Culture Mapping in the Age of Ambiguity
by Tim Stock & Marie Lena Tupot
We are living in the age of ambiguity. Advancing technology and a global economy have increased social complexity and forced an evolution in how we understand how things change in the world. In a complex and ambiguous environment, long-term success rests on two pillars: creativity and society. New ways of thinking become essential to understanding a dynamic global landscape. Yet, W. Lee Howell of the World Economic Forum notes that technological and scientific advances coupled with today’s complex social issues present challenges to understanding innovation and how it can create value for all.
People are getting overwhelmed by big data, unable to extract information they need; the issue is structuring the data for meaningful information rather than grappling with a barrage of statistics. Consequently, they tend to return to traditional techniques — which were not designed for today’s complex or ambiguous world. We miss the stories in the data. We miss seeing the future as it develops.
What is Culture?
Culture is a system of dynamic and interrelated characteristics. Profound opportunity for cultural insight lies in the patterns that the people of a given ideology, a given place and at a given point in time are adopting and adapting.
Visualizations help illustrate the complex social relationships that evolve out of culture. New ways of thinking have become essential in this ambiguous world, calling for a move away from focusing on any one data point, or cultural characteristic, and developing a data and visualization strategy that helps show relationships between points. Meanings emerge only in the relationships between points.
For example, it’s not enough to focus on how we as a society value cars as a mode of transportation without considering the car’s relationship to our own interpersonal evolution and concepts of sexual freedom. Without question, cars transport people beyond simply moving from place to place. They allow people to assert themselves. Cars let people push beyond their borders. They expand the space in which people live. Traditional research might mistakenly lead to thinking the answer is more cars. But the backstory is not about cars, let alone more of them. It’s about the expansion of horizons. The question is what can be done to expand horizons? With these relationships identified, intuition can be rebuilt and the crutch of quantitative approaches minimized.
Culture is a measurable system
In this ambiguous world, becoming epidemiologists of culture is essential. Research must take a more nuanced and inductive approach to gathering insight. We must be patient with the data and be more tuned to smaller signals that have huge implications. Everything must be weighed in relationship to all other factors. This is why a leader such as Vladimir Putin offers this sobering thought, “the nation that leads in AI ‘will be the ruler of the world.” It’s a valid observation.
Consequently, identifying cultural signals earlier becomes critical. Seeing human expression as part of a social system allows for anticipating adaptive and immune responses. Tremendous value is gained by developing action options that consider black swans. Our ability to read the unexpected can only come from a system view of how culture is working. The key word here is “view.” Once the process that leads to market oversaturation is exposed, its path becomes obvious to avoid. And, conversely, those once nuanced ideological shifts can be proactively viewed before they happen and confidently invested in for long-term economic and social impact.
“All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.” — Charles Sanders Peirce (American philosopher and the father of pragmatism)
We must understand that these cultural systems are measurable, enabling science to return to examining how cultural dynamics and meaning creation are structured. Our methods can better leverage this reality as the promise of next generation technology and machine learning evolves.
Putting science to technology
According to writer John Lancaster who penned the recent New Yorker article, How Civilization Started, “For much of human history, though, technology had nothing to do with science. Many of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific method behind them.” Fire came before cooking. Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin, etc.
This is pretty much where the world is at right now with data and technology. There is a lot of technology, a lot of data, but method is lacking.
For this reason, we locked down our anthropological method with a utility patent after a ten year process of rigorous testing and tuning. Our method, as it always has — even prior to the age of big data — helps us organize and make sense of the ongoing influx of cultural data and trends. It works by leveraging language as the most powerful form of human data, offering a rich view of how things are really working against a semiotic matrix measuring expression. Inputting linguistic data, or “cultural signifiers”, creates a map that helps identify and structure cognitive spaces. These spaces are where language clusters and emerges as new habits and new behaviors. A group’s perception of the world can be represented by the linguistic taxonomies that make themselves apparent within the structure of the matrix.
These linguistic signatures serve as cultural signifiers in each quadrant forming a patterned, measurable logic. Archetypes and codes emerge from the signifier clusters, contextualizing essential human narratives. The logic and consequent algorithms that emerge quantify how an archetype is likely to respond uniquely. For instance, the word “organic” placed in the context of the four quadrants shifts in meaning, and thereby response, in correlation with other changing signifiers. The stories that emerge are the basis of kinship. They illuminate emerging trends and allow for understanding the social adaptation. This lends the power to leverage patterns and dynamics of cultural change.
Culture mapping has broad applications
It’s not stating the obvious to say that before digital data existed, there was information to map. But, at times, that is forgotten. Research too often begins and ends with what can be obtained digitally. No surprise, it’s cost effective in its immediate use. However, digital mapping can be extended to fieldwork and vice versa. The goal is to bring seemingly diverse data together on the same plane of measurement.
Using this structure, a broader cross-correlation of corpora can be implemented and augmented. Cognitive frameworks for recruitment can also be developed, and a linguistic logic for further queries can be structured. These predictive frameworks can be tested and evolved over time.
This approach demonstrates obvious value when working in challenging research markets. For example, when conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Japan traditional methods fall short and more contemporary approaches of impromptu interviews are viewed skeptically. It’s incorrect to ask direct questions as subjects are cautious to reveal what they are truly feeling for fear of being offensive. This phenomenon is not unique to Japan — in fact, it plays out globally depending on subjects. Interviews and surveys are inherently incapable of capturing meaning and intent.
However, combining layers of data analysis and ethnography can unlock some tough blocks in research. allowing verbatims to connect with the larger sphere of social signifiers emerging online. This hybrid approach is useful to the researcher in how subjects are recruited and for developing ongoing panels and finding real-life muses for inspiration. An ideology evolution of the screening process gives a bigger picture of the individual in the context of society. This cognitive approach to recruitment segmentation can allow the interaction to be less direct and more open to natural interactions on topics and within activities.
Leveraging emerging technologies
Sandboxes for researchers get created, which are useful for integrating machine learning and complementary APIs. Image recognition APIs can help us classify larger datasets of visual information. Placed into our framework image clusters tell their own stories as a collective body. There are visual details in images that can be classified and then searched. Words and images can be evaluated in their unique pairings, and those structures can be used to run larger search queries to gather near-neighbor correlations. We can also analyze unique pairings of images with certain keywords associated with unique cognitive spaces in our matrix. The structure opens up the possibility to all of these emerging recognition engines including ones that can classify gesture and sound. The key is how the structure of the data might make these recognition engines more practical in understanding cultural change.
Coaxing out the poetry and stories
Coaxing the poetry out of data separates true analytics from calculation — 19th century British mathematician Ada Lovelace emphasized the Analytical Engine’s ability to be programmed to solve problems of any complexity, different from calculating machines.
“Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must seize the unseen, the unconscious.”
- Ada Lovelace (English mathematician and writer)
At the end of the day, data is about people. And findings must better reflect this truth, especially if people are expected to act on research findings and implement strategies. Findings have to feel real and elicit empathy in order to receive attention. Leveraging Jungian archetypes is one way to bring findings to life. They serve as a foundation for cultural signifiers and reveal how characters are actually points in the system of belief and ideology — from the rebel as the point of cultural dissent to the hero and the lover who normalize language into a form of social currency.
Archetypes represent an evolving process. that researchers can measure at any given time in the context of changing societal forces. Recession triggered an immune response culture that placed the rebel and the sage in high regard in re-establishing cultural norms. Many of those early signals triggered in 2009 are now expressed as social norms and ways of fitting in. The evolution of yoga in American culture after the recession is a good example. From self-actualization to yoga pants as social badge unrelated to the origins of meaning.
Developing new KPIs based on culture
The phrase KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is often used when discussing what is hoped to be coaxed from data. These indicators are defined very loosely from business to business. Adaptive behavior in the context of society is the only indicator that matters, and such indicators need to evolve from awareness to systems of belief. It’s not correct to expect that indicator to express itself as a single point.The need for this concept of performance can be evidenced in the rise and fall of companies over the last ten years Categories like retail are simultaneously in crisis and rebirth. Large brands are buying culturally authentic startups to counteract declining sales in their core portfolio. The only measure of future success is in how well these companies see the complexity of cultural change and know how to develop the right measure of action to participate. As cities grow new opportunities in suburbia begin to emerge in new ways. As artisanal foods get over-marketed, new opportunities in scientific methods of food production are beginning to be reclaimed and integrated.
Food as a cultural system
Consider how supermarkets were designed in the 1960s. Food reflected an ideological affirmation of technology and progress in the booming decades of consumerism. This common concept of food shopping has changed drastically — most significantly in our recent lifetime. Its change has not been cultivated by marketers or urban planners, but by a system of culture networks that drive the change. Before there was Whole Foods, there were decades of evolution of what that framework of food means. And that meaning was directly correlated as a political response to social norms in food production after WW2. From Rodale health and wellness books to Alice Waters to David Chang, these networks define how we live, how we celebrate, and in turn how we cook, and ultimately how we grow.
Research tends to silo these aspects of consumption and by doing that the rise and fall of certain critical trends are missed. If you want to see the future of food look to creative chefs. They are the bridge between the farm and everyone’s kitchen table. But not only are they in the kitchen, they are lobbying and they are incubating. That process of framing new symbolic language of growing and cultivating food into techniques that can be understood and shared is critical. Integrated cultural participation is a much stronger economic position for companies who want to build futureproof brand portfolios.
Anticipating Luxury Bubbles
Visualizing these cultural systems helps better chart cultural dilution and bubbles. Consider the cultural system of luxury as another example. Luxury is a constant search for balance between the profound and the permissible. In the years the internet has grown, it has suffered significantly from the ease by which elements of meaning can be easily re-appropriated. When everyone knows about it and is able to access it in some way, the original meaning disappears. It creates an ideological tension across the pillars of luxury, those being purpose, truth,freedom and rank. Mapping reveals the dynamics of these pillars and demonstrates exactly where, when and how to exercise restraint.
A brand can be killed with over promotion. So many legacy brands made this mistake as the US and European markets declined after the recession. A great application for mapping is to see how a brand is able to express itself in multiple physical and virtual retail contexts without diminishing meaning. The researcher and brand manager can orchestrate a layered meta-narrative for the brand to distinguish retail contexts — in order to balance the art with ease of access. One can’t be done too heavily without harming the whole. A brand like Gentle Monster executes well on this reality by allowing its physical retail store to function more as spectacle and knowledge acquisition. Why? Because the brand understands the ease by which people can buy the products online. Gentle Monster is a designer brand that constantly develops itself under the philosophy of “Innovational High-End Experiments.” This gives the brand room to breathe and innovate.
Backcasting better futures
Backcasting is a design research method in which a desirable future is identified and then works backward to align policies and programs to connect the specified future to the present. In the case of culture mapping, the behavioral archetypes establish the future vision and the way that can be connected contextually over time. For example, in 2007, the bicycle was somewhere between virility represented by Lance Armstrong, and triviality represented a nostalgic idea of riding bikes on the weekend as children. The category was framed as leisure. The future cast bicycles as integral part of transportation. But the traditional data to support that did not exist yet. The research needed to tap into cultural movements. Canada’s Naked Bike Rides in 2002 were the first recent time bikes were being used for protest — beginning with Artists for Peace/Artists Against War (AFP/AAW). From there, pro-bicycle protest movements such as Critical Mass emerged as a way to reclaim the streets, followed by activism for aggressive urban planning, leading to walkable cities reconstructed around bicycle traffic considerations. These happenings foretold where cycling was headed as well as cities. The future was fluid and mundane.
The indications of directional change are always present within the culture; we just need to know where to look to find the evidence. Culture mapping points us in the right direction, offering us the advantage of being on the front end of evolution, both giving the sense of prescience and allowing full preparation for the new social direction.
Any social phenomenon anywhere can be observed with these tools In a time of increasing social complexity and ambiguity, culture mapping helps simplify and provide clarity. We can nurture a new literacy for culture if we translate our research methods to be synchronized to how culture really operates.
