Dan Hill part 1 - Cities of Sound
Dan Hill is Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova - Sweden’s Government Innovation Authority where he invents the future of cities.
His story brings together innovation, design, music, technology, gender, computer science and lots more. He’s been the Head of Interactive Technology and Design at the BBC, Director of Web and Broadcast at Monocle, CEO of Fabrica, Design Advocate for the Mayor of London, Executive Director of Future Cities Catapult, the Spice Girls’ web designer and much more…
This is the first in a two-part series in which Dan talks in-depth about his experience consulting governments on innovation, mobility, and quality of life, his thoughts on how we use technology, culture and creativity to meet the UN sustainable development goals, what sorts of noises electric cars should make, why gardeners should be put in charge of urban planning, how he brought podcasting to the masses - and much more.
Music: reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
bbc, people, cities, called, realised, design, music, question, building, point, government, culture, radio, understanding, exist, manchester, big, internet, technology, head
SPEAKERS
Dan Hill, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest. And welcome back to a new year of the MTF podcast. A lot of important and interesting things have happened in the time since we last spoke some big personal life stuff, as well as some incredibly important new developments for MTF Labs, the Industry Commons, and what we’ve now got lined up in the calendar for 2020. I’ve also had the chance to sit down and have some of the most fascinating conversations with some brilliant people from the world of music, technology and innovation, not necessarily in that order. And you’re going to be meeting some of those people over the coming weeks on the MTF podcast. Now, I really want to kick off a new year in the right way, by introducing you to Dan Hill. For the past year, almost to the day, Dan has been the director of strategic design at vinnova, Sweden’s government innovation authority. Before that, well, lots of things including head of interactive technology and design at the BBC, Director of web and broadcast at Monaco, CEO of Fabrica, design advocate for the Mayor of London, Executive Director of future cities catapult Not to mention a few books as part of designing websites for bands you’ve heard of, and some fairly prolific long form blogging and serious international thought leadership on the topics of innovation, culture, creativity, and design. Now, one of the main things that Dan thinks about for a living is the idea of the city. And this is a major theme for MTF in 2020. Now, as you can probably imagine, the conversation with Dan was fairly wide ranging, and we had a lot to talk about. So what we’ve done is divided this podcast up as a two parter. In this episode, Dan talks about his journey, the innovations he spearheaded in the worlds of media and music, and talks about new ways to think about what it is and what it can be in the future. It’ll continue next week in part two, when we’ll talk about the physical internet music metadata how far we’ve come in the past 15 years of digital music sound for urban environments in an age of electric and autonomous vehicles. And while a lot more the changeover from 2019 to 2020 was full of highlights, and this was definitely one of them from our conversation in the vinnova head offices in Stockholm. This is Dan Hill. Enjoy Dan Hill. Thanks so much for joining us.
Dan Hill
pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Your
Andrew Dubber
job title is director of strategic design at Vinnova. I’ve got a couple of questions arising from the Yes. Okay. So okay, first of all, what’s been over? That’s an easy one
Dan Hill
as the Swedish government’s innovation agency, so we were responsible for coordinating the innovation ecosystems in the country, basically, the government. Traditionally, we fund a lot of stuff, and r&d projects, innovation projects, things like that. What I do within that is maybe more exploratory stuff, which is figuring out what needs to happen in the first place. And we address some of these really complex challenges aren’t just a question of throwing money in an existing investment pipeline, or, you know, saying there’s a big business, they just need more big business. We’re trying to figure out well, what do we do to really address really complex challenges that don’t fit neatly into silos or don’t fit neatly into understood practices, hence, design coming to that much more. And also, then investment is less of a thing that drives our work? Actually, it could be about all these companies ready to go there’s the law needs to change in some way, or, actually, the public sector is what needs the attention here, when he’s building new capabilities and city governments, for instance? That’s a good answer from my work. So yeah, that innovation agency remit is something I’m sort of pushing the edges of quite a lot in different different areas. Can you describe yourself
Andrew Dubber
as a designer?
Dan Hill
Yeah, very much so in, in that, that’s what most of my career has been about. And it’s really is the way that I see the world interact with it. Having said that, it’s not something that despite my job title, I lead with necessarily, because sometimes that work can put people right off straight away, you know, and when they say do your design, but what are you doing, you’re making chairs and buildings and stuff isn’t unknown making website and we’re not really, you know, now I’m basically looking at organisations and policies and the way that people interact with each other and designing processes and our environments, we will come together, or we’re designing structures or systems in some way. So yes, it’s got unfortunately, abstract at times.
Andrew Dubber
So how do you know when you’ve done your job? Well,
Dan Hill
when we’ve hit all of those global challenges that I’m looking at the wall behind, right. So like the so yes, the when we come to so what are the challenges that things like how do we radically transform air quality and carbon emissions pollution, the way that Housing Works, though, that mobility works? Yeah, actually all very tangible things. And we call quadruple the amount of tree cover in cities, things like that. How do we create spaces that are conducive to social interaction? How do we enable migration in a way, which is a way that can be seen as a positive thing where people can bring cultures to a place, but also absorb the existing cultural place harmoniously. So within that set I just gave you there are some that are pretty easy to measure. And there’s to answer your question, did a quality improved from this to this right in this way? Because we took cars away and put bikes there instead? Absolutely. So that’s stuff that I’m working on driven towards. And then there’s stuff that’s less tangible, which is the stuff that I mentioned that migration or social interaction, where it’s that’s just harder to measure. So if that’s something where, you know, how would I answer your question, then you can look at proxy measures for those things. Did we stop fighting in that state? Right? Have we got the right diversity of people in the workforce coming through from different backgrounds, globally, culturally, coming through into Swedish startups or businesses or public sector, then yes, there are measures there as well. But that’s where I’m usually, that’s the area that I love, because that gets into these really complex, ambiguous, less tangible areas, which are much harder for policymakers to get their head around and using traditional tools surely understand. So that’s why I think, as a designer, I have something at least to offer in that space. Because designers are, to some extent anyway, drawn towards asking the question in in the right way, or at least less, most think it was the question behind that.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, I find that really, really interesting. Because a lot of people start with problems like this with a whole lot of, I guess what you call presupposition? There are certain kind of starting points that are just Givens. Yeah. And I always want to sort of rip that away and go right, starting from scratch. What would this look like? I mean, for instance, the idea of cities?
Dan Hill
Yeah. Do we
Andrew Dubber
start with this, this idea that, okay, we’ve got cities, we’re already there? How do we build them into nice places? Or if we were building nice places? Would this be what we end up with?
Dan Hill
Yeah, as I’m very much digging into that, you know, the basic, what’s the underlying question was in lying assumptions. There’s a great quote from Cedric Price, the British architect, which I overuse, he said this in 1965. So the technology is the answer. But what was the question? And, you know, if I had something written on a T shirt, describing my work, that’s it, because there’s sort of, I’m often in the world where people will say, Oh, yeah, autonomous vehicles, or something, Ai, and AI and AI about what and why, you know, ai isn’t necessarily a, you know, an untrammelled, good or bad. And I could use it in all kinds of ways. No, then you have to ask the question. So What’s it for? So what surgery I think was saying was, like, then around cars, mainly in cities. That was the big tech of his day. I was saying, people are obviously going around taking cities like Birmingham and Auckland, where you’re from, dropping cars into the left, right and centre and carving the city apart. And we’re saying, hang on a minute means have a conversation about what these cities are about first, and then we can talk about technology. So as with music, you know, we can talk about the relationship with music and technology and the sort of chicken and egg relationship between those two forever, unless you have a sort of a musical thought in your head, no amount of tech thrown at it will save that, you know, you can’t start with that. Now, you might use tech to tweak what you do and open up new questions and avenues. Fantastic. Yeah. At the end of the day, unless you’re making music, tech as a business, and making music. And that’s what I’m trying to get into as cities as wide as cities exist, what are they for culture, community commerce, to some extent, you know, like conviviality, they’ll begin to see for some reason. Those are the that’s why we bring we make cities for people to come together and do something together, right. And then you have a bunch of enablers of that I transport, housing, green spaces, or blue spaces, or energy and water and waste. And those are the only exists in order to enable the first set of things. But one reason or another, we’ve kind of built city governments or disciplines around those enablers, not the outcomes. So you have a Ministry of Transport. And you have a Ministry of Energy and so on at the city level, and they drive very much what happens like an engineering problem. And I’m often the one putting on the table and saying, so. Why, why is that fly over there? Why is that?
Andrew Dubber
Is that because that’s not sort of joined up thinking that there are people who are in charge of specific atomic units of city that actually don’t kind of interact as an ecosystem?
Dan Hill
That’s where we’ve ended up definitely, I say this about we’re doing a lot of prediction streets at the moment. And I’m trying to, you know, unpick, so the street is a street immediately was a complex question. What does he mean by street doesn’t mean something where people live, work and play and interact has a bit of density in life there, which is kind of what I’m getting at. But that’s not a technical depth. Finishing straightaway write something like traffic verka, or transports to listen to the Swedish context in the government have very literal definitions. They’re answering a street in a State Road in a country road and things like that. So immediately we get into that. And then I say, so why streets, you know, they’re not for traffic. Right? They’re not, that’s not why they exist. If you look at an old Italian city or a Greek city, they’re pretty much also about markets, about social interaction about shade and about numerous things. But they’re about parties. They’re about drinking in the evening, or, you know, taking cover in the morning, whatever. And then traffic is sort of introduced to those things, but it’s the other way around. But we’ve led often in let’s just call them developed countries for the sake of argument. Streets are now run by traffic engineers, pretty much. And I have this diagram, if you put a traffic engineer into the street, the traffic is what comes out the clues in the name. Yeah, so if you can get more or less of it, but basically, that’s the producers. If you like gardeners govern the street, you get garden. So we don’t we like traffic engineers do it. I’m just sort of saying, Okay, how many different perspectives can we get into this complex thing called the street and let’s see as a complex thing, but in a beautiful, everyday kind of way, right? And then we can see that as a real powerful multiplier of all kinds of diverse activities, music, festivals, businesses, you know, life in general greenery, everything. And traffic is one of the things that happens there. For sure. Right. But it’s not the point. What you’re saying is rather than divide a large city up into its functions, yeah, you divide a small amount of city up powerful generator of possible things, you know, and then imagine if you had that, again, imagine if you sort of had like a department of gardening running the streets, you’d have a very different kind of city coming out of that. So I’m not suggesting that I’m suggesting that is one of the
Andrew Dubber
sound like a nice idea is
Dan Hill
that and funnily This is not to name drop. But this is about a chat with Brian Eno about this because I was part of the Commission in the UK working for the government on the industrial strategy. And one reason or another to long to go into Brian and I ended up in the commission. And I was fantastic having him in the room, as you might imagine, because the bunch of the rest of us are so called experts in our areas, me now is like an urban, urban history sort of expert. And I was responsible for coming up with some challenges of the government around mobility. And one of the things I was doing, I was streets and saunas, heading that way. But I was also I realised, in retrospect, playing it safe a bit because I knew the Department of Transport and others around the end of this, so I can’t walk in there talking about garden straightaway, they literally would laugh me out of the room. I was heading that way. meandering that way. Yeah. Brian instantly, just sort of subverted the whole thing beautifully. At one point in the this afternoon in this boring committee room and UCL in London, when he said this is great, but what if we could imagine a city where people just slowed down a lot more and things moved a little less? It’s just, you know, just immediately changed the tenor of the conversation
Andrew Dubber
we’ve got already they called not cities.
Dan Hill
Well, yeah, but why doesn’t that happen in a very urban dense environment? Absolutely. Could there’s no reason why
Andrew Dubber
is there a reason that we need to have an urban dense environments?
Dan Hill
I think so I think, yeah, I think but then there’s a question about how do you make that have the qualities of maybe what you’re alluding to in your question. So we can, in my view, you can have this is what Brian was getting at. You can have slow cities like think like slow food as a thing. And super green, super convenient or beautiful, pure, pure water, you know, just full of life and conviviality. Imagine that, but with a bit of density, there’s no problem with that technically. Sure. It’s not a technical question that you that cannot exist is the way that we’ve run them. That means that doesn’t exist again. Giving the streets to the traffic engineers is why then you think it’s not nice to stand in the bullring and Birmingham? Or as it used to be? Yeah. Because it’s nicer than it used to be? Yeah, exactly. One of the 7000 cars every 10 minutes. And of course, it’s not nice. Yeah. wouldn’t have to do that. That was Cedric Price’s points. It’s not to be like that. No, it’s Brian’s point as well. So you could have a city which all the deliveries is on cargo bikes, basically, you could have you know, food grown far more than 11 location, it can be super green and convivial, the buildings can be made out of wood, street becomes this completely social space, as it’s built for kids and all people simultaneously, you know, sort of, is entirely possible to do.
Andrew Dubber
So what’s the journey that somebody like you takes from, I don’t know 10 year old child to becoming the person who says Wouldn’t it be nice if things were nice around here? The government? What was the kind of the moment that started you on that path? Do you think
Dan Hill
I’m the short version of that because that’s just way too long to get into but the, I did a computer science degree first. found it hard, because I got into computers quite early through, you know, like many of us did in the mid 80s, by chance, my dad was a head teacher having to bring home an apple two from his school holiday on over the summer 199 went out would have been 84. Maybe earlier actually, a little bit earlier example two, and just playing defender on that, you know, and then Exactly, and then I ended up with a ZX81, I think at some point and so on, and ended up with a spectrum. And then what I what I found myself doing was drawing alone, okay. And I did this accoding. But I realised looking back the coding I was doing on the ZX Spectrum, you know, like typing basic, in line by line, ended up designing an interface for something that had no content, hilarious, it was like, it was like, you could pull down a menu and move a cursor around with the arrow keys, and just sort of getting it to do that, you know, most abstract thing ever. But I was because I was drawn towards interaction. I realised in retrospect and thinking, how do we make something that people might want to use, and you know, more interested in that than, say, using code to write a word processor or something, I was going to interface with a word processor without realising WordPress was thing. ended up in computer science, I struggle with that, because I’m not a great coder or anything. So what I was drawn towards was the human side of that very much human computer interaction, as was called at the time because of AI Even then, actually, this was 1988 in 1992. So using the internet without knowing it kind of days, and and then my final project was something about gender bias and computer science, not quite sure how I got there. But that’s where I ended up and I was looking at, then video games quite a lot within like wider video games, kind of in culture boys to pick up computers more than girls. And I went to Austria that looks at things like HyperCard. And these more open building platforms that were less gendered, put it that way. And started playing around with how would you convey culture through those things, I made a HyperCard stack for Death of a Salesman I remember at the time and then thinking, Well, you know, be interesting, then look at the context of that play in the late 50s. And that’s a Miles Davis making music at the same time. And could you click on a link from Death of a Salesman and the kind of blue jump to somewhere about fashion that the miles concert was wearing, and then back into Death of a Salesman. So all of those early hypertext ideas without realising that the network would be the thing that would actually make that viable. And it was it was not that smart, right. But again, just looking at that, and then that became then a master’s in urban sociology, as it turned out, I started in Manchester, I started it thinking I’m going to be using video games, but then the the web just sort of appeared in 9495. In front of my eyes, at least,
Andrew Dubber
it was your first experience of that.
Dan Hill
Probably reading about it in a magazine. Right? And then, you know, the, or the newspaper or something. And then yeah, having a modem to hand I guess, at the university must have been around them. Because again, I’ve used the internet from 1988 without really knowing I was doing an used a lot of that stuff. At the time. It wasn’t a big feature of a computer science degree, ironically, at that point. So it became something that I just sort of picked up as a curiosity, talking bulletin boards, and yeah, certainly the internet stuff on the computer science degree Absolutely. Was email and FTP and telnet. and stuff, gopher. Yes, exactly. And the way that those systems ran, and of course, we covered it on a network’s course, but we had no idea that this was about to be a thing. Similar thing it became. Anyway, that meant that when I got to thinking I want to do masters, I worked at Manchester City Council for a year or two in between the actual isn’t the Masters then I want to pick up this to have a gender bias again, actually, what’s interesting to me now is video games and where they come from my way in Manchester, at least is Ocean Software. Who are the bigger that’s known? Why did they end up there? And then it was like, What is that company come from is a cultural company. You know, this is all part of making the point about video games being culture and not being moral panic, Death of civilization stuff. And just saying that they’re sitting alongside music and graphic design as part of you know, in this case, what’s
Andrew Dubber
the big deal at the time were you? Yeah, yeah, it’s playing in bands. Yep.
Dan Hill
Yep, yep. Yep. I was. I was in Manchester United. I was concerned. Pretty much. I went to the Hacienda a couple of times and mates very much in bands me on the edge of bands, a terrible guitarist. And likewise, yeah, you know that but a massive music fan spending most of my disposable income on CDs and things and going to gigs a lot. Yeah. bouncing between Manchester and London. In particular, and not only that come from particularly because my parents didn’t really have that but that was just something was that was picked up, I suppose. And I went going from school to college. So yeah, when I was looking then at video games for me, it was like a cultural scene like the music scene was. And that’s the I worked at a place called the Manchester Institute for popular culture, which doesn’t exist anymore, but was big in big I’m doing inverted commas for those listening big in the mid 90s. And there were researchers there looking at the rave scene on the Mancunian music scene and looking at as sociology. How does that happen? Why does it come from here? What are its network dynamics and things like that. And then looking at the fashion scene, alongside that another made some minor bits, I’m looking at football, town culture, and those sort of things, a lot of media and cultural studies, I thought, well, I’ll drop video games into that mix. That’ll be interesting. And then very quickly, it was a pivot, as we would say, Now towards the, towards the internet and the web. And then thinking about, okay, the new media scene, as it was, it was just flourishing overnight. Effectively was, that was more interesting for me to look at what I was looking at it from this very sort of sociological lens of why does it happen now? Why do those why those guys mates with those guys? And why are they then building a website for them? Yeah, I realised that I’m doing this with just a particular mode of this sociology was participant observation, lots of ethnography. So we set up a base in Manchester’s northern quarter, very involved in regeneration of the city, an active participant in it with a studio in a upstairs from an architect’s next to a record shop, running our research from her. And the way that we did the research was that I basically built the websites for everybody that I was researching, you know, so go to fat city records and Eastern Bloc and all of those things. And if they didn’t, have you already have a website, I would build one for them. And in a way that will let’s figure out together is this thing going to catch on? Yeah, is it any good. And I was researching it while it’s being a participant at the same time. And then I realised I’m just enjoying this designing stuff, liking of the websites in a way more than I am the academic stuff, right? not exclusively, it wasn’t like a I got my masters and things. And it wasn’t that I stopped thinking that stuff is just that’s the when the way that I then became a designer. So this is the not very short answer to your question, sorry. But it’s just the way that I’ve then become a designer through practice, I didn’t go to design school, I learn how to do it in a self taught way. And then once you do that for 2530 years, then, you know, you’re not bad at it, I suppose. But what I brought into it as a designer was this very much sort of people in place based approach because of its sociological background and understanding it as a cultural artefact. And then having this very diverse array of references and ranges, I can I can bring into this work in some way. So while I was obsessed with graphic design, and David Carson and designers Republic, what records and what they were doing and all those things, I was also looking at this other more kind of human and historical and cultural, again, why Manchester came back to well, the Hallé orchestra has been there since 1862 has been a place where radical politics for a long time and so on all of that stuff, means you end up with a small one design agency upstairs from a shop in Oldham Street. And so that massively interconnected, complex web of ways of seeing the world was just utterly natural to me. And that turned out to be handy for wrangling the internet. It turns out, I didn’t see that coming. I just knew that whenever Moses Ah, that totally makes sense to me as a way of working everything in it from the crushing of high culture and low culture simultaneously to the complex internecine challenges around the way that networking works. Its global and local. At the same time, you can have a shot like Eastern Bloc, which is utterly Mancunian and exists in 50 square metres and simultaneously can be sending records to Moscow and Memphis you know, make perfect sense.
Andrew Dubber
So, colliding these things, the technology, the people, the the cultural aspect of it, I guess there’s a lot of clear route but a, an understandable route from that to what you ended up doing at the BBC.
Dan Hill
Yeah, exactly. So then I moved to London, from Manchester, as many people do, unfortunately. And that was partly because the web design scene was clearly there at this point in shortage around 1997.
Andrew Dubber
This is before they were calling it the Silicon Roundabout. Yeah.
Dan Hill
So that was Yeah, definitely moving to a place in transition. And I worked for a company called state 51, who, theoretically like second or third new media company in the country, but the one that no one’s ever heard of, because they never made it big in the.com, boom, which was interesting, in a good way. Because as a result of Never making that much money because it’s
Andrew Dubber
been sustainable. It’s still in existence
Dan Hill
now. And anyway, we were then they had a retainer with Virgin Records and EMI to be their basically their new media agents last time. So I went straight into that and then sort of immediately building websites for pretty much anybody on the Virgin and ami roster at that point, which in those days when those labels were Big beasts were a lot of people, everybody from Genesis and the Spice Girls through to Chemical Brothers and so on. So it was just this roller coaster ride of somehow going Genesis bicycles, Chemical Brothers, from one day to another. And making sense of all that as a, as a someone that was very much interested in alternative or non mainstream or whatever you want to call it. So on the side of that we also as well as doing all our burgeoning AI work, we set up something called motion, which was a kind of a website with and then mailing lists, we started running gigs from this place we had in London, which was this disused factory, which is big enough to handle that we wrote these platforms have briefly mentioned earlier, one was called a specialist record shop, find where you could say, Okay, I’m going to Lisbon or Leicester, where are the good record shops there, and it would list where they are, what they’re into, and what they know about the same thing for bookshops later on. That’s pretty much the last code I wrote in Paul, I suspect of us. And yeah, I mean, it was big at the time. And of course, things like Facebook and other sort of immediately crushed it later, and or many other things, in fact. But yeah, that was really this interesting balancing act of almost like simultaneous in the same business, we will, you know, I was literally designing this bicycle sign, which was kind of very instructive and lots of interesting ways. Looking at the suddenly the massive global reach, that’s something like that. I remember literally like dragging index dot HTML file onto the FTP server with a new, basically news item on the webpage. That’s how you did it. And just watching the server log in real time of like these like piranha bites, you know, just go jumping at this new means. They were all coming in from Vietnam and Malaysia and Indonesia, just so you could see, oh, my God, this thing’s incredible. But this thing has been the internet and the Spice Girls. At the same time to sort of seeing that that’s kind of extraordinary. And then, in the meantime, working with the most esoteric, you know, like a Derek Bailey rerelease, from 1983, or something on on Zadek or something like that, writing reviews about that, and having building in a global community of people interested in that. So it’s just yeah, immediately fascinated and led straight to ultimately the bbcs doors. I then after many years, ended up as the head of intuitive technology and design, sitting in the radio and music division, looking after, what became I player, briefly designing an AI player for a while before I left and went to AWS but building radio player, which was the predecessor of streaming all of the audio out across all the major networks dealing with introducing podcasting into the BBC, Sharon
Andrew Dubber
might never catch on
Dan Hill
now. Exactly. Me and my team. I called Matt Webb leaning across the desk one afternoon saying there’s this thing where you can take an mp3 file and sort of wrap it into an XML and it can be been sort of sent automatically to people like they just subscribe to it. Yeah. Well, and and he said, Yeah, and it’s called podcasting, parenting, and as you know, for them in the world, or something like that, and that and so but at that point, we positioned ourselves within the BBC at a team of 50 or so actually just building the website.
Andrew Dubber
It’s a luxury to Yeah,
Dan Hill
- And then it was ultimately part of a team of thousands, right, but became a very small r&d team within and we could take an idea like that, that Matt mentioned over the desk in an afternoon, and then the next morning, able to sort of go and talk to our radio for colleague and say, Have you got a show that we can try this out on? And needs to be something that’s not that popular? Because we don’t really know yet. And they said, in our time with Melvyn Bragg, right, yeah. You know, mid morning, highly intellectual show has closed your ears, BBC, sometimes only thousands of listeners, despite going out on the national speech radio network, is that esoteric? And I thought perfect, like under the radar? Well, we’ll try that. And in that, in that time, there were all the conversations you just alluded to, like radio journalist saying to me, this is the death of radio what you’re doing, what are you doing, this is going to just lead to, it’s going to lead to superstar presenters like Chris Evans, leaving the BBC and having their own podcast show, of course those things happen. But equally, we are saying, well, it could also be the way that the BBC manages to lighten navigate through these changes and is going on in the landscape. If we don’t do that, and understand it, then people will do it to us. I’d rather that we were on the front foot about this. And we see that some understanding of that. So we must do long story short, again, negotiate all that through chuck and chuck in our time online, and as soon as the producers obviously start seeing, oh my god, we’ve quadrupled the audience within one day. By having people in Australia and America listening to the show, all of a sudden, the listener couldn’t get enough of it. So then what Having to pick our way through that carefully and make sure that then we built a structure around that on my work was then building the architecture for what we call the programme information pages so that you can point to a broadcast, firstly, Lake junction on radio three. And you can make a link to it from your website and you know that links not going to die. And then because since so basic, but in those days, when you think about broadcast, they make a show you fire it or the airwaves disappears on to the next show, you’ve got a recording of it, but that’s it. So the BBC was totally in broadcast mode for about 70 or 80 years. Yeah, for us to say, well, you make a show now it’s there forever. doesn’t go away, like that show existed. So it’s like the Radio Times, but forever, in perpetuity available all time. So it’s a completely reengineer the way everything works, it’s a
Andrew Dubber
scary thing for them. I got brought in, a couple of us got brought in, I got I think maybe colleague of yours trust and fan,
Dan Hill
too. He was in a r&d team after that was
Andrew Dubber
right. Okay. But the idea was that the radio stations or the radio brands, as they were calling themselves, yeah, the idea of anything that you put online, for the people running the radio brands was to bring people in to listening to the brand. Yeah. So a radio to listen to the radio to listen to radio three, lesson three lesson. And what the what Tristan and some his colleagues are going to know some people like jazz as much as on six musical jazz on three, three we’ve got. So how can we navigate that? And what does the technology enable us to do
Dan Hill
completely now so that was my day job basically, like working that stuff through and we did that ultimately, I ended up a very relatively high level, I suppose at the BBC. And then working simultaneously on running these teams were making the six music website and so you’re immediately thinking about the architecture of that page, how do we have the BBC is kind of a meta global brand, which has huge meaning. Globally, obviously, people know the BBC way more than six music. So it gives a lot of trust and values in need that there, you can’t say that people at six music, by the way, is there kind of and at Radio One was particularly hard not to go to British mothers, but Radio One is the youth. One, like the Triple J in Australia, whatever it is,
Andrew Dubber
wherever you are this ratings by day, reputation by night,
Dan Hill
and it actually wanted not that much to do with the BBC, because it would see the BBC as this, you know, representing the 60 year old, quite frosty, you know, establishment radio for BBC One and a mainstream, they wanted to be edgy, and you know, 18 year old 17 year old 15 years, so we had to coax them into using it quite a lot. And meanwhile with others, you’re kind of almost having to rip it out of the hands and say, need to loosen up about it. And as you said, someone’s gonna be wanting to just and the BBC, and you want them to Yeah, because that way you can get them into six music and then the BBC through that route. So we did tonnes of work on how do people understand music? You know, and then a lot of it was about the information architecture, right? If you do like Miles Davis, do you like charity, like 1950s stuff?
Andrew Dubber
So we will go?
Dan Hill
Yeah, yeah, very much that was under my team. So both working with the radio brands, and then slash music, which was basically about not the BBC brands like BBC 12345, or a 12345. But slash jazz, slash hip hop, whatever. incredibly complex work behind the scenes, as you can imagine that we lead that very much with, again, user centred research, we went out and we interview people, we talked to them, we looked at why they use music in everyday life. And we said, this person loves soundtracks, this person loves jazz, this was most of things called Miles Davis, because they’d like to know. And this person was ready to to this person, once something wasn’t on the bus, this person wants something to listen to, while they’re cooking, you know, and just sort of bring all of that into play. And as you can imagine, at the BBC, most people have never really thought about doing that. They’re in the building, making the show and sort of throwing it off the top of the roof. Yeah, the nation, which is extraordinary, you don’t lose that had no real audience research or understanding
Andrew Dubber
that the people are complicated, which I guess you took from that job elsewhere.
Dan Hill
Yeah, exactly. And understanding the context of their life. And then also the deeper stuff about understanding that well, maybe they’re also making music. And maybe they also have something to say about the show. And those again, like,
Andrew Dubber
what, what do you mean? Well, that was the thing we found with this research project. We did, Tristen, which was how fans of specialist music engage with the BBC Online about their fandom. Yeah. And to a large extent they didn’t they communicate with each other about the fandom and it happened to sort of intersect with the BBC. But yeah, but what was really interesting is the amount of, I guess what we call cultural generation that was going on that wasn’t just about passive consumption. People writing that music, dancing to music people, you know, sharing it, people
Dan Hill
Yeah, and I was a very active blogger at this times and the days when you call a blogger from about two thirds And one of my students, yeah. So, and I was very aware of writing about stuff and pointing at it and therefore, you know, generating content use that word or editorial around something that someone else has done, whether it is an artwork or a TV show. And that I was able then to bring that in also, obviously, my understanding of that as a participant within it, and saying that there were this concept called ripples as a new you, when you’re making a radio show or a TV show any making EastEnders on BBC One you’re throwing out there 8pm on a Tuesday and a Thursday. That’s like dropping a huge pebble in a pond and the ripples coming out from that thing all over the place. So people in the pub talking about it instantly. There are people writing about it in the next day, either as a journalist in the mainstream media, or as a blogger now or someone just later on would have been tweeting about it, you know, use the BBC, you want to understand that sort of stuff that you stimulated massively powerful, and it’s part of your ambit and remit to understand that and dig into it, partly because that’s massively interesting. Partly because it’s cultural generation, as you’d say that you’ve stimulated, so tiny, what you’re there to do is the Beeb. So, again, let’s take a long time to get through, because you can imagine a radio journalist doesn’t necessarily and previously, they could never see that stuff. So how can we listen to all the conversations in the pub up and down the country that isn’t, you can’t know. But this stuff, you can absolutely see and read. And you can even write code which extracts the key words out of it, if you wanted to. So so that was that there was a lot of change going on there. And just again, just to sort of then generalise away from the VBC, what my career then became about ultimately was when the internet and let’s just use that as a sort of a container for all the stuff we just talked about. It’s an industry or a thing. That’s what I that’s when I can do something vaguely useful. So I, I realised that then from the BBC, I went to Monaco, which is starting up a magazine, which was going from, you know, 30,000 people, down to 15 people in a room in Melbourne, super interesting, writing all of that stuff out and then moved to AWS and ultimately ended up working at Arup, very large engineering architecture company. I realised that okay, and the internet and all that stuff, is going to cities and buildings and architecture, I knew that from my Urban sociology degree, I had a background in that but I wasn’t I wasn’t wasn’t an architect, I’m still not an architect. that something had to be quite useful about this, actually, then those technologies are also changing the way people interact with each other and work and play and live. And therefore, that’s about cities and making citizen governing cities and so on. And back to an event of Finland, actually, which is Helsinki to citra, where I then realised this kind of design work is becoming is where this term strategic design started emerging. So it’s not just interaction design, which is what I was interaction designers designing the way that you interact with a thing. It wasn’t really service design, which is okay, then how do we rebuild the organisation to make that work? Well, and you know, what the, what’s the wider context of that fantastic strategic design? Was that opening up? So what’s this all about in the first place? Now, what is a hospital? What is health care, given the internet, given contemporary culture, given massive cultural diversity and so on, it’s not just as it was in 1950. It’s not like the blueprint for the NHS in 1948, it’s now got to be some other kind of thing. It can have the characteristics of that or the ethos behind it, but it plays out differently. So that was really doing that work in the context of policymaking. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing at the BBC, which was, I ended up working on big programmes, the BBC called Beyond broadcasting and creative futures, these huge rethinking the BBC project from inside about what does the BBC mean, in the context of, you know, the 21st century, same thing with government, then it became Fabrica and Italy, same thing with education back to the UK, future cities, catapult and then back to Arabic. Same thing with building cities spaces, the way we work with those things, technologies around them working all over the world, everything from the Google campus in California, through to other places in Australia and others find most points in between
Andrew Dubber
you’ve had several people’s careers in several countries, but
Dan Hill
I think so or is the same career. You know, I just keep saying that. I only really have one idea. I just keep saying maybe around place to place. And so so you can, sorry, this is such a long answer. But it’s, you know, sort of when you asked that
Andrew Dubber
it was such a good question, I
Dan Hill
was ready to remember it. When you asked that question about, you know, what was it that made you that from 10 year old to ending up in Manchester and London? Yeah, it’s exactly the same stuff I’m thinking about now, to be honest. It’s just that now it’s in Sweden, and it’s, again, how does the complexity of the way that culture is in places armed people are and then the technologies of everyday life? They use my use taken a very loose way, meaning cars and pencils just as much as AI and Internet of Things, right? So but all of that stuff is tech. And so how does that play out and how does it work? to rethink what we do, and if we’re rethinking what we do, then you’re into why why are we doing that? To what and, and and now it’s about how do we crush carbon emissions through the floor? I mean, increased equality, that we increase people’s health, you know, to enable people to have meaningful social convivial lives have an engaging culture with each other, all of those big hairy questions, right?
Andrew Dubber
Like you’re pushing more of an open door here in Sweden.
Dan Hill
Yes and no. So definitely, it’s a lot easier. You know, having worked in Australia, I can say, there’s a real Ken’s point here, right now we’re talking, obviously, Australia is on fire, basically. And yet the Prime Minister is still denying that as much as climate change, that conversation doesn’t have to be hard in Sweden, pretty much. Yeah. So let’s say 10 20% of the country accepted 80% immediately are on boarded that and even in that 10 20%, it’s pretty much understood that climate change is real, and we need to do a lot about it. This might be a percentage that I’m not addressing them, but still, we’re in AWS, it’s just not like that. And in the US is not like that. And in the UK, it’s much harder to get other questions on the table, which here are sort of more understood. The other thing that’s different here, as well, as the government still has a lot of levers to pull the public sector still relatively well funded, meaningful entity in people’s lives. In the UK, as you probably know, that’s been slashed and burned so much in recent years. That is, most of my work in cities, again, is incredibly hard in the UK, or Australia,
Andrew Dubber
not quite as much as we’ll be in the next few years. But
Dan Hill
no, I mean, yeah, who know who the hell knows. So it’s, um, but yeah, you can imagine that when we’re here, I can have a conversation with people at least and it’s, so what’s harder than still here is because what works in 20th century Sweden probably won’t work in 21st century Sweden. So the success of Sweden in the 20th century becomes a problem. Because it was incredibly successful. If you look at where went from 1900 to, let’s say, 1995. And a lot of credit is due there. And it’s incredibly valuable, right. And yet, the same moves are built the country from the 30s 40s 50s 60s are ones that we now need to unpick and rework in a different way are much more around, again, a kind of super low carb and much more diverse population and you know, more complex what
Andrew Dubber
you hear might not get you there.
Dan Hill
Yeah, we need completely different tools, we’re doing a lot of different results. So that’s hard, actually. Because sometimes the thing in the UK or America things are pretty broken. Or in the developing world, I don’t use that term. But you know what I mean? Things don’t exist in the same way. So it’s kind of it’s more open as a possibility as you can generate, actually, in a different way that you might not when the UK or Australia is literally on fire, then you can actually, you know, you can make changes in that situation. Whereas when things are apparently working as they are in Sweden and Finland and others, then it’s harder to motivate change sometimes for sure. So that’s a different thing I’m struggling with.
Andrew Dubber
That’s Dan Hill, Director of strategic design and Vinnova. You’re listening to the MTF podcast. I’m Andrew Dubber. And we’re going to pick up the thread of this conversation in part two with Dan next week, when we’ll talk about sound for urban environments, the future of the city, the history of the future of music, and a lot more. And one way to make sure that you don’t miss out is to press the subscribe button. Don’t forget to share, like rate and leave us a nice review. And hope you’ll join us then until then have a great week. And we’ll talk soon. Cheers.
