I’ll give you a little bit of background about what I’m doing as CXO (Chief Experience Officer) of Sapient. The company I came from (E-Lab) has been transformed into what’s now called the Experience Modelling Discipline – currently a group of about 100 people spread around three continents.

In some ways, we are organized like a niche boutique research firm – one that includes anthropologists, sociologists, literary theorists, historians, critics, people from performance studies; all in all, they are people who understand the interaction of cultural systems with everyday life and experience.

But we are a part of a much bigger company that is building businesses and deeply involved in information technology. So, in some ways, the mission I’ve been on a for the past 14 months is to transform one of the big web E integrators into a company that thinks like the social-science interpretive types I’ve been around for most of my adult life.

So that’s what I’m going to talk about today, the how and why of doing a new kind of research within the context of the business Sapient is in. I’m not really going to give you a case study, but I will, I promise, explain the title of the talk: ‘Things to Think With.’

Not being trained as a designer, I have gotten most of my design credentials from the people I’ve been exposed to over the years, and one of the people that I’ve learned the most from in terms of how to make a good slide shows is Tucker Viemeister, who taught me the value of using totally cheesy stock photos and just pulling them out of context. (shows picture of an elephant)

I like this picture of an elephant, and one of the things that it brings to mind for me was the structuralist maxim "meaning inheres in contrast" – the idea that we know darkness because we know light, that we know up because there is a down, and on. Elephants are pretty heavy, but when I first got the invitation to come give this talk, there was a part of the invitation that asked us all to, ‘imagine a thing that stands for lightness to you, an experience of lightness.’ And I immediately thought of something, represented by this cheesy stock photo.

A couple of years ago I started going heli-skiing, and it’s a pretty profound experience to have a helicopter drop you off on top of a ridge in the middle of the back country and then dive into hundreds and hundreds of vertical feet of very deep powder. And to me, those were the sublime moments when I most feel light and released, when I actually experience lightness.

But when I started to think about that as something that I would try to convey to an audience, or hang on a wall, I realised the idea was totally weird – because there’s never been another time in my life when gravity has been more prominent. You’re standing with these 40lb boots and these large boards clamped to you, and some of these ridge tops they drop you off on are about 30 inches wide (or at least they feel like it). Weight, gravity, pull, the whole idea of going down is remarkably present there, and yet at the end of it, what stays with me is this notion of lightness, floating in control. And what I wanted to do was make sense of it. Why was it that I could think "light" in the face of all this gravity and weight?

And I realised that I should have known this right from the start. I did my dissertation work with Csikszentmihalyi, and one of the concepts that we worked on, among a number of different concepts, was the notion of flow. Mike calls it the ‘Psychology of Optimal Experience’. It’s a pretty simple notion that optimal experience is about balancing two dimensions: skills (how good are you at doing something?) and challenges (how hard is it to do?).

There’s this nice notion of balance in there. If your skills are really high, but it’s not very hard to do – say if you’re an adult and you’re playing chequers – the result is boredom. On the other hand, if you’re not very good at something, and the task presents a lot of challenges, you get anxiety. Right in between, in this perfect balance, is this notion of flow. After doing hundreds of interviews with everybody, from rock climbers to heart surgeons, from programmers to Grand Masters in chess, people would describe the experience as one of release, as one of lightness, as one of forgetting the constraints of place and time and being in this experience that they came to call flow.

So that’s what it was for me. I realised why this very heavy moment somehow left me with an experience of lightness. Because it’s a flow experience. So what is that?

What is that, when you can bring a little piece, a representation of something complex to an experience and make it accessible to someone else? That’s what I think of as models and the most useful use of models. More on what I mean by that.

These guys were really damned good with models. This is Watson and Crick with their famous stairwell model of DNA. Now think about how profound the changes in Western medicine, science, biology, have been, not to mention how much money has been made from this thing that was clamped together out of old chemistry clamps and sticks and balls in a stairwell behind their offices. Their genius was to represent not the precise detail, but the underlying structure of how protien molecules combine to create a DNA sequence. That notion of a model was something that was both a model of the underlying structure, and a model for how people could think about what’s going on in genetic material.

One of the people that I also studied with is Jacob Getzels. One of the things that he always said was that a good theory gives you something to think about, but a great theory gives you something to think with. And what we’ve been trying to figure out in our discipline is where is the best place to think with models and how do we start to use models as a part of our everyday approach to work? And how is it that the two disciplines that are so closely intertwined in my work every day manage to work so well together. Those two disciplines being interpretive social scientists of various ilks, and people of the various design disciplines. And I started to think about it in this way.

I start with the my (probably idiosyncratic) reading of Clifford Geertz’ seminal essay "Thick Description" in ‘The Interpretation of Cultures.’ One of the critical notions in that essay is Geertz’ notion of where an ethnography sits, of the purpose of an ethnography. Geertz argues against some of the old school who say that an ethnography is about going out and exhaustively describing what ‘the other’ is doing, and the result of the ethnography is the representation of description. And I think that that oversimplified tourist-snap-shot vision of ethnography is what a lot of people see in ethnographic work for business. And they look at it and say, "That’s not very profound," and there’s a good reason they say it: that’s not what it’s supposed to be.

In many ways, Geertz’ own work is the best example of the ‘place’ an ethnography occupies. In "Thick Description," he describes his own place as a member of the academy, indicating that his interpretive community is other anthropologists who are working with the common theoretical and empirical issues of their time and community. At the same time there is also a place that he studies. The place Geertz studied most famously, is Bali, and in the essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" Geertz’ notion of what an ethnography does is beautifully realized. In this essay, right between the theoretical concerns and the detailed description of another culture, Geertz gives us the notion of ‘deep play’.

The essay is not an exhaustive description of cockfights or cockfighting. The center of the chapter is the notion of ‘Deep Play; which is a construct that describes the sociality of passionate involvement in almost any kind of competitive sport. This becomes a lens through which not only can he show you what’s important about the Balinese cockfight, but through which his colleagues can address things like riots in Scottish soccer matches. This idea sits above the particularities of the events described and lets different audiences make sense of them.

There's a very similar process in a lot of what I’ve seen in really good design work. Here is one of the annotated site sketches from Frank Gehry’s book on the design of the new museum in Bilbão. From the way that Bilbão has been described, it was as if it were the Pittsburgh of Europe – a decrepit, industrial, decaying city in need of a new centre. And what has happened with the building of the Bilbão museum, is that people speak the word Bilbão in hushed tones as if the whole city has been transformed by this museum. But what was in between the characteristics of this site that you see on the top and the final model? Is the model really the solution, any more than the exhaustive description of a cockfight is the cockfight? No!

Gehry singles out a little series of sketches as his ‘solution.’ When he got to this, when he scrawled this kind of relationship of volumes, he knew the problem was solved. And this solution is something that both helps relate the conditions of the site, the concrete and present, to a potential future. When you think about it, ethnography occupies the same virtual space as a design, in the way that many designers work.

Designers and ethnographers, at least ethnographers that work this way, structurally think the same. The other thing is that this is kind of light. This is where models have a place, that’s both enlightening, in the sense of a lens that can project light on something, and it’s up above. Freud once said that a good analyst should train him or herself to have "evenly hovering attention." It’s a lovely phrase. The ability to step back, give equal attention to everything.

There are a couple of other kinds of models that we use in this way. One of which is this, Vygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development." It’s a really nice notion. Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist attempting to contruct a truly materialist psychology. He tried to understand what elements of cognition could be taken out of your head and put out in the social world. Put really really simply, this notion holds that there’s stuff you can do, like adding one plus one, and there’s stuff that’s just way too hard for most normal human beings. But in between there’s this really great space called social cognition, which is stuff that you can do with tools. Vygotsky says this isn’t just calculators, it’s calendars, addresses, there’s all these systems that we use to actually extend our cognitive reach.

Another one is from Sir Anthony Giddens. If I were to ask you right now what time it is, most of you would look at a clock, or a watch. You wouldn’t run outside and (if we weren’t in Amsterdam in November!) try to see how long your shadow is, or where the sun is in the sky. Time is a system that has become abstracted from its concrete, everyday realisation and technology, rather than distancing us from time, has enabled us to overcome the social fact of the abstraction of time into a system. Giddens works through how a number of different kinds of thing actually do that.

Flow is a model that helps you think about getting better through ever more complex interactions with what your activity is. Vygotsky is a model that enables one to think about how social constructions of tools enable us to do more than we ever could on our own.

Giddens is the one who starts to give us hope here. He says that technology is not just the bad guy, making things abstract, but it also gives us a notion of access; and he gives really great definitions of confidence and trust that go along with it. To me, that all adds up to the only person that social scientists really understood anything about economics from, Karl Marx.

What Marx said, and what I think this all adds up to, is that in the revolution, in any economic revolution, the people who win are the people who control the means of production. And if information is the basis of the next generation of our economy and society, then what a lot of us in this room are engaged in doing is returning control to the users.

This last little statement here is too much to read, but in the middle it says: "Given the premise that such systems extend the commonality of experience, the goal of the design of technology should be to provide access, trust and confidence in systems which are growing ever more difficult to know." That is worth doing. And that is from the mission statement to the Experience Modelling Discipline, which we train people to think about.

Thank you very much.