Cultural Research Requires A Lab

Over the last two decades, global events have reshaped the dynamics of human behavior. Yes, of course, life is in a constant state of change – but events occurring in a compressed amount of time compounded by technology have rendered behavior as unrecognizable. This frustrates trend forecasters. They don’t know what to make of having every trend over the last century existing on one plane in real-time (Ewens, 2022). Are we seeing empty signifiers? Hannah Ewens writes in Vice, “The nostalgia trip has gotten so fast it's tripping over itself.” She isn’t wrong.

Events of late came at us seemingly like rapid fire. They were pent-up. The 2008 recession. The doubling of unemployment. The rise and fall of housing. Gamergate. In 2017, the rise of Me Too as a hashtag. Killer bees. The beginning of COVID19 in 2020, followed by Black Lives Matter. Parents arguing to supersede educators. Arguments over gender-neutral bathrooms. The January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Facebook’s Frances Haugen testifying to Congress. The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Great Resignation. The overturning of Roe v. Wade. Elon Musk. Quiet quitting. Iran. AI challenging artists. All among the ongoing backdrop of Afghanistan and other global unrest, climate change, income inequality, gun safety and mental health struggles.

It is hard to make sense of how culture plays out across such an adverse environment.

People don’t yet know what they are careening toward, but there are patterns. Subcultures are engines of social cohesion. Alliances and affinities are reforming. What looks like chaos is a reset, a systemic change on the horizon. The tensions are present. We need to be taking a social science approach to futures, reading and analyzing signals as they develop.

Effective cultural research needs to be a rigorous process in order to see and make sense of these signals as patterns, a process that can be read but also fed correctly. Design research and newsrooms do not allow for this kind of complexity.

Complexity is made understandable through narrative patterns.

The narrative patterns of stories reveal how we make sense of our world. Our stories, and even their shadow worlds, are growing further in complexity as events come at us, shaking our collective core. These stories are the foundation of emerging intelligence as we better understand and connect with each other. 

Ideally, cultural research toward understanding patterns is a well-funded, dynamic and iterative process that is fed over time. Ideally, it is filtered through a cohesive social science framework. Ideally, it breaks siloes, connecting the local with the larger world. Ideally, it functions as a laboratory. Why? Because a lab is an environment for testing and succeeding – and failing. A lab is a place where the unexpected happens all the time. A lab is programmed for resilience and recovery. It’s a place to experiment and make sense of the seemingly unpredictable. It’s a place where questions are fostered from the bottom up. 

A lab approach allows for comparing diverse sources and generates visualizations of data for diagrammatic reasoning.

Diagrammatic reasoning is crucial for human cognition.

Semioticians Krämer and Ljungberg in a 2016 article state “It is hard to think of any forms of science or knowledge without the "intermediary world" of diagrams and diagrammatic representation in thought experiments and/or processes” (Krämer and Ljungberg, 2016). 

A mind shift needs to happen to be able to implement the required longitudinal practices of a lab. The people involved need to come from all practices: creative software artists, political science, philosophy, linguistics and information science – All boots on the ground feeding into a solid system that tells compelling stories that can be visualized to gain understanding. Analysts need to be able to say “I see something here. Get me more of that.”

Thankfully, modern science has become more social and productive by including different perspectives to foster collective thinking and holistic approaches to problems.

However, there is risk aversion to a laboratory approach. Most clients still want sure things, not processes – even though sure things rarely exist (Blumer, 2001). Consider, Steven Pinker’s latest book Rationality (Pinker, 2021). It seeks to explain why our efforts often seem to fall short (Gottlieb, 2021). Pinker wants a refocus on critical thinking. He points to  Bayes’ theorem, an application of 18th-century rationality by Thomas Bayes. It is a method of estimating the probability of truth. Critical thinking plays a significant role in identifying truth and managing risk. This really is what we need. Risk aversion will not get us anywhere.

We also need to start thinking along the principles of mundane science fiction, meaning that although we have deep capabilities that already exist – we shortsightedly grasp for bells and whistles that prove meaningless. The manifesto of mundane science fiction is to produce a collection of stories that follow these rules: no interstellar travel, no aliens, no alternative universes, no supernatural elements, no time travel, no teleportation (Odeluga, 2016). These parameters makes us dig deeper into what our existing capabilities actually are (Bernard, 2022). At the end of the day, analysis and foresight is a human capability.  

Works cited

Bernard, A. (2022, November 23). 10 emerging technologies cios are investing in. Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://techbeacon.com/enterprise-it/10-emerging-technologies-cios-are-investing

Blumer, Martin. 2001. “Social Measurement: What Stands in Its Way?.” Social Research 68(2):455-480. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971466

Ewens, H. (2022, December 14). How the 20-year trend cycle collapsed. Vice. Retrieved December 17, 2022, from https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmkm8/how-the-20-year-trend-cycle-collapsed?utm_source=vice_facebook&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR1oMGNcjkPIbw6fAyqd14Pu8KCp9PtSgNlcyq-zrhjuXaOIEwP84G32El0

Krämer, & Ljungberg, C. (2016). Thinking with diagrams : the semiotic basis of human cognition (Krämer & C. Ljungberg, Eds.). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501503757

Odeluga, T. (2016, June 03). Geoff Ryman, et al. – the mundane manifesto. Retrieved December 3, 2022, from https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/

Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality. Penguin USA. Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker. (n.d.). Retrieved November 19, 2022, from https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780525561996