This series of articles explores organisation-external communications, how to engage the world out there to impact how your peers think and act, how this process shapes our identity and what we might become. It forms part of research into my next book on organisational and human sensemaking.
Part VII Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Making sense of artefacts
- 3. Building an artefact portfolio
- 4. What's next
- Footnotes
1. Introduction
Think about something you worked on for a decent length of time that you shared with the world. What happened next?
Of the audience members you targeted, who engaged with it, shared it with their community? Alternatively, who pushed back on it, or ignored it completely?
Part VII of this extended essay explores the world of experiential, physical and digital artefacts, to understand why some shared things gain traction, whilst others are met with a collective shrug. The aim isn’t to create a more efficient customer funnel, garner more attention, or achieve virality (although these outcomes become more likely with this understanding). Instead it focuses on what makes a thing more artefactful, worthy of continued presence in our lives, to shape who we are and what we might become.
We’ll unpack the properties and dynamics of artefacts to understand why they are ascribed value, embody meaning, and retain importance. I’ll include a number of Studio D case studies, with plenty of other examples along the way.
How we ascribe value
We can start with a reductive question:
Of everything you put out into the world, why are some things ascribed a high, neutral or low value by you and your audience?
FIGURE 1. Ascribed value assigned to shared things
We can consider this from the perspective of the sharer and the receiver, shown in (Figure 1), where three broad shared assessments of value—junk, stuff and artefacts—are shown. In all other sections there is a sharer/receiver assessment mismatch.
Not everything should be an artefact
Everything has the potential to be an artefact, but not everything should be.
For example:
You’re presented with a gift of a ceramic vase from a friend who has recently started pottery classes. From their perspective it is a reflection of the value they place on your friendship, their thoughtfulness—embodying attributes of ‘artifactulness’ (which we’ll unpack later on).
However, accepting the gift feels like an imposition. The vase is a reminder of the many times they let you down when you needed their emotional support, and yet you succumbed to the pressure to adhere to social norms and graciously accept it. These mismatched assessments of value, meaning and symbolism will be prolonged as you’ll feel the social pressure to display it every time they visit your home. Throwing it away will trigger guilt.
A mismatched assessment of our broad definition of ‘value’ can lead to a range of negative feelings: confusion, under appreciation, being patronised, awkwardness, resentment, and obligation. Positioning something as an artefact can be a tax on the receiver’s attention, passing on an unhealthy fetishisation, a net negative.
We can acknowledge that not everything should be positioned as an artefact, and recognise that things can sit comfortably along a spectrum of value (Figure 2).
FIGURE 2. A spectrum of value
2. Making sense of artefacts
Three categories of artefact
A shared artefact can be categorised as physical, digital or experiential, each with high level attributes (Figure 3). A single artefact can sit neatly in one category, but often leads to acts across all three categories. For example, you create physical project t-shirts that are given out to team members, host an experiential event where the t-shirts are worn to reinforce team affiliation, and where digital photos are taken of the t-shirt wearers and are shared online.
FIGURE 3. Artefact categories and high level attributes
Alternatively, consider the act of sharing a digital photo of a physical book versus sharing a screenshot of the book’s cover (Figure 4). The meaning and value to the sharer and receiver in each instance is different, but why are they different?
FIGURE 4. A shared photo of the book versus a screenshot of Kevin Bethune’s, Non Linear.
Sharer and receiver dynamics
Almost anything can be considered an artefact—it is ultimately subjective assessments made by the sharer and the receiver—but we can recognise that some things are considered more artefactful than others.
With a nod to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), consider an artefact from the perspective of both sharer and receiver (Figure 5), to understand whether the value ascribed to it carries over from one person to another.
FIGURE 5. The value ascribed to an artefact by the sharer and receiver
For example:
You attend a conference where the organisers provide a conference-logo adorned t-shirt, bag, water bottle and lanyard—from the sharers’ perspective these are artefacts. However, the two objects you decide to keep are the lanyard (that includes your name, and that you were a speaker), and a book bought after a 1:1 conversation with its author (a tangible reminder of that conversation, and a gateway into their hard earned wisdom). The rest of the conference swag is left in the hotel room when you depart, destined for the trash or recycling.
In this example the value and meaning ascribed by the sharer and the receiver are mismatched. Whilst a carefully thought out conference will seek to activate serendipitous outcomes, these are difficult to predict.
A high financial value alone does not make something an artefact, although a high cost implies scarcity and it may still be worth holding onto because of its value as an asset.
Six attributes of an optimal artefact
I propose six attributes that make something more artefactful for the sharer and receiver, although of course you may wish to add your own (Figure 6).
FIGURE 6. The six attributes of an artefact
Artefacts share some properties with memes, and may achieve virality, but generally require more effort to produce, share, lead to higher levels of emotional engagement and attachment. Attaining virality may enhance something’s artefactfulness e.g. ‘if we all adopt this point of view, our community will be more resilient’, or undermine it e.g. ‘This is so widely available, that keeping it around it provides limited additional value’.
Returning to why we share
Motivations to share vary for individuals and organisations, to recap a few:
- Communicate values e.g. ‘this is what I stand for’,
- Build, reinforce, or celebrate a community e.g. ‘this is who we are, what makes us special’,
- Positioning e.g. ‘this is our stance on this issue’, and to draw in people to adopt that stance,
- Raise awareness e.g. ‘this is important to me, it should be important to you too’, and,
- Signal intentions e.g. ‘I’m interested in this and want to attract people and conversations that help me realise my intention’.
For example, consider how a certain powerful individual uses artefacts to attract attention, polarise audiences into stans or trolls (both to be monetised on his social media platform), impose values, reinforce his brand, through sharing a flamethrower, wielding a chainsaw, and other symbolic acts. We are in unknown territory whether dissenter’ boycotts and other acts that target his companies will be sufficiently offset by billions of dollars in government contracts and subsidies.
3. Building a portfolio of artefacts
An optimal artefact embodies meaning and delivers value to the sharer and recipient. These effects are amplified when the artefact is part of a coherent portfolio because an audience that has invested in ascribing meaning to one thing can carry some of that meaning over to the others. For example, we can see this in the portfolios of artefacts produced by Jeff Staple, Liquid Death and their collaborations, and in the activism strategy of Greenpeace.
A well curated portfolio of artefacts can still be highly diverse and remain recognisable to its audience, with Mschf Product Studio Inc., stretching the boundaries of what a highly diverse yet coherent portfolio can include.
Case Studies from the Studio D artefact portfolio
Writing this article pushed me to reflect on the things that Studio D has put out into the world, how they were received, and what this led to.
The following is an inventory of (potentially) artefactful things produced and shared by Studio D over the past ~decade, a few of which are public, many of which remain client confidential. We consider them artefacts, with sufficient coherence to be considered a portfolio. It's up to you whether you share these assessments:
| Physical | Digital | Experiential |
|
Books, trail map, Hamidashimono, moonshine, organic sesame oil, tee-shirts, chit lone shoes and uniform, SDR Traveller products and paraphernalia, artworks, objects for exhibitions, and client deliverables. |
Articles, eBooks, template kits, Radar newsletters, end-of-year reports. phone and laptop wallpapers, blog, social media accounts/posts, and client deliverables. |
Masterclasses, retreats, expeditions, *, popup studios, Studio D Annex guest stays, our culture, fellowship programme, talks/presentations, team immersions, community engagement models, client immersions and exhibitions. |
The level of coherence between artefacts in a portfolio is not always obvious to the intended audience, and may take years to become apparent. The audience’s willingness to stick around an invest in understanding depends in part where they lie on the audience sentiment arc. More positive sentiment provides greater permission to stretch the boundaries of the portfolio, but there are limitations.
To provide an example:
When I was in the fifth year of writing and designing The Field Study Handbook, Studio D needed to make a decision of whether to release it through an established publisher or to self-publish.
My first book Hidden in Plain Sight was published by Harper Collins Business and whilst I learned a lot from the process, it was surprising how little interaction it led to with readers (with 70k+ units sold worldwide). Unlike Hidden in Plain Sight, TFSH was a mission driven book, with the aim of changing how organisations engage with the world. To achieve this we needed to build, engage and nurture a community of practitioners.
For TFSH we decided to try something different, to launch the book with tie-in products from SDR Traveller, to offer digital template kits, in-person retreats, and an expedition to Afghanistan. At that time we didn’t anticipate any demand for training, which shows just how shortsighted we were.
All of the agents and publishers we approached struggled to see the coherence between a physical book, digital assets and the experiences on offer. Of course this could be due to my poor communication skills, but I think it also points to a publishing industry that was set up to position, market and sell books in a particular way—effective, but deliberately limited in scope and unwilling to go beyond a tied and tested formulae.
We opted for setting up our own publishing arm, Field Institute, and through a chance encounter onsite at the first print run in Iceland, decided to offer it as a Kickstarter. In the event it became the second highest revenue generating non-fiction book on that platform, and the only one that I know of that offered a $10k reward—to join a trek in Afghanistan (the ‘Risks’ section of that kickstarter is worth a read). More importantly, it helped us build a community, which has sustained us to this day.
The critical questions for the launch of TFSH and related artefacts were whether:
- To launch through an established publisher or self publish?
- Exposure to established sales channels would yield greater lifetime value versus building direct relationships with a nascent, as-yet-not-engaged community of practitioners?
- The audience would find sufficient coherence between the artefacts?
In the event it turned out to not only be sufficient, but to set us apart from the norm. However, at the time it was by no means certain.
For an elegant example of stretching publishing norms, see also the release of Damian Bradfield and Luis Mendo’s Caro Carrowack, a physical book plus an audiobook released as a double album, narrated by Sir Stephen Fry. It is produced by Bradfield’s wonderfully esoteric publisher, Fupe.
PHOTO. Cara Carrowack, Photo by Luis Mendo
In the following sections I’ll unpack the intent and behind five Studio D artefacts, introduced in Figure 7.
FIGURE 7. Categorisation of five Studio D artefacts
Hidden Cup moonshine
Studio D was hired by Proximity Designs to map the rice ecosystem in Myanmar and to identify new product and services opportunities to bring to market. The project team included three Studio D team members, and eleven from Proximity Designs.
PHOTO. Hidden Cup, taken by Geoffrey Brewerton
Early on in the project we noticed the ubiquitous rice moonshine made by farmers that was sold cheaply in local markets using recycled plastic oil bottles. As a team we decided that—in addition to our contracted deliverables—we would commission a batch of moonshine, and reimagine its presentation as a high-end sake.
All project team members contributed to the concept, procurement and design process, and we managed to keep it secret from the Proximity leadership team, so that we might present it as ‘one more thing’ during the final project presentation.
The role of the moonshine-as-artefact was to:
- Accelerate the cohesion of team members from two organisations through the creation of a secret side-project, in addition to the main deliverables,
- Embody the values of the project team including respect for the communities we were researching, reflect the formal/informal practices that were prevalent, playfulness, attention to detail, and reimagining where value lies,
- Provide a unique tangible presence to our otherwise digital and experiential project deliverables.
Today, if you take a tour of the Proximity Designs HQ in Yangon, it will likely include a mention of Hidden Cup moonshine, a bottle of which was placed on its own dedicated shelf. As an artefact it serves as an accessible entry point into a larger body of rigorous research.
Popup Studios
As a consultancy that operates internationally we often need to rapidly build trust between our local and international team members. Our modus operandi includes setting up popup studios, live/work spaces where all team members sleep under the same roof, where the layout of the space supports a wide range of social dynamics.
PHOTO. Popup Studio Kalaw, Myanmar
Clients are also welcome in the space either as drop-in guests (who are put to work), or to live/work with the team. The invitation usually extends from the third day, after the rest of the team has settled, and onboarded guests are presented with a welcome pack and access to a local guide for a day to ease them into their new home.
The daily dynamics of the popup studio includes: taking turns to prepare breakfast for the rest of team, rituals such as rotating team members to sound a gong to start and end the ‘official’ working day, being able to ‘walk the wall’ of what we have collectively learned, and a mix of:
- structured time, things that are planned, often feel like work, and,
- unstructured time, which is left unplanned, often feels like hanging out, even when team members utilise this time to push the project forward.
On arrival rooms are allocated using the ‘upside down principle’, whereby the most junior members of the team get to pick their room first, to demonstrate that this isn’t business as usual, and that for the duration of our stay, all members of the team can shape our own norms and reality.
The popup studio approach often leads the project team to achieve a state of ‘flow’ (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). As one guest commented on the experience “It's like a holiday romance, without the holiday and without the romance” i.e. a group of people coming together for a dedicated amount of time, to work with minimal distractions on a shared goal.
Can an experience be an artefact? I’d argue that it meets that criteria because it shares many of the same attributes, and is:
- Distinct and memorable for everyone who joins,
- Embodies its creator/s values, represented by the culture that they collectively create,
- Triggers associations that are authentic, meaningful, and memorable, for example the ritualistic burning of the paper data wall to mark a transitional stage in the sensemaking process,
- Materiality and form are true to what it represents, and are perceived as authentic to the context in which it was created,
- Is time boxed to the duration of their stay.
One of the challenges (of the many things to pay attention to), is that the team can feel a profound sense of loss when the popup studio ends, so that we now build decompression time and conduct a longer debrief to support their adjustment back into their regular lives.
Studio D End of Year Reports
PHOTO. Ramoosh the Studio D camel, Hargeisa Somaliand.
For a number of years Studio D published digital end-of-year reports, a summary of what we got up to, where, and with whom.
The primary aim of these reports was to reflect on what we achieved and where we fell short, and to use this to guide us going forward—an early demonstration of ‘reflecting forward’ practices which we still apply.
Secondary aims were to:
- Communicate our processes, thinking, domains of interest,
- Position ourselves in the consultancy space and beyond,
- Attract a community of likeminds, suitable job candidates, and potential clients.
As you might imagine for a small studio, those early years went by in an absolute blur. For example, in the 2015 End of Year Report, we worked across 10 countries (Afghanistan, Brazil, China, India, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Somaliland, the USA and Zimbabwe), hired 35 team members to work on projects, ran 12 popup studios, and purchased 1 camel. This cadence was broadly replicable for the first decade of our existence.
The end-of-year reports were also an opportunity to share our culture and ways of thinking, and whilst digital, they featured the physical and experiential artefacts that we’d introduced into the world.
Prompted by a reevaluation of priorities during the 2020 pandemic, we discontinued publishing end-of–year reports publicly for two reasons:
- We had an established audience that understood our service offering and these reports generated too many conversations that distracted from our core mission. We had the option of expanding our footprint, but had—and still have—no desire to do so.
- The increasingly highly-sensitive nature of our client projects raised the question‘If we share this, what else might we share?’. It is easier to take on interesting work by remaining discrete.
Studio D is now in its 14th year. Re-reading the 2015 report feels like an out-of-body experience, a reflection perhaps of how far we have evolved.
RedMat
From 2010 to 2012 I was living in Shanghai and decided to run a side project to help address my limited understanding of Chinese online services, reflect on China’s changing global role, and hold up a mirror to its national identity.
The first step was to hire a local personal assistant, a confident, savvy student at a local music school, with whom I spent many hours wandering around the city discussing ideas before settling on the following question:
To make things interesting, we adopted of six rules:
- It must engage people from across China.
- Every Chinese person must be able to recognise the final thing that is made.
- None of the people taking part should understand what is being made, until the exact moment that all the pieces come together (in recognition of globalised supply chains).
- Only Chinese people and services can be used.
- That the experiment goal and process is reviewed after each step (a critical component of ethical reviews).
- The process must be transparent, in-so-far as it doesn’t compromise Rule 3.
The experiment was called RedMat.
We decided to make a Chinese flag using one-hundred doormats, which were commonly found outside restaurants in China. Most neighbourhoods had at least one mom-and-pop shop that supplied these mats in the standard ‘Chinese flag red’, and it would also require fourteen customised mats for the yellow stars—highlighted in Figure 8.
FIGURE 8. One hundred mats required to make a Chinese flag
The total process took 6 months, with 310 people from 100 locations across the country actively engaged in tasks (Figure 9), and cost around $3k.
FIGURE 9. The steps and approximate number of people engaged at each step of the process
To share insight into way we approached this experiment and the dynamics that played out, for the Design a Flag Task we:
- Posted a request in an online forum to buy a vector graphic of a Chinese flag design, that should include exact dimensions, layout and colour, then divided it into one hundred equal sized pieces. It is a notionally simple task, but how would we know it was error free?
- On a separate crowdsourcing site we then invited five people to find errors in the graphic design, paying them for the review, and offering a bounty for the discovery of any errors.
- Only when step 2 was completed without errors would we move onto the next step, following the same request-action-verify procedure.
For example, in the Anonymous Payments Task we needed to pay people small sums for crowd sourcing tasks, mat purchases and delivery costs but we also wanted to explore putting distance between our accountant and the receiver, by transferring money through an unknown (and potentially untrusted) intermediary. The process was as follows:
Each iteration of the Anonymous Payment Task involved three people: our accountant A, and two strangers B and C neither of whom knew each other.
The question we were trying to answer was: if A pays B and asks him/her to forward the money to C, what is the likelihood of the money arriving in C’s account?
We posted a request for participants to the Sandaha crowdsourcing site asking for participants to receive and pass on 50 RMB, for the opportunity to receive a 2.4 RMB reward once receipt has been confirmed. 161 persons paid attention to the task, 13 signed up to be part of the experiment and 10 people were selected to be intermediaries for the money.
In other words, in an anonymous setting would you complete the task for 2.4RMB (~$0.5) reward or keep the 50RMB (~$8)?
In the Sandaha forum the members that responded to this task questioned its purpose, assuming that it was a test of people’s morality, perhaps for a TV show.
In addition we learned that someone taking an adversarial position, may still support our intent. To paraphrase one B participant's comment on the crowdsourcing site forum “I want to keep the money, but if I complete this minor task, maybe next time they’ll trust me with a greater sum of money, which I will keep”.
In the end 60% of the money was received by C, a counterintuitively high amount for citizens in a notionally low-trust consumer environment.
The primary experiential artefact, was to place all one-hundred mats on the roof of the Wieden + Kennedy office in Shanghai, and invite participants from that company to join the experiment. They were given the instructions “You have 20-minutes to complete the task”, with no other context provided. We videoed the task from a nearby apartment block:
VIDEO. Red Mat assembly, on Shanghai rooftop
RedMat was a purely creative and intellectual exercise that in addition to considerable learning, generated physical, digital and experiential artefacts. The quirky nature of the experiment served as a conversation starter for a range of audiences and directly led to a notable, multi-year US client engagement.
SDR Traveller 1M Hauly
One of the issues Studio D faced when conducting field work—often off-grid, and in places with a variable rule of law—is the need to carry sufficient cash to cover expenses and payroll, and avoid its detection by sticky-fingered local officials.
In 2014 we launched SDR Traveller, an ultra strong, ultra light, range of luggage to support our field teams (we shuttered public facing sales in 2022). The most artefactful product we released was probably the 1M Hauly, a bag designed for carrying a million USD in new or used strapped hundred dollar bills.
PHOTO. 1M Hauly
The 1M Hauly Heist was released alongside five other products: pouches for $10k, $100k, and $400k, an accounting kit, and a faraday cage liner (the Heist variant) that minimised the risk of electronic tracking of whatever is inside the bag.
It took a year of R&D to settle on an optimal design for the 1M Hauly, including commissioning a US based military contractor to produce the faraday cage liner. The final design supported single handed carry with a gloved hand that would easily glide across a marble floor, as well as other ‘I didn’t know that was a thing’ attributes.
Is there a viable market for such a niche product?
PHOTO. The volume of new versus used strapped banknote bundles
On one level, the 1M Hauly is an ‘impossible product’, whereby the total addressable market would never cover the costs required to research and produce it. However, over time it attracted customers working in domains with very distinct needs: from lawyers working in countries known for electronic surveillance, security personnel working in off-grid, high risk environments, and the US special forces.
However, if we reconsider the 1M Hauly as positioning artefact, it:
- Embodies values, the Studio D worldview, and hints at our sometimes-unconventional processes,
- Functions as an mnemonic to the projects that Studio D takes on and wishes to attract. For example, the SDR Traveller Instagram account and website mostly used photos taken during field work bridging to our consulting work,
- Is aspirational, whereby people seem to like the idea of being able to discretely carry large bundles of cash, and, notably—to tell other people they could discretely carry large bundles of cash. This larger total addressable market made the product commercially viable.
- Is memetic, with the lightest of online sharing leading to a wide range of media mentions and social media engagement, and follow up conversations.
The main drawback of the 1M Hauly as artefact, is that it led Studio D job applicants to have an overly romantic view of our consulting projects, which added to our candidate-filtering process. In addition, the virality increased the levels of attempted fraud on our sales platform, which at one point led the FBI to reach out.
The primary value generated by the 1M Hauly was that it attracted a community of interesting people, which in turn led to conversations, collaborations, and a wide range of opportunities.
4. What’s next?
Every time I pull on an intellectual thread to explore how sharing shapes what we become it unravels into, well, more of this.
If it all goes to plan, in the next instalment (to be announced on the Radar mailing list), I’ll weave together what we covered thus far into an overarching framework.
Also in this series:
- I. On what we might become. A topology of sharing
- II. How the identity evolves
- III. The experiences that shape a career
- IV. How much of your career is down to ‘luck’?
- V. The evolution of the professional identity
- VI. Career time horizons and the evolution of identity
Footnotes
*RedMat was prior to Studio D as a legal entity, but I’ve included it in the portfolio because it was a personal side project when I was at frog, and it shaped Studio D’s mindset and processes.
With thanks to Kim Lam for the conversation on the over-fetishisation of things.
- Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
- Roland Barthes (2012), Mythologies, FSG, English Language Edition
Untitled photos: from the Red Mat experiment, all taken in China.