those final project days it often leads to under-socialised, immature frameworks that have not been adequately stress tested.

Instead, in Framework Darwinism we encourage the team to surface frameworks from day one, with ideas pinned up to a high visibility (physical or digital) framework wall. The initial quality threshold to be shared with the team is minimal — a framework only requires:

• A title
• A light description
• A prioritised list of up to three things to communicate

We encourage quick and dirty submissions using pen and paper (or stylus and blanks sheet) that is framed as “a hunch that might be interesting and relevant” and where its inclusion and final form remains an open-ended question.

To mitigate team members becoming overly attached to a particular framework: its owners are rotated; all contributors are acknowledged; alternatives are encouraged; and after discussion evolutionary dead-ends are archived.

Client and other outside contributors

Early on in the sensemaking process the team asks “if we could have anyone in the room alongside us to make sense of this data whom would we invite?”, and identify experts inside and outside the client organisation for selected framework reviews. These contributions undoubtedly strengthen the framework quality and lays the groundwork for report propagation inside the client organisation.

How role of a framework changes over time

Inexperienced team members tend to fixate on the value of the final polished, framework-as-artefact. In reality frameworks serve different roles over the course of the project.

Early frameworks represent individual’s mental models (or hunches) of what might have value to trigger conversations and to shape the next day’s research. Over time these are semantically clustered so that edges of the universe or ecosystem start to reveal themselves. Whilst research activities are ongoing, these early frameworks open up new lines of inquiry, and data is collected that supports or refutes their underlying assumptions.

Individuals, pairs and small teams pull frameworks from the wall to discuss and iterate them further. Structured reviews are used to nudge the team to understand where the relative value lies, and to understand what might still be missing. We’ve found a live/work (popup studio) space is optimal for developing mature frameworks, with selected a few structured activities to consistently move things forward, and unstructured time being ideal to iterate on ideas based on team-members’ energy. This approach balances personal curiosity with the broader project needs.

Over time the discussions and reviews lead to consensus on which frameworks to prioritise and why, and one team member takes on an editor-in-chief role with one eye on the final report.

Progress on all frameworks is tracked in a spreadsheet, that is ideal for reading framework titles side-by-side so that each framework has a distinct role, and we also use it to rotate ownership, nudge prioritisation, and track the relative strength of ideas. We want framework titles to enter the team’s vocabulary early on to reveal ambiguities — titles that confuse by team have no hope of being understood by the client.

Building a framework portfolio

Whilst frameworks need to be understood in isolation they also need to be cohesive in larger body of research. A one-month Studio D project typically generates between sixty and ninety frameworks, with roughly one-third making it into the final deliverables. This includes a mixture of conceptual frameworks i.e. “here are new ways of thinking about the universe”, and data drive frameworks i.e. “here are things we’ve measured within the universe”, with the optimal mix depending on the project, access to internal and external data resources.

The final portfolio has a clear prioritisation, and often includes:

• An overarching framework, “This is the universe we explored”
• Primary frameworks, “This is where we want you to focus your attention”
• Secondary frameworks, “This will make it easier to understand the nuances of what we’re sharing”

In addition we maintain an archive of:

• Depreciated frameworks “These are other things we explored, but we’re not sure they are valid or add sufficient value”
• Out of scope “These are other things we found interesting, but are not relevant for this report”

As the portfolio progresses, we check-in to ensure we’re not over-indexing on a particular framework format e.g. charts or maps, which can make reading the final report more challenging.

Mitigating biases

How representative is the framework portfolio of the team’s understanding of the research? The process needs to address the most common biases:

• cultural bias, the framework reflects the belief system and cultures of dominant personalities, and on cross-cultural subject matter lacks local perspectives,
• client bias, the team is afraid to challenge the client’s opinion, or their organisational worldview,
• cognitive biases, present in how the data is collected, managed and processed or shared, and,
• process biases, the data is unevenly sourced, managed, made sense of and applied.

Four principles of framework generation

Four (of longer list of) principles that guide our process include:

1. Inclusion Every team member has the opportunity to introduce, meaningfully contribute to, and critique any framework.
2. Opportunity Every framework starts with a pen and a blank piece of paper (or stylus and blank tablet screen), where the optimal format is an open question.
3. Responsibility Each framework is assigned a lead (typically the person that introduced it) who owns it until it is either reassigned to someone else to complete, is completed, split, merged, depreciated or retired.
4. Stress test The strengths, weaknesses and appropriateness of a framework are realised by exposure to new data and other stimulus material, time and space for reflection, conversations, analysis and a formal review process.
5. Quality assurance Prior to inclusion in the final report, a framework needs to be exposed to one or more team critiques, a domain review that focusses on fact checking and appropriate use of terminology. Conversations in the team, and the more formal editorial review ensures it matches quality and tonality of the framework portfolio and the strategic narrative of the research.

In summary

A great framework simplifies complex data or ideas and becomes a touchpoint for stakeholders to engage with the larger body of research. However, many research projects fall short in delivering this value due to when and how the frameworks are generated.

Studio D can credit two primary frameworks in a recent project deliverable with driving client engagement and aiding decision-making that directly impacted the UX and regulatory policies of a service with well over a billion customers.

— Jan

Bootnotes

For a deeper dive on the process, including the back-end tools and techniques for drawing the best out of the team, join our Framework Darwinism Masterclass.

Thanks to Studio D team members Lauren Serota, Kyle Becker, and Sara Yang for their contributions to this methodology.

Visualising research using Framework Darwinism was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article outlines the Studio D process, explores how and why we use photography in research project deliverables today — from the fundamentals of human cognition to the norms that guide photographic practices — to cue up the question: how might processes and behaviours change in the paradigm shift?

Photography consistently provides highest return on investment

In Studio D research photography has consistently delivered the highest return on investment of any data type we collect. This isn’t because we hire dedicated photographers — we mostly use non-professionals who take on photographer duties as part of their other work. Rather, we’ve figured out a streamlined process that can engage all members of the team and which compliments rather than overwhelms their other research activities.

Photos that generate the highest engagement are true to the research locale and provide a ring-side view on a hot-button issue that the organisation is facing. They can communicate a self-contained story and/or draw the audience into a wider body of research. Whilst mostly viewed in the context of a report, individual photos plus a question, quote, data point or insight have the highest fluidity within an organisation in relationship to their weight — the effort to required to collect, manage and make sense of, and share.

On a single cross-cultural project with three weeks to collect data, we typically end up with a “working archive” of between 10–15k photos. This might sound like a lot but when split between the team, the number of days on the ground, and home contexts where there is a lot to document, the numbers soon add up. To build and maintain quality we provide around thirty-minutes of upfront training, plus ongoing support, crits/reviews and other related quality control processes.

As a rule of thumb, hiring professional photographers leads to smaller archives containing a similar number of strong photos, but this is traded off against less-contexts visited, and weaker-representativeness of what the team finds relevant — making them less suitable to apply to downstream activities.

From this working archive, we typically generate:

• a project archive of between 50–150 photos that can be widely used by the team internally, and,
• a comms archive of between 3–15 photos that are suitable for use outside the organisation, e.g. for conference presentations or for print media.

Usually, 30–80 photos are used in project reporting, and 3–5 are frequently shared to “represent” the project and are widely used for engagement with the deliverables.

Analysis of photography use

Whilst photos travel further, faster as atomistic units, their primary use is in research deliverables. The following is an example of an executive summary deck showing photographs in purple, text in green and frameworks in blue. In this example, photographs are used for:

• scene setting,
• to provide detailed context,
• to balance information density,
• a teaser to draw the reader into the main report, and,
• and as a reward for reading other text/information heavy content.

Photography’s other golden ratio

Novice photographers often assume that high-end equipment is paramount for good research photography. Our heuristic is that with today’s mainstream technology, the “right gear” only accounts for 10% of the quality, whereas 50% is about being in the right place at the right time with a camera and that skill accounts for 40%. Field research provides ample suitable contexts, and on-the-job training supports skill development. Thus, a primed team is in a good position to generate a strong archive.

What we’re aiming for

Our goal is to build a representative, accessible and versatile project archive of high quality, appropriately sourced research photography. The optimal working archive is representative of what the whole team considers worth paying attention to and enables us to communicate:

• the feel and tonality of a locale,
• deeper contextual understanding and higher emotional engagement compared to other data we’ve collected,
• direct comparison e.g. between participants across one locale or multiple countries,
• provides detailed information, for example around service norms or product use, and,
• reinforces the ethical stance of how the research was conducted.

In many contexts taking photos may lead to social and ethical violations — a camera and the act of documenting a space can be invasive and negatively impact the relationship between the subject/participant and the project team. On some Studio D projects appearing in photos may also present a significant risk to research participants. After many years of trialling different approaches we refined a Studio D process called Full Circle Photography Collection that effectively shepherds team members into legally and morally appropriate behaviours and practices.

Why do photographs have potential for such a high return on investment?

• At a high level photographs allow us to effectively transcend the time and place of experiences — such as events, emotions,, ideas, and things — and allow others to also appreciate those experiences, at a time and place of their choosing.

The images are realistic, as in, similar to the retinal image that is formed if a person were to experience that situation in real life, and they elicit reactions in certain areas of the brain similar to events see in the environment.

• They can be quickly and effortlessly understood, for example taking in a lot of information with a single glance.
• Beyond in-person conversations, they are the primary means by which humans share experiences and are inherently fluid.

Reflecting forward

Can our understanding of photography’s evolution provide insights to new behaviours? The following shows a rough timeline with advances in tools and how they have shifted the photographer/photographic-subject relationship. It opens the question of how these norms will changes to the current advances in technologies.

Enter the paradigm shift

In 2023 we saw significant advances in Generative AI images and computational processing — which we believe will be comparable to the paradigm shift from analog to digital photography. How might these changes supercharge or overwhelm your project?

Last month I wrote that in order to elegantly navigate a paradigm shift we need:

1. a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what came before in a given domain,
2. acknowledging why current practices and processes evolved into their current state, and,
3. a set of principles for a given domain to guide decision making for the new reality, plus experimentation to apply and stress test those principles.

As new photographic tools and processes emerge, what should we systematically adopt, prudently adapt or judiciously ignore? The following is one example, from over thirty that we ideated in an afternoon.

An example of practice norms today

Our community has established practices that enable our research audience to establish the veracity of what we share, similar to the benchmarks they expect of other forms of data. To meet this veracity threshold research photography draws on established practices and norms from other forms of research, plus documentarian-, photojournalism-, street-, and studio-photography. Within these norms, a single photo of a person can represent that person, but we are also comfortable when it is used to represent an archetype drawn from many research participants. This might seem trivial — this framing is part of what makes it a norm — but in effect we have callibrated our assumptions of the “veracity of representation” to encompass this abstraction, because of the value it serves the photographer and the audience.

By the same reasoning we can ask: how will today’s norms around the veracity of photographs be changed by the paradigm shift?

An example of practice norms adapted for Generative AI imagery

Today a project’s working archive (the 10–15k photos) enables us to generate a high quality project archive (50–150 photos) and comms archive (3–15 photos). To these we might add a Generative IA training archive that can use support numerous downstream activities, such as:

• to obscure personally identifying information such as faces, whilst retaining the aesthetic and sense of “wholeness” of a photo,
• prototypes being used in a range of new (un-photographed) situations,
• provide richness to scenario planning, with “generative characters” being built from participant training data,
• modelling behaviours inside and outside the home (especially when paired with lidar maps of those places), and,
• generate a first pass at marketing and communications collateral for a product launch.

Of course, just because we can do this it doesn’t mean that we should. There are significant ethical and legal issues to address, for example: informed data consent and model release, appropriate participant rewards that cover new scenarios of use, data-retention practices, guardrails around how a person’s likeness is used, and an updated author/audience social contract that relies on accurate representation of what is shared.

My visceral reaction to this example scenario was critical — as anything that challenges a hard-fought, ethically grounded practice should be. However, in reflecting on how we got to where we are today, the broader societal shifts in how images are created and used, and in thinking through the value-add to organisations, I now consider this ethically, technologically and practically feasible. Perhaps even desirable.

What’s next?

I recognise that “research photography” might seem like a niche within the niche of ethnographic research, but my sense if that it won’t only survive the paradigm shift but will come out the other side core to how we collect and communicate research findings, and will have a considerably larger impact on downstream activities. The lessons learned from exploring changes in the niche of research photography can be applied to multiple domains.

What the new community norms should be is very much down to you, and the conversations that follow — with our colleagues, audiences, the participants and the communities in which they live.

To help you navigate these changes I’ll be running a Photography in the Paradigm Shift online masterclass that pulls together these disparate threads. Full masterclass description.

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— Studio D founder, Jan Chipchase

This first appeared on the Studio D Radar newsletter.

How AI changes (research) photography was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since the terms “story” and “narrative” are often used interchangeably we’ll revert to the following definitions from Herman (2009):

In this model, a single narrative can contain one or more stories (and if we wanted to expand our scope we could include story worlds, and universes, although they are less relevant for this article).

Back to basics

There are a lot of meaty ideas to wrap our heads around, so let’s start with a granular example that highlights the role of storytelling and narrative in how we make sense of information. Read this short text, adapted from Haven (2007):

Your cognitive processes that occurred in the reading likely included:

• assessing whether this is a viable short story and it is worth paying attention to,
• projecting associations between “she”, “Susie” and “John”,
• seeking intent for the each of the characters,
• assumptions around cause and effect sequencing,
• framing the “story” through our own unique lived experiences,
• our search for a “struggle” to be overcome, based on why we think the story is being shared, and,
• adding details and filling in gaps to meet our desire for closure.

Humans are primed to use stories to understand the world. Evidence of the first documented stories can be found in the earliest markings on cave walls 36,000 years ago and continue with a wide range of cultural artefacts that have survived, even thrived over millennia. The importance of stories and narratives today can be found in the enduring presence of storytelling palaces such as theatres, the prevalence of “story” features in many social media applications, and the high status in society afforded to selected storytelling professionals such as actors, musicians, or game designers.

Constant reinvention

As something affected by events, culture and technologies the narrative landscape is in constant flux.

An accelerating trend since the beginning of this century is the proliferation of platforms to enable first person storytelling and the fracturing of norms within each of those platforms that has led to remediation — when “our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (Bolter and Grunion, 1999). Today, we all have access to tools to drive our own narrative, but are also at the mercy of algorithms to surface and amplify them to our intended audiences. Generative and other AIs combined with advances in computational processing are rapidly expanding scope for remediation, creating threats and opportunities to current assumptions of best practice.

To paraphrase what I wrote last month, to navigate the changes in this narrative landscape we need:

• a deep understanding of the fundamentals of storytelling and narratives,
• acknowledging why current practices and processes evolved into their current state, and,
• a set of principles to guide decision making for the new reality.

Principles provide a lens through which to assess new contexts to decide what to systematically adopt, prudently adapt or judiciously ignore. A set of principles nudges us towards mindful adoption, prior to new ways of thinking and working becoming calcified.

Lets now turn our attention to storytelling and narratives in the organsation.

Storytelling in the organisation

Over the last two years I’ve been researching my next book on human and organisational sensemaking. Aside from the depth of themes covered — from the origins of speech systems and writing, to theories that seek to explain organisational decision making — I’ve taken a meta-view that looks at narrative formats. The analysis probed what drives engagement in the workplace, why certain ideas gain widespread traction, and which (sometimes excellent) ideas fall by the wayside. These themes keep circling back to organisational purpose: its mission, vision and core values — that manages to bridge its history with its idealised future — and which is communicated through a strategically positioned narrative.

Since “culture” can be widely interpreted, I’ve settled on the definition by Atkin (2019) — organisational culture “the social soup of shared assumptions that an organisation has about how its members should behave, relate and decide things together. ”

Why we should broaden our scope

Although this definition of “strategic narratives” has had its moment in the business literature, it is too narrow to describe how communication occurs across all strata of an organisation. Remediation — the first-person retelling and fracturing of formats that are omnipresent today — allow us to broaden our scope of where narratives can occur and be strategically positioned — into what I term narrative layers from the individual to meta-narratives (such as Christian or Hindu religious creation narratives) that are used to explain our origins and idealised behavioural norms. Each layer is conducive to a particular narrative format and has its own aims, norms and desired outcomes, and each can have strategic intent.

The opportunity

The under-realised opportunity comes from understanding each narrative layer and how they relate to and affect one another. There are many practical applications of this understanding including:

• positioning oneself in a job interview or to obtain a promotion,
• developing a communications strategy for project deliverables to either take advantage of prevailing organisational narratives or alternatively (with higher risk/reward) to take a position as a critical alternative to the status quo,
• galvanising a department or team into action, and cementing its position in the organisation,
• creating or refining an organisational narrative,
• positioning the organisation within an industry or society. This is particularly pertinent for multinational companies and organisations whose products are used globally, in that they are affected by societal and meta-narrative layers that draw on belief systems that are very different from their own.

What’s next?

If you’re interest in strategic narratives is piqued, I’ve developed a course that takes attendees step by step from the building blocks of storytelling through to understanding the narrative forces that shape organisational decision making today. To ensure practical application it includes hands-on exercises to better understand and develop individual, project and organisational narratives. For those already steeped in narratology, it also provides tools to reframe the changes occurring through remediation and emerging technologies such as Generative and other AIs.

I hope you can join us — sessions will run in May and early bird tickets are available now. See the full mastrerclass description for how to attend.

References

• Herman, D. (2009). Narrative ways of worldmaking. In: Heinan, S., and Sommer, R., eds. Narratology in the age of cross-disciplinary narrative research. Berlin, DE: Walter De Gruyter, 71–87.
• Bolter, D. & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Haven, Kendall (2007). Story proof: the science behind the startling power of story. Libraries Unlimited.
• Atkin, Doug (2019). How Airbnb found its purpose. Medium.

This article was first published on Studio D’s Radar newsletter.

Strategic Narratives was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to manage travel anxiety

Tips from a professional security and risk consultant.

If you’re required to travel to less developed or higher-risk countries for work, you’ve probably found yourself in numerous situations where you felt well out of your depth — whether being in an alien culture, unsure of local norms, or because the destination presents a variety of risks that you’re not used to. This can be as simple as being unsure of food and drink, not being able to speak the language — through to actively being targeted for theft, assault or kidnap.

What’s more you may also be responsible for your team. All of these make it difficult to concentrate on the work, compounding stress and anxiety. It’s highly unproductive and accelerates burn out.

It doesn’t need to be this way

For the past fifteen years I’ve been a professional security and risk consultant, I work with some of the world’s leading organisations, advising their travellers and teams how to travel smarter, with a focus on enabling individuals and teams to be happier and more productive while working in complex and higher-risk environments.

The work encompasses many of the destinations you’re probably already familiar with from your own travels and others, like Somalia and Syria, that are at the more extreme end of the risk spectrum.

Often I’m the person on the end of the phone when the worst happens — a natural disaster strikes, a conflict breaks out, or individuals are under threat. This is the more reactive part of my role. I find it far more effective to work with individuals and teams before they leave for their project/expedition/assignment to help them prepare more effectively for the environment they are stepping into, and to ensure they know how to respond if or when things turn to sh*t. A big part of my focus is to help build long-term resilience, and a key part of resilience is managing the anxiety of operating in remote and / or higher risk environments.

How do you hit the ground running, and keep anxiety to manageable levels wherever your work travel takes you?

There are a range of different techniques you can use, but from my experience there are three areas that are often overlooked, and can have a significant impact on individuals and teams in the field if managed poorly.

1. Break down the origins of anxiety

Many of you have a role that requires extensive travel. For someone, say, brought up in the US or Singapore, these are likely to include travel to rural India, third tier cities in China, almost all countries in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East (and to be fair people from those countries have a similar set of anxieties when travelling to your home country). Extensive travel to new and novel locations typically increases anxiety, and is compounded by recent negative news events, job instability, and the strain of maintaining relationships over long distances. Furthermore, you’re not just managing yourself and your team, but your loved ones.

Being anxious about travelling to an alien and potentially higher-risk location is a completely normal and healthy response. It’s your internal warning system kicking in as it attempts to keep you safe. At the same time, excessive anxiety can work against you, and may actually place you at greater risk once you get on the ground.

Anxiety reduces performance, and can impinge on clear and rational thinking. It serves as a continual source of distraction, particularly if you’re worrying about the wrong things — without the proper frameworks in place everything presents a risk. Being out of your comfort zone requires you to be clear headed and fully prepared.

Some people will try to ignore the potential risks, hoping that nothing untoward will happen.

We all have different ways to manage anxiety. Some people will try to ignore the potential risks, hoping that nothing untoward will happen. If you’re lucky that approach may work for you, but it is not a viable long term strategy. It can lead to disaster when managing teams. Understanding, prioritising and rationalising risks are skills that can be learned, but it takes experience to apply these skills in different contexts.

2. Objectively assess potential risks

Having a balanced and objective assessment of the potential risks is the foundation of your planning. You should start this process before you make the decision to travel in the first place. Understand that many risks, particularly complex risks, can’t be fully mitigated. The only way to mitigate them completely is not to travel. By choosing to travel you are tacitly accepting those risks.

There are a number of different approaches to assess risk in a practical way that produces an actionable outcome. What we want to do is move beyond the theory of assessing the risks to the practice of mitigating them in the street.

As a start point, always assume a base level of risk. Risks like petty theft and vehicle accidents, for example, can happen anywhere.

Next, focus on the stand out risks for the location you’re heading to. These risks can require our constant attention and can sap team energy, for example maintaining awareness of kidnap attempts or mass street demonstrations. In our OCE masterclasses we work through practical ways to manage stand-out risks.

3. Manage expectations at home

A key factor in being able to continually travel to higher-risk locations is ensuring that those people closest to us are comfortable with it and have the right information and support should things escalate. This part is never easy, but we have a templated set of conversations that help travellers prime and manage these remote relationships.

Travel anxiety can be proactively managed using the techniques described above. There are other techniques you can use to manage your anxiety and ensure optimum performance when travelling to higher-risk locations. We use a range of techniques, for example locking in a solid communications plan, ensuring we have a soft landing, discreetly carrying cash (lots of it), building robust contingency plans, using specialised insurance, and packing our gear in a way that enables us to perform our work well.

How do you manage travel anxiety? What techniques work for you?

Thanks for reading.

My name is Grant Rayner, and I’m the founder of Spartan9. I’ve been working in the field of travel security for over 20 years, and have supported travellers and organisations through a host of complex incidents. I’m the author of The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments, the Field Guide Series and Under the Radar, amongst other niche titles. I also design specialised bags for travellers who push the boundaries.

If you’re interested in travel security, you’ll enjoy Dangerous Travels, my weekly newsletter on Substack.

Tools for better managing travel anxiety was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How difficult would it be for someone to physically break into your organisation and steal your secrets? How about accessing the most protected parts of your infrastructure? Given the layers of physical security: security fences, perimeter sensors, lighting, regular security patrols, and a myriad of video surveillance cameras, where would you start? What kind of team do you need?

What might surprise you, is that Fortune 500 companies and other interesting organisations often hire people to break into their own facilities— places they consider to be highly secure. These physical intrusion tests are designed to evaluate existing systems and procedures, and to identify potential vulnerabilities.

In this article I’ll share one example of a physical intrusion test to demonstrate what’s possible (in limited timeframes, and on a tight budget).

“Can you draw a picture of the layout of the inside of the entrance area for me? Where does this door lead to?”

The security officer carefully drew a detailed picture of the entrance area, the very area he is supposed to be protecting.

“If one of the perimeter alarms was activated in the early hours of the morning, what would the guard response be? How many guards would come out to check? Where would they come from?”

The security officer talked me through the response procedure in detail.

Less than a week later, after conducting reconnaissance and surveilance to identify potential blindspots in their video surveillance system, generating a few key artefacts through publicly available information, and scaling a high security fence with alarm sensors installed, I had managed to get inside the facility and was able to start identifying potential access points into the building. Phase 1 was successful.

Why would someone share confidential information less than an hour into their first meeting with a stranger?

The person I was interviewing was not under my control. I wasn’t paying them. I had no leverage over them. As all I had was an honest smile, a firm handshake and – via a fake social media profile as a recruiter – a compelling reason for them to betray their organisation and share sensitive security information.

These activities occurred as part of a physical intrusion test, and this provides one simple example of how social engineering can be used to support efforts to breach the physical defences of buildings and other infrastructure. In fact, I applied similar techniques to target the facility’s security vendors as well, gleaning detailed information about the non-visible aspects of security technology and infrastructure at the site.

In this post I’ll share some aspects of that project, focusing a few of the key challenges I faced and how I overcame them.

A complementary practice

To me, targeted intelligence collection from human sources within the client organisation is a central part of any physical security testing project. While I will always conduct intensive surveillance and reconnaissance before any intrusion attempt, this never provides the full picture. For example, the areas immediately inside an access point are often an unknown if they can’t be observed from outside — the last thing you want to do is make your way through a door only to find yourself standing like a lemon with nowhere to go in the middle of the staff cafeteria (although in some cases, that may actually work).

It also helps to know, for example, whether security cameras are monitored live, and the response procedures when security officers are mobilised. I can’t see these things from the outside — this information can only be gathered from human sources.

Like dating, but for intelligence

So how did the security officer find himself sitting down with me, offering vital information?

The process began with me setting up a pretext as a recruiter for corporate security positions, and identifying several potential targets in the client organisation. I initiated contact indirectly, via the friends of my targets, using social media. The indirect and referred approach generally has a good chance of success because it extends credibility, appearing to de-risk the encounter. This reduces the risk that the target will try to check up on me before we meet — why would they need to this when I’m already referred by a friend?

In this case it was a relatively simple matter to use social media networks to find employees who had worked in the same company as the target, and that had left a few months ago (ensuring the currency of relationships). I connected with them, mentioned that my client was looking for good people for a specific role, and asked who they thought might be interested in jumping ship from their old company.

This was an important point. I was deliberately targeting individuals who were already thinking about leaving, and who were therefore potentially less loyal to their organisation. This enabled the recruiter pretext to work, and didn’t require as much social gymnastics to convince the target that I was someone who was legitimate.

For the referrer, they believed they were gaining social capital amongst their network (helping an old colleague find a better job). Because I wasn’t meeting them, they had no reason to check up on me. For the target, they were exciting that their ex-colleague had referred them. Both were looking for evidence to affirm their respective beliefs about what the situation was, ignoring cues that might disprove it.

Establish a confidential relationship

The most powerful aspect of using a recruiter pretext is that it’s relatively easy to establish a confidential relationship.

“I won’t tell anyone else in your company that I’ve been speaking with you, and that you may be interested in leaving. Please don’t tell anyone else in your company we’ve met.”

With that simple statement, I reduced the risk that they would leave the meeting and immediately report my approaches to their security department. This provided me with more time to develop them as an asset. In addition, it provided me the flexibility to target additional people in the company, in the knowledge that they were unlikely to compare notes.

Understanding motivations

One of the goals of the first meeting was to establish the target’s motivation for being in the room (something that overlaps with the research practices for a lot of consumer and user research, familiar to those that follow Studio D). The recruiter persona provides considerable leeway to probe this question in order to find them a suitable job, to the point of asking challenging and very detailed questions, such as those that identify potential weaknesses in their security system.

The power of praise

Praising someone and recognising their accomplishments is a highly effective technique, and is part of a range of behavioural techniques that built trust and encouraged sharing.

“I’ve heard some pretty great things about you.”

What a great opener to a conversation. It sets the pretext of being referred by a colleague, and makes them more open to telling you why they’re great, by demonstrating how much they know about their security systems and procedures. It really is a win-win.

Peeling the onion

Of course, it’s not all about praise and exploiting human weaknesses. At some point you need to get your hands dirty and get inside.

Once you do get inside a high security facility, the job’s far from done. You still need to be able to access the building itself, then make your way through various internal layers of the building’s defences (the most vital assets are almost always behind several layers of secured doors, sometime alarmed or manned by security officers). To find a way in is never easy. Without a valid access card you really only have two options – break in manually, or follow behind someone as they enter (or try to slip in behind them as they exit). This is actually easier to do during business hours when there are predictable flows into and out of the facility.

On most projects done in the dead of night, it invariably requires significant lengths of time standing in the shadows just outside doors that you know may be used occasionally hoping that someone will exit at some point. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

This is when you’ll feel most exposed. Standing with minimal concealment with no valid reason for being there, just hoping people don’t glance over your way…

Of course, the ultimate objective is to use social engineering to get all the way in. This works for some facilities, but it’s significantly difficult for higher security facilities with well designed access control and solid visitor and vendor management procedures. At this point going low tech and just trying to follow someone in may be the best option.

The real art is to know when to proceed, and when to withdraw. If you extend too far, you’re done. But without a significant degree of audacity and chutzpah, you’ll probably end up hunched in the shadows, afraid to move forward. Finding the balance between the two takes experience (and some chutzpah).

Aftermath

As an interesting footnote, after the operational phase of the project was over, I visited the site to provide a briefing to their security team and talk through the operation from the perspective of an intruder, sharing my perspectives on what aspects of security were effective and what weren’t.

As I walked up to the gate to obtain my security pass, my target was sitting inside the security office. My target looked up to scrutinise me, checked my identification, but didn’t recognise me (despite the fact that we had several meetings over several hours only two weeks before). While I did disguise my appearance slightly during our meetings, this also shows a human weakness – he couldn’t associate the person in front of him with the context in which he’d met me previously. As you would expect, as I started briefing the team on the different aspects of the operation, the target started squirming in their chair. Only then did the target realise their role in the operation. Of course, I didn’t call the target out by name, but they knew.

It’s easy to point to the target as being the weakest link in their security chain. However, I guarantee that there would have been half a dozen viable candidates, including many of the professionals that were sitting in that room. Someone with suficient training and experience will always find a way‚ it’s just a matter of time and persistence.

Yes, but what about ethics?

There are numerous ethical issues with conducting this type of work. Clearly I was operating in some fairly gray areas.

Before I initiated the project I worked with the client to establish clear boundaries, defining what was permitted and what wasn’t. I couldn’t, for example, surveil the target at their home. Nor could I offer any financial inducements. I reported in after each meeting with an update on progress and an assessment of the potential impacts on the target. At all times, the welfare of the client’s employees were a primary concern.

You need to weigh these risks against the potential gains. When carried out correctly, social engineering and physical penetration testing provide an opportunity to build competence and increase an organisation’s resilience to similar attacks.

A useful set of skills

The techniques I’ve shared here might sound exotic, but they are grounded in an understanding of the nuances of human behaviour.

Many of the techniques used in this project you’ll use in your everyday jobs, whether you’re designing a new product or service and are understanding user or customer needs, looking to influence your colleagues, or figuring out the growth strategy. The mindset required to think through these complex and unorthodox challenges in the real word can be learned.

Grant Rayner is the founder of Spartan9, a security and crisis management consultancy firm that specialises in solving complex problems in challenging environments.

Social Engineering for Intrusion Testing was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After a decade of designing, testing and scaling new products, I’ve learned what it takes to deliver a successful pilot (also sometimes called a “test” or “experiment”)— one that resonates with customers enough to build an organisation’s confidence to deliver new and novel concepts to market.

A well-executed pilot requires a well-calibrated team that understands the subject-matter, market, their customers, and their executive stakeholders.

A successful pilot requires a team to strike a delicate balance, to nimbly and cost-effectively deliver a “believable” experience to customers, and quickly deliver “believable” evidence to executives. Off-kilter pilots often yield data that is too poor quality to make effective design and strategy decisions, or end up fatiguing the organisation by sucking up resources due to over-engineering. Pilots that drag on simply lose executive interest and miss the market opportunity.

After a fair bit of trial and error, I’ve found the following two frameworks useful to plan the pilot and calibrate the team.

Framework 1: The Customer Line of Believability

This requires working with a team, internal stakeholders and external partners to deliver to the threshold of “believability” to conduct an effective market pilot. Discerning what can be done with “smoke and mirrors” manually versus what must look and feel like the “real thing” depends entirely on what is being tested, timelines, resources and other factors.

Framework 2: The Executive Evidence-to-Intuition Ratio

Launching a suboptimal product can cost an organisation millions of dollars , hurt the brand and kill careers — there’s a lot at stake. Most executives rely on a blend of intuition (based on wisdom built up over years) and hard evidence when it comes time to make decisions— even in organisations that are reputed to be data-driven.

A successful pilot recognises the balance between evidence and intuition, and requires the team have a keen ability to adjust on-the-fly based on what the pilot reveals day to day. Exactly how much data and evidence is required to make the leadership comfortable with a decision to go/no-go dictates how long the pilot should run, how to report, which measurements must be taken, and who must be involved. When the ratio is too high in either direction, it’s a signal that piloting is likely not the right approach.

If you’re interested in running better pilots, and want to meet folks from the the community facing similar challenges to you, I’ll be in San Francisco on May 15th to run a Rapid Piloting Masterclass. It draws on ten years of working with fast-paced clients from my time at frog, Studio D and most recently as the Head of Service Design at Yoma Bank. Look forward to seeing you there.

Finally, if you’re interested in how other people run pilots, and are willing to share some of your own experience, please take the Rapid Piloting Survey.

Frameworks for Rapid Piloting was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Confronting Limitations On An Expedition Through Afghanistan’s Big Pamir

Somewhere in a finger-shaped corner of Afghanistan called the Wakhan Corridor, in the dusty warmth of August, I am trekking as slowly as time seems to be moving. A plateau stretches into a distant horizon of vast peaks, as the alpine sun, intense at this elevation, bears down mercilessly. My hands, the only body parts that aren’t covered, are dark and dry, the texture of crinkly paper. My back is searing from an ill-fitting backpack. My calves burn. My right heel, inflamed by tendonitis, forces me into a somewhat staggered, unwieldy gait.

The insides of my stomach occasionally lurch and wriggle from whatever dodgy meat or silty mountain water I had imbibed in prior days, each passing wave of panic producing frantic dashes toward the nearest clump of boulders. I feel heavy and listless, hungry, and angry at having fallen so behind in my group, a caravan of intrepid hikers blazing up and down the steep hillsides ahead. It is mid morning — still only the beginning of our day, really — yet there is far more distance to cover before we can rest, and I’m fighting with myself whether I’m capable of any more steps, much less five or ten-thousand more.

If someone had asked me even in late June what I was expecting to do this summer, I certainly would not have imagined myself out here on alien terrain, about to trek over two hundred kilometers across 11 days with 8 others in perhaps one of the world’s more dubious places to travel.

I was unexpectedly offered a fellowship… recording the operational practices, norms, and emotional journey of the experience.

I’m an outdoorsy type to be sure, but I’m not crazy. Yet I’ve come to this far northeast corner of Afghanistan to join an expedition run by Studio D Radiodurans, an international design research agency that studies human behavior one half of the year, and guides adventurous explorers to extraordinary corners of the globe in the other.

I was unexpectedly offered a fellowship to come on board this year’s team of five men and two other women as a photo documentarian, whose main purpose is to capture the entire expedition in a series of images, recording the operational practices, norms, and emotional journey of the experience. Everyone else on the team also has a role to play, from wayfinding to negotiating prices for our daily pack animals to keeping inventory of our water supply. What drew me to this expedition was not just that its timing seemed almost serendipitous (I was contemplating what I would do after I wrapped up a freelance contract in Portland), but because it presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a country and culture that not many people would ever get the chance to witness first hand. It’s a place that’s much maligned by most media coverage, and there was more a sense of intrigue, rather than fear, involved in the idea of seeing what may lie beneath the headlines.

However, I am just coming to realize that there exists a lacuna between personal expectations and reality — that this expedition is far more than a simple sightseeing hike. On this sparse, flat steppe in the Wakhan Corridor, a 185-mile long strip of land flanked by precipitous mountains, I am as remote as I could ever be. The home I’m familiar with is halfway across the globe, and anything close to modern conveniences (and I use “conveniences” very lightly) is at least several days out on foot. It’s our third day on the trek, and the longest distance we’ll hike this week — 20 miles across dry and yellow monoscapes, networks of wide glacial streams, knee-bashing climbs up unforgiving talus trails, and pastoral yurt settlements inhabited by the Wakhi tribes. A journey into the Wakhan is an experience in traveling back in time, to a place in the world where life is simple and defined by few, but elemental, rituals: the tending and bartering of livestock, the drying and collection of yak dung, breadmaking, and afternoon games of knucklebones, an early version of dice that utilizes joint bones meant to be tossed across a small, dusty playing field. There is no mains electricity, immediately potable water, or sheltered bathrooms.

Perhaps because of its remoteness and inhospitable geography, the Wakhan has remained relatively untouched by the wars that have embroiled the rest of the country for so many years. It forms a rugged valley wedged between three great mountain ranges known as the Pamir Knot. The locals who reside here refer to it as “the roof of the world.” Thus, if I choose to stop or give up at any point, there is simply no easy way home.

One of the first things we learn as a group on this trek is the One Body Principle — a tenet that asks of us to think of each member of the team as part of a single, holistic organism. Therefore, we always move as a single unit, our individual well-being tied to the well-being of the entire group. At first impression, it’s a rule that makes a lot of sense, with its emphasis on keeping the team close together, intact, and cohesive at all moments of the expedition. Yet, consistently finding myself to be one of the slowest hikers in the group nonetheless fill me with frustration, for in my mind I am slowing the group down as a whole, failing to live up to my part on the team, and most of all failing to live up to my own internal expectations around my own physical capabilities. The confidence I first had coming into the expedition is slowly falling, as I feel my body rebelling against me, as it leaves me feeling weak, slow, tired, and hungry.

I walk the landscape of my own self-imposed imposter syndrome in parallel with my real footsteps.

Simultaneously, I am in a psychological battlefield over my role as the documentarian — what if I turn out to be a terrible photographer? What if I’m out of practice? What if I miss all the best shots because I’m too paralyzed by my own fear, by the discomfort in my surroundings, by the uncertainty I have over my place in the group? I walk the landscape of my own self-imposed imposter syndrome in parallel with my real footsteps. On this eternal trail, where even time begins to lose its own structured clarity, I have every boundless moment to contemplate all the questions that come.

The sun is beginning to set over the jagged ridgeline, as a set of dark clouds loom ominously behind us. We are perhaps just another thirty minutes away from our camp for the evening, but some of us are nearly ready to call it quits and make do with wherever we are right now, even if it means camping on an unlevel slope far from a water source. I am certainly exhausted enough both physically and mentally to consider this a viable option. But we painstakingly continue, and finally crest the top of the ridge where we can see our guide and our animal herders ahead of us, carrying our things into the valley below, our resting spot for the night. As we clamber down, rain comes.

A wave of mild panic sets in as we hurry down the hillside, dismayed at the idea of further misery to be had at the end of a long, arduous day. The men on the team — Seth, Mike, Myric, Alex, and Jan — are charging ahead to assist the local Studio D crew, and luckily, arriving right before the worst of the storm, swiftly put up all the tents.

As someone who has never been on a proper expedition before, “expeditions” have always felt like an overtly masculine space. In popular imagination, expeditions — epic journeys into an unknown, extreme wild — are where men are celebrated for battling beasts, blizzards, and demonstrating incredible feats of strength and survival, which never quite seemed to resonate personally for me. After all, expeditions fuel the mythology of the conquering hero, many of whom typically do not look like me.

As someone who has never been on a proper expedition before, “expeditions” have always felt like an overtly masculine space.

I spot Bjork and Joyce dashing into a tent the moment we hit camp, and I quickly follow. Inside, the air is frigid and the heat of our bodies produce a haze of precipitation. We huddle close to each other, hugging our knees and laugh with gratitude to be inside, to finally not be moving, giving thanks to the rest of our team hard at work in getting the remainder of the camp situated, and to share in each other’s company as the rain begins to pound against our tent. As I witness our male team scrambling to settle for the night, distributing freeze-dried dinners, making rounds to deliver hot water, and checking in on each other, I wonder about what an expedition really means. What we believe the outcomes should be, who we come into the expedition as, and the reality of who and what we actually leave with.

Bjork, Joyce, and I are the only three women in the group, and we have naturally gravitated towards each other — not with the intent to isolate ourselves from the rest of the men, but because “female space” arose quite organically, almost intuitively since day one, as a space for us to find reprieve and personally recharge from the long hard days of walking and playing our parts on the team. Joyce, in fact, has a very demanding role as the “Water Ambassador,” which requires her to keep constant stock of our water supply, know where and what all of our available water sources are, and make sure all of our water containers are refilled with filtered water every night. As the entire team’s well-being hangs in the balance if our water situation is not taken care of, the job is defined by mental and emotional fortitude more than it is by physical strength. Joyce is the smallest human on the team, yet the mightiest of us all.

Joyce is the smallest human on the team, yet the mightiest of us all.

The girls and I sit nestled in our sleeping bags, backs and legs sore from the physical demands of the day. In the privacy of our tent, we can simply be who we are. Our tent is a haven of sorts, a place in which we can change comfortably and practice the hygiene rituals that help preserve our sanity as days pass without showers. We each have brought artifacts from home: charcoal-activated wipes from Portland, lemongrass oil from Iceland, and moisturizing serums from Singapore. Our little space echoes murmurs of delight as we vigorously scrub the dirt and grime off our faces, snuggle deep into our bags, reach for our novels for some bedtime reading. These are the small moments we connect to ourselves and to each other, to the comfort of familiarity in a place so unlike the ones we’re from.

Suddenly, it’s light. I open my eyes, unzip the front of the tent and peek out. A soft sun begins to rise high in the sky, burning through a vaporous mist. In the distance, a donkey grazes on a carpet of grass beneath a razored set of frozen peaks looking like they’re eating into the sky. There is a surprise waiting for us: we find out there is a hot spring right above our camp up a craggy hillside. It almost sounds too good to be true — our first shower on the trail!

The girls and I opt to go first. In the Wakhan, religious ideology is a little looser, so I unravel my hair, let it breathe, as the Afghan herders nod morning greetings. We make our way up to the hot spring, hopping across wobbly plates of rock towards a cozy enclosure of boulders, a perfect stream of water flowing into the steaming pool like a faucet over sink.

I’m the first one in the spring. I submerge myself as deep into the water as possible, and like an ocean wave it envelops me in a sweet, melting embrace. I lie flat on my back, my face pointed towards the sky. I listen to my own breathing, and for a brief moment everything is still. I may not feel like I’ve yet found my groove on the team, but I know that will come. I may not be the strongest, or the most physically capable, but I know that isn’t what really matters. For me, this expedition is not about how I battle beasts or blizzards, but how I find what’s important to me — the moments of connection to a small piece of the world, to a part of myself where I can be vulnerable, where the only thought that seems to capture the essence of the experience is simply, “I am here.”

Today, I tell those who ask that the expedition was by no means a comfortable or easy travel experience. There were no luxuries. The Wakhan landscape often appeared incomprehensibly big, unforgiving. Parts of it are steep, aggressive, and therefore extremely tough on the body.

Beyond the physical challenge of trekking in the Wakhan across ~200km of formidable terrain, there is also the mental, psychological battle of withstanding the external damage inflicted by Mother Nature, like the sun, altitude, wind, and snow, and in another part, a battle against ego — one’s sense of self-importance in an atmosphere of uncertainty. There are times when you need to make peace with discomfort and unpredictability, which isn’t a particularly intuitive or wanted process when you’re used to the creature comforts that a modern and increasingly manufactured world provides nearly 24/7. Based on this experience, “expeditions” are no where near as romantic as what the mythologies present. But they can be transformative — just not always in the “conventional,” expected way.

One walks away from an expedition with more questions than answers, and I like to think that’s a good thing. I left the experience not with a bolstered sense of self, but perhaps a more expansive one that now stretches into more directions, open to further exploration. For me this is what defines a good travel experience — when you are challenged to redraw old boundaries of self and look at it anew. When you leave not only feeling proud of what it has accomplished (no matter how big, small, or inconsequential you may think those accomplishments may be), but with a broader understanding of why it’s important to embrace all of its parts — its strengths and limitations, its durability and its fallibility.

We cannot always be conquering heroes, but we are always human.

Photos: Charley Zheng & Joyce Chua

Charley joined the 2019 Short Walk Expedition on a Documentarian Fellowship. To support nascent adventure tourism in the region Studio D will be returning to the Wakhan Corridor to map trekking routes. To apply to join the 2020 Afghanistan Survey Expedition, sign up here.

A Short Walk was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The ‘open sesame’ to working on a foundational design research project with a ten-person team

“It’s so beautiful!” my colleague Nilar exclaimed, as we were browsing photographs and illustrations of sesame affecting pests and diseases. As a novice and lowkey insectophobe, these were the kinds of pictures that haunt my nightmares and make my skin crawl, yet here was Nilar, an agronomist by trade and research coordinator in our team, appreciating the beauty in these creatures. This was the kind of interaction that made me realize just how vastly different, yet compatible, the skills and knowledge of our team members were.

A mere three weeks prior, we had all met for the first time, in what became a joint Proximity Designs and Studio D Radiodurans team researching the sesame farming ecosystem in Myanmar. Proximity, a socially driven organisation that designs and delivers affordable, income-boosting products for rural families in Myanmar, and Studio D, a research, design, and strategy studio specialized in running international ethnographic research studies, have a sustained working relationship, marking this engagement their fifth. Nevertheless, the team, composed of 7 people from Proximity and 3 people from Studio D (including myself), had highly varying research skills and experience working with people from another culture. The 7 to 3 ratio made sense. After all, the team was to be curated to ensure a careful combination of three types of experiences: (1) domain and subject matter expertise, (2) context and local culture expertise, and lastly (3) process expertise.

Working with a team of this size can be tricky. Field studies are all about swiftness, agility, and the ability to execute huge amounts of work in a short period of time. Going into it, I realized how the structural conditions for a successful project were there. The client was committed, as demonstrated by the resources invested and time dedicated to completing the study. The team was motivated, as Proximity Designs underwent an internal “pitch” where employees could compete their way into being a part of the study team. And we were about to operate a relatively well oiled machine, as Proximity and Studio D had already teamed up on a similar study exploring the rice ecosystem beforehand.

Yet, I kept wondering what about the team, the sum of the individuals, made everything “click.” To try to decipher the intangible ways in which a team of ten people with wildly different backgrounds could successfully come together, I remembered Mike Monteiro’s You’re My Favorite Client, in which the author outlined a number of signs the client of a design consultancy could observe to know that things are going well. The book provides too many of those signs to address here, but I wanted to focus on three that particularly stood out to me.

Team members understand why

This is all about understanding the context that drives the decisions made by the team. With a foundational study like this one, the scope can be so broad that it can become intimidating and difficult to envision exactly what will come out of it. Before our team left for the field, Proximity organized a send-off party in their Yangon offices. Dozens of employees were present, not just to wish us luck and safe travels, but to let us know what they expected us to bring back, and why they needed it. Representatives from the organization’s farm technology, farming advice, and finance teams weighed in, spelling out exactly why we were setting off to go on this field study, what it meant for their activities, and what it meant for their mission and raison d’être as a whole. Did we feel the pressure of an entire organization’s expectations manifesting right in front of us? Yes. But did we understand why? Also yes.

Team members argue

As Monteiro put it, “arguing is a good sign (in moderation). This means people [are] invested in what they’re doing and passionate about the results.” I remember distinctly an instance where representatives from Proximity came to visit the team as we were making sense of all the data we had been collecting for weeks. A question was asked about the use of agricultural machinery in sesame farming. It started with the initial soft mutterings of a group of people in recall mode, firing their brain synapses to remember which interview, which set of notes, which framework had the exact data we needed. Soon enough, the voices in the room became louder. “Different machines are used throughout the harvesting process.” “No, no machines at all.” “Actually, just the one tractor, used for tilling and ploughing.” “Yes, but only for those who can afford it, otherwise it’s just ox-carts.” Finally, deliverance came when one of us brought unequivocal proof. “Well, the Dry Zone household survey says almost no one uses machinery for threshing or harvesting, but 60% of households do for land preparation.” Everyone nodded, as the soothing feeling of a group of people who just reached a consensus settled. Because, for a fleeting moment, everyone cared enough not just to find the answer to that question, but was willing to contend for it.

Team members form relationships

People begin to bond and form relationships when a project is going smoothly, because it’s a sign that they don’t just get along, but that “they enjoy working with one another,” wrote Monteiro. Right after the final presentation and workshops bringing the field study to a close, the team met in a quiet meeting room one last time, for one last team ritual. We gave each other bottles of our very own sesame oil, one we sourced and milled and bottled and carefully wrapped. With the oil, we exchanged words of gratitude to acknowledge something we appreciated about one another, or learned from each other. Actual streams of tears were shed. Not because the project came to an end, but because with it came the realization of what it means to put our newly formed relationships to the test of thousands of miles of distance and a collection of Viber stickers to express the quirky emotions we could no longer see on our faces.

When it’s all said and done, the end result is the true mark of the success or failure of our efforts or planning. When It Rains, It Pours is it. It’s our labor of love, of endurance, but more so the culmination of our research, sensemaking, and articulation of opportunities for the sesame ecosystem in Myanmar. If you’re interested in sesame as a crop, in smallholder farmers or rural Myanmar, or simply in what the outcome of such a foundational study looks like, you can learn more here, and get your hands on your own copy of the report here.

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Editor: Sarah was part of the Studio D team working in partnership with Proximity Designs to conduct foundational research in the sesame ecosystem. The printed report was designed and produced by Studio D imprint Field Institute. For more on our methodology of bringing together cross cultural teams read The Field Study Handbook. Photos: by the field team.

The open sesame to working on a foundational design research project with a ten-person team was originally published in Studio D on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.