Joe Sharpe has been founder and creative director at Applied Works since 2005, a design studio using data visualisation, user-centred design and storytelling to create digital tools and products that drive positive change. Joe also teaches on the BA Graphic Design degree at Kingston School of Art, running an elective pathway for second and third year students that explores how emerging technology is transforming the way we communicate, work, play and consume.
Mike Orwell is a digital executive producer, filmmaker and consultant. Between 2009 & 2018, he was a producer and commissioning editor at the BBC and since then has worked with award-winning digital production studios like Unit9, Marshmallow Laser Feast and Applied Works to explore new storytelling methods. At the BBC, he pioneered various mass-audience, data-driven storytelling & branching narrative projects , including the Great British Class Calculator and the BBC Lab UK platform. His boutique film-making collective Elastic Semantic specialises in telling research-driven science & engineering stories for clients such as Arup.
Episode Notes
Joe Sharpe | Web | Twitter
Mike Orwell | Web
BBC Great British Class Calculator
The Times case study: Defining a new era in data journalism on iPad
Chatham House case study: Celebrating 100 years of independent thinking
Resource Trade.Earth project
Resource Trade case study: Opening up a world of trade and policy data
BBC: Tell Me Your Secrets
Battle in Style case study
Invest in Research case study.
Information is Beautiful
A world first: How Chatham House made data on the trade of resources accessible to all
Joyful Infographics: A Friendly, Human Approach to Data by Nigel Holmes
Related Episodes
Episode #232: Stefanie Posavec and Sonja Kuijpers
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Transcript
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I am your host, Jon Schwabish. On this week’s episode of the show, we look back at a fairly old project from the BBC, so I’m joined by two guests, Joe Sharpe and Mike Orwell to talk about an old project the BBC’s Great British Class Calculator. Again, it’s a fairly old project, it’s a few years old at this point, but I thought it would be interesting to talk with them, because when this project came out, over the first day of its release, it received more than 6 million views. And if you’re trying to get your data or your visualizations in front of more and more people, I think this serves as a good case study of how to make your content more engaging, and more visible to people. So we talk about their process at the time, we talk about things that they may have done differently, we talk about the data that they collected, and, of course, we talk about what Joe and Mike are doing now in different spaces of visualizing data.
Now, before we get to the interview, I want to let you know that my new book, Data Visualization in Excel has been out for about a month. I hope you’ll pick it up at Amazon or at Routledge or wherever you get your books. It is a step by step guide to creating more than 20 intermediate to advanced graphs in Excel. And if you have the book, thanks so much for picking it up, and I hope you will consider leaving a rating or a review on the websites where you picked that book up. If you would like to learn more about the book, like to learn more about what’s in it, check out policyviz.com, where I have a whole separate page on the site dedicated to the book.
But to the show this week, here’s my conversation with Joe and Mike about the BBC’s Great British Class Calculator, and lots of other topics.
Jon Schwabish: Mike and Joe, good to meet you guys. Welcome to the show. How are you both?
Joe Sharpe: I’m very well. Thank you. Nice to meet you.
JS: Nice to meet you too. Mike, how are you?
Michael Orwell: Very good, thanks. Yeah, not too bad.
JS: Excellent. Excited to chat with you both about a relatively old project, but kind of exciting nonetheless and curious to see and hear your thoughts on it, and what you’re working on now. So I thought we would start with introductions – seems to be the best place to meet new people, and then, we could talk about the work that you’ve done, and the work that you’re doing now. So Mike, I thought we’d start with you, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, what you’re working on these days.
MO: Sure. My name is Michael Orwell, I’m a digital media consultant, producer, and executive producer. My academic background is in biological science and bioethics, but I started my career in the music business actually before transitioning to working in Digital Interactive with the BBC. At the BBC, I was part of a team that developed a mass participation experiment platform called Lab UK, which collaborated with leading academic researchers and the BBC audience themselves to try and answer some big questions in psychology and society. I also worked on a factual content platform called iwonder and became the factual commissioning editor for that. And then, I left the BBC in 2018, and since then, I’ve been working with various organizations in digital production agencies and companies to tell stories in lots of different ways. So I’m working now with Marshmallow Laser Feast, making big immersive room scale stories with a sort of history flavor. Before that, I’ve worked on music videos and various interactive, and, sort of, cutting edge technology storytelling methods.
JS: Right. Well, so around the block.
MO: Yeah, exactly.
JS: Very cool. Joe, what’s your origin story, superhero style?
JS: So yeah, I’m currently founder and creative director of a digital design studio called Applied Works. I studied graphic design at Central Saint Martins in London in the 90s, graduated from my degree in 1997. At that point, kind of, interested in motion graphics, film and video, time based type work, did various things on graduation in that area before founding Applied Works in 2005. We weren’t really a studio doing much in the way of data visualization until a couple of projects came along in the mid, well, 2010 was the first one. So the Times, the British newspaper got in touch at the time when the iPad was first released, and they were also putting up a paywall, and they were the first UK newspaper to launch an iPad edition; and all of their infographics to that point on the main website were Flash based, so they immediately had an issue of migrating content to this new device. We spent about a year working with them on a range of different data projects – really interesting relationship that really set us on that path of doing more work in data.
The second project that really sort of cemented that direction of travel was for EDF for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics working with BBDO, who we’re EDF’s advertising agency partner, and we developed a real time energy dashboard that monitored the energy consumption of key venues at the Olympics, the Olympic Park, and also Tower Bridge in London. That was a much more complicated project involving installing smart meters and things of that nature. And then, yeah, more recently, working with organizations like Chatham House, Climate Arc, Green Economy Coalition on lots of projects to do with environmental and sustainability data. One project that really probably that represents the most complex of these types of projects is for Chatham House called Resource Trade Earth, which takes, I think, last count nearly 50 million data points on resource trade between different countries around the world. So you can search for, let’s say, anything from fossil fuels to fertilizer to peanuts to sheet metals, and then explore trends in trade data. And yeah, so that’s me, I also teach one day a week at Kingston University, so yeah.
JS: That’s great. We were talking before we recorded about teaching in person, the act of being in person how much nicer it is to like see students in person rather than…
JS: I don’t think we appreciate how difficult it was until we came back face to face, and there’s only so many mirror boards and video calls that you can do, and it’s just, you know, intermediately, it’s kind of okay for the tutorial, but it’s really difficult to maintain long term. So yeah, it’s brilliant to be back face to face, really enjoying it.
JS: So it’s interesting because you both sound like you didn’t really start from a data in your professional work, start from a position of data work and sort of have evolved into those kind of in that area. So let’s kind of flashback to this Great British Class Calculator project that I think now is about nine, 10 years old, something like that. I want to talk about that briefly, and then, we can maybe talk about some of your current projects. Can you talk a little bit about where this project came from? I mean, at the time, it had six-seven million views within its first day, it was a hugely shared project. Where did the project come out, and how did the collaboration work? I’m guessing, Mike, you’re on the BBC side, and Joe, on the design development side, so how did this collaboration work, and then, when you finally sort of got that project working, how was the collaboration process between the two different groups of, I’m guessing, kind of, on the journalism side, and then, the data side, so I don’t know, Mike, maybe it’s best to start with you.
MO: Yeah. Well, I mean, this all came out of the BBC Lab UK project, which was a brilliant idea that was had. The people liked doing kind of quizzes, like, based on science programming that the BBC was making. And one researcher came to us and said, I would love to see how people are answering these questions that have to do with a program about the evolution that’s discussed actually. I’d love to see it, and I’d love to see how they answer differently depending on their demographics. And so, we thought, yeah, we could probably make something that stores that data, and then, you could analyze it, and you could find something brand new out about something we didn’t know. And then, we decided to turn this whole thing into a platform, and realize that if one person completed multiple surveys, then you’d start to build up a picture, an anonymous picture of their data across lots of domains say, you know, the way that they spend money, the way that their upbringing has influenced their personality, or the way that they – the things that they find disgusting or don’t find disgusting in society. And so, it becomes a very powerfully linked database.
So this was a big kind of project that we started in 2008 and one of those projects was the Great British Class Survey, which was a collaboration with the Current Affairs Unit at the BBC; they wanted to sort of understand if the old idea of social class was wrong in Britain or was outdated or outmoded, and they wanted to see if there were other things that were more pertinent for working out which classes people sat in.
So we did this, we created with, well, a whole team of social scientists, a battery of questions and interactive tests and things, understanding people’s cultural consumption patterns and all manner of different ways of looking at social class, and collected, I think, about 160,000 cases of data from people, which is not too shabby. And then, the academic researchers took that data, and then, just thought about it for a very long time. And I’m afraid to say in that timeframe, the TV commissioning rounds came and went, and the current affairs team said, well, where’s this brand new snapshot of British society. And we said, well, I think they’re still working on it. And so, they kind of lost interest, which is a shame. But fast forward, maybe six months or so, maybe six to nine months, the team came back with a structure of an analysis, which said that it looks like there’s these seven distinct clusters in British society. And I should say, we had already done a recruited sample as well, where we got a sort of demographic spread of people to take the test as well about, I think it was over a 1000 people.
And then, we used these two datasets basically to work out, extrapolate what the entire society looked like, and it was, you know, it was fascinating stuff, it was brand new way of looking at British society. But we didn’t really have any way of getting it out there, so we picture a little bit of money from the BBC coffers, and that’s when we got in touch with Applied Works who were doing some interesting stuff with data. And I kind of thought, well, maybe, we could visualize it in some interesting ways, and I was very interested in information is beautiful, and all that kind of area. And I was interested to see what the designers and Joe could do at Applied Works. And, I guess, that’s where, you know, that’s how we kind of started the collaboration.
JS: So Joe, you’re now brought in, you have this like treasure trove of data, maybe it’s worth just quickly explaining to listeners here what the final product looked like, but more interestingly, how did you arrive at that solution?
JS: Yeah, so the final product was a simplified set of questions that would approximate you or give you a closest match to one of these new seven class groups. And so, it would ask you, there are three groups of information or groups of questions, the first are to do with your financial situation, the second is your social, and the third is your cultural interests. And so, the quiz asks you a handful of questions that approximate some answers that will place you in one of these class groups. And so, you’re given a result, and you’re then offered the opportunity to explore each of these seven class groups and how you relate to them. So there’s some demo – there’s quite a lot of editorial information in the Calculator itself.
And so, at the beginning, I was looking back actually, it was quite a long, intermittent process where I think we were first talking to Mike, late 2011, and we were – I think we always enjoy opportunities where we can get involved with the raw data and really get in the trenches with the client and start to look at what’s going on with the data. We were opening this SPSS software, which is really complex, social science stuff, looking at cluster maps, trying to understand what was going on. And I think at that point, we were sort of overflowing with ideas of we can have heat maps, and we can have all sorts of demographic information, and some of that stuff came out subsequently through the BBC. But I think we quickly came to the conclusion that the quiz needed to be simple, you need to be able to get through it quite quickly, you need to be able to understand or anticipate what’s going to happen as you were using the quiz. And I think what made it particularly successful was it was really shareable, I mean, we were tapping into this kind of British obsession of class and I think for me, the most successful bit is finding the right line between the serious research and this kind of slightly obsessive thing we have in the UK, with the class system.
And yeah, that’s kind of how it evolved, but it was several phases of work. We did a prototype initially in mid-2012, I think, Mike roughly, where we sort of resolved the project in a way, and then, it went away for about six months, while this – I think we had six class groups at that point, and then, I was looking back, I got an email that says, please call Mike, GBCS is alive, and the deadline was two weeks away. So we had to take this prototype that we’d developed six months before, and rapidly turn it into like a finished product, meeting all the BBC accessibility guidelines, ready to be embedded on the BBC News website, and ready to support this kind of wave of, yeah, news and interest that it generated.
JS: Right. So I want to flash forward, but before I do that, what was your reaction when it took off the way it did? I mean, I think even now, I mean, we’ve had 10-15 years or so of experience of interactive visualizations, immersive narratives, quizzes, all these sorts of things, some things are old, some things have stayed the same. It is, I think, still pretty rare when you come up with a visualization that just explodes and kind of takes over. What was your reaction when you had this 24 hours of millions upon millions of views?
MO: I mean, I would say what was different to other types of visualizations was the fact that we had picked these indicative questions, which could sort of shove you into one of the categories of the research, which was quite – which was a novel thing, I think. The BBC News website had had tax calculators and things like that, where you could type in how much you spend on this, that, and the other, and it would spit out some sort of result at the end. This is the first time when you’d put your own kind of information into something, and it would tell you something brand new, you didn’t know about yourself. So it was kind of, I think, you know, I might overplay a bit that it was hard to kind of get people interested in this, but I think once the news team saw the prototype, they said, this is going to completely catch fire, this is going to go off. And to be fair to them, they got behind it and made a lot of other editorial content around it as well, and it did very well.
But, I mean, it was a hilarious first 24 hours, where I was getting phoned up by people I’d vaguely met like three years ago saying, hey, hey, come on, I need your sociologists, I need to speak, I need to get them on my show, all this sort of stuff. And it was just great for them to, for a bit of a Cinderella sort of subject like sociology to have, you know, be headline news for a week, it was brilliant.
JS: Yeah. And Joe, were you and your team just kind of like sitting back, drinking pints, just watching the traffic, just being like, this is a way…?
JS: To some extent. I mean, it took us by surprise. The first thing I heard was I woke up and I listened to the radio, and there was a news story about it. And then, there was this satirical news critical of I’ve got news for you, we’re just watching that, and it came on there, and there were parodies. I’d never had before or since our worked parodied. And yeah, it really took us by surprise. It elicited all this kind of emotions in people, and I think it just – it was one of those things where just everybody was sort of talking about it. You’d see on social media, and you’d see something like a quarter of all views came from social media, despite the fact that it was on the BBC homepage. So it was generating a lot of interest, yeah, a lot of interest. And yeah, it completely took us by surprise.
JS: Yeah, so let’s fast forward now, because you’ve both done a variety of different things, Joe, sounds like you, at the time, maybe like your feet were getting wet with data, but now it’s like up to your eyeballs. Mike, you’ve worked in sound and video and other sorts of things. And the world of data visualization, and data has changed considerably over the last decade, in many ways, but also, in some ways, is kind of the same. I mean, quizzes and those sorts of things tend to do really well when they’re done well. And I’m curious, if this project came back to your desks today, what would you do differently? And I don’t know where to start with that question, maybe we’ll start with Joe, like, just off the cuff, would you change the core visualization, or, do you feel like the way the basic, I mean, I am not asking you to redesign the whole thing in the podcast, but just, are there certain things that you would fundamentally change?
JS: I’m not sure fundamentally change it, given it was so successful.
JS: Right, yeah, sure.
JS: Obviously, the social media landscape has changed a little bit since then. I think the main thing looking back is it, it’s of its time, in terms of how it looks, it was at that weird point between before responsive web layouts became a thing, we had a separate mobile, there was a separate BBC mobile website, so we designed a completely separate interface for mobile. I think it’s set in error, I think there was no pre-web fonts. And it was certainly pretty rigorously tested for accessibility, but I think, again, we’d probably be looking at that aspect of it. In terms of the core visualization, I’m not sure – it’s difficult to know without having, sort of, Mike’s perspective on what the client would do differently really.
JS: Yeah.
MO: Yeah, I mean, I think Joe is right about social media, you know, the way of collecting data from social interactions would be interesting. I mean, one of the things that, not a regret, but it was certainly something I thought about afterwards was, wouldn’t it be great to gather this data as well, and be able to do some analyses on that, because you had people doing it from all over the world as well as all over the country. And so, it would be fascinating to just perhaps take an IP address, and then, look at what people were putting in, and just sort of have a look at that. But I certainly think there was a lot of novel things in that project, and the souvenir, we dynamically created your results, which could then be shared as a JPEG on social platforms. That was red hot innovation at the time, but that’s now become a fairly standard thing. But that certainly helped in, sort of, spread and disseminate the content, I think. But there’s so much more you could do with the social platforms you’ve got nowadays. So I think that would be very interesting.
JS: That’s a good point, I think you could probably do something more sophisticated and more unique with the share visualization, with technology available today.
JS: Again, the user puts their personal information and they click run, go, whatever, and they get their personal results and creating something that they could immediately share to one of the – to the different social platforms.
JS: Yeah, exactly.
JS: Yeah. So I wonder today, whether you think it would still work as kind of a standalone kind of dashboard, like, right now, it kind of sits as its own digital dashboard, but do you think now things have changed sufficiently enough, where it would need to be sit within a larger narrative, or does that kind of project still work as its own separate standalone page?
JS: I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this, Mike, but I’m recalling how it was a standalone quiz, and the additional tabs kept coming day after day after day as the more attention it got. And a lot of this other analysis, and deeper analysis came along and supported it. So yeah, I think maybe if there had been a more cohesive plan of how to sort of deliver all that content together, and also, bear in mind, we’re within the BBC News website, so there’s all of the surrounding navigation that sits there. Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve got anything else to add, Mike?
MO: Yeah, I mean, I think the original idea was just to have a series of articles, you know, flat articles with some nice visualizations in it. But I think the fact that it could be embedded, and I think it told its own story fairly well, actually, I think it, wherever it turned up in the BBC News website, I think it didn’t require that much other stuff going on. Yeah, I mean, I don’t – it’s an interesting question about what other sort of surrounding narrative it would need nowadays. I mean, I think what’s changed since 2013 is there’s so much more of an emphasis on identity politics, and that was sort of curiously missing from that analysis or that way of looking at society. And now, it’d be very hard to ask those sort of questions about society without some of that identity politics coming into it.
JS: Right. Joe, you mentioned the accessibility piece, and I’m curious about that in its own right, but I’m also curious about, like to your point about the icons that were used at the time, and obviously, there’s been a lot more attention both on accessibility for digital products, but also in the last two, three, four years on how we represent people and communities with the icons. It was interesting to me, because I just finished Nigel Holmes’ book, Joyful Infographics, and he makes a point about race and identities and icons, and he just argues, don’t worry about using black and white and trying to match skin color, just use blue, like, there are no blue people, so just use blue. And it turns out that in this project, you guys used blue, and I’m just curious to kind of pull all these different kind of identity threads together, like, I guess, the question is pretty broad, but where do you think things might have changed on that? Taking that project today, do you think you would have changed some of your decisions around icons and color and maybe even accessibility discussions would be different today than it was 10 years ago?
JS: You want to take that one Mike?
MO: Yeah, I mean, I gave some broad sort of like guide – well, not guidelines, but I sort of said, what I thought the territory should be, but you guys ran with it, so yeah, definitely.
JS: Yeah, I think how we ended up with blue, I mean, yeah, clearly, we wanted to retain a certain ambiguity of ethnicity, and although we had some demographic information, average age, predominant gender, types of occupations within each class group, they were really, you know, there’s no real easy way to represent that many people in one character. But how we arrived at blue, I can’t recall, other than we had the BBC color palette, we had colors for each of the economic, social, and cultural elements of the graphic, and we had orange for the user, and it was kind of, yeah, a process of seeing what looked good and what worked well. We have done a project more recently, with Chatham House called Tribes of Europe, which follows a similar mechanic, it was attitude to Europe, Chatham House conducted a survey in 10 countries in Europe, 10,000 respondents, and it was to challenge the idea that people were generally just pro or anti-EU, or pro or anti-Europe. And so, they proposed six different tribes, and at either end, you would have so Federalists on one end, and EU rejecters on the other end, but all of this nuance in between of people with different attitudes to these related topics, and we – that one was, we didn’t have the kind of leeway of wit and humor, and not taking yourself too seriously. They had to be witty, but they had to, I mean, they were – there’s some pretty serious questions that we’re asking.
We commissioned an illustrator called Bell Nova, and she produces beautiful group illustrations around the European star; and they were, again, quite ambiguous, but they had attitude, so they were kind of austerity rebels, for example, and they were kind of trying to change a wheel underneath the star, and they were, as I said, EU rejecters with a wrecking ball. And these kinds of – it was more attitude than demographic information, so from that point of view, we did do a project that was quite similar that we did approach differently actually. I think it depends on the context of the subject matter.
JS: Sure, yeah, it’s interesting, and the way you phrase it, kind of the fun, more whimsical piece versus something that’s more serious and demands that, yeah. Joe, you’re able to talk about this more recent project. Mike, I wanted to ask, do you have a more recent project you wanted to maybe talk about a little bit?
MO: I mean, I think a lot of those sort of projects from back then feed into sort of the interest that I have now of this idea of nonlinear storytelling, and also a kind of voting or selection kind of process. So I made an interactive graphic novel, called Tell Me Your Secrets, which is based in the Second World War. It was a sort of little known kind of story of diplomacy and espionage that went on, but I let the users inhabit the main character, and try and make the decisions with the negotiations with the United States that basically saves Britain’s bacon, pretty much. And we recorded a lot of the decisions that people were making, and we made a little piece of content based on who decided to do what, and who is influenced by what decision. And that’s sort of gone on into other types of, you know, I mentioned before, we made an interactive music video for Chinese clients, where we allow people to vote for how they wanted the video to change in real time. And then, we had to demonstrate in real time with graphical overlays and things, like, what was the more popular thing at the given time. And so, I think there’s something really compelling about people being able to, A, have agency to change the story, or to bend the story to the way that they would like to see it, but also to sort of show people what’s happening so that people have this understanding of there’s this dynamic situation going on, but we can see it changing because of the selections we’re making. So I think a lot of this stuff has really influenced a wide variety of stuff, not even just sort of social science stuff, but all sorts of ways of telling stories.
JS: Yeah, terrific. Well, I want to thank you both for coming on. I know it’s a little bit of a trip down memory lane, but definitely interesting to see how you think about it now, and what the process was like. So thanks to you both for coming on the show, it’s really, really great to chat with you, and I’ll put links to all the things that you’ve mentioned, so folks can sort of at least take a look at the BBC project, but also, I think it’d be interesting to contrast and compare how things have changed. So Joe, Mike, thanks so much for coming on the show, appreciate it.
JS: Thank you very much, Jon.
MO: Thank you, Joe, brilliant, thank you.
Thanks to everyone for tuning into this week’s episode of the show, I hope you enjoy that. Of course, I hope you’ll check out the Class Calculator. There’s a bunch of other links to Joe and Mike’s current work and some other pieces that they thought would be interesting to listeners of the show, so check it out over policyviz.com. And so, until next week, which will be the last episode of the PolicyViz podcast for this season, thanks so much for listening. See you next time.
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Sotsky Remirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you’d like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. The PolicyViz podcast is ad free and supported by listeners. If you’d like to help support the show financially, please visit our PayPal page or our Patreon page at patreon.com/policyviz.
