Kate Sieck, PhD is Director of the Human Centered AI at the Toyota Research Institute, where she leads the Harmonious Communities Department whose task is “developing technology that integrates AI in furtherance of Toyota's global mission of happiness for all and collective well-being.”
I met Kate through this newsletter. We spoke for the first time a couple months ago, and it was so much fun, I was excited to invite her into a conversation here. We spoke for almost an hour and half. The work she has done is amazing, and her enthusiasm is truly inspiring.
Mentioned in our talk is this paper on ritual-based research, “Move Me: On stories, rituals, and building brand communities.”
All right, beautiful. Kate, thank you so much for agreeing to sort of be a part of this. I think as you know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I always want to give credit to Suzanne Snyder, who's a neighbor. She teaches this oral history summer school which is really amazing, and it's such a big beautiful question I have to use it. But because it's so big, I always feel like I want to caveat it and make sure you know that you can answer or not answer any way that you want. The question is: where do you come from?
So I'm going to answer that in two ways, and I'm so glad I've listened to all the other episodes to hear how everybody else is answering this. First, geographically, I grew up in the Midwest. Born in Wisconsin when my dad was in grad school, and then we spent most of my childhood in a Chicago suburb called Oak Park, which was this sort of—at both the time and the place—it was this sort of idyllic bubble of what's possible.
Oak Park had watched what was happening with all the blockbusting on the west side of Chicago and had really put a hard line on maintaining economic, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity within the community. So they changed a lot of how houses were sold and how neighborhoods were built. Well, it wasn't perfect. Let me be clear about that. As a kid, I had friends from every possible background you could think of, and the schools were one of the first to sort of integrate kids with physical or intellectual disabilities into the classroom. So we were all together, and you really saw, sort of in the truest sense of public, accommodating everyone.
That was really the foundation for where I grew up. You know, that's kind of through the eyes of a young kid. I'm sure there were a lot of other challenges that weren't on my radar at that time, but from my perspective, it really was an indicator of what was possible if we all kind of worked and lived together.
From a sort of more conceptual and emotional standpoint, and part of why we ended up in that neighborhood, is that I grew up in a household where three things were kind of paramount: gratitude, action, and community. So my parents very deliberately chose to live in Oak Park because they wanted us in a place where we were not the highest, we weren't the lowest, but we understood that it took everybody to make a community work. Every day we should approach the day from a place of gratitude for all that we had and how can we use that and share that to build and bolster our community. Not just like cheer it on from the sidelines, but what is our role, what is our action, what is our behavior in fostering all of that goodness that can come when you all kind of come together and work together. So I'll leave it at that.
It's beautiful. Can you tell me a story? I mean, I love how you highlight the word "public" right in the biggest sense of the word public. Is there a story that comes to mind that sort of captures what it was like to grow up in that place with all those values?
I think what I just remember was being in kindergarten and first grade and living on the block where we did. We were right off the train, so it wasn't—you know, right off the L trains into Chicago—and there were apartments on our block and there were really lovely homes on our block. There were probably, I don't know, 30 kids, which—it was the '70s, like we still had some big families. I just remember our neighbors were like these vegetarian hippies, and then there was another block, another house where one of the kids had—like, we would all just get together and run around and be crazy kids all afternoon and on the weekends.
It was just—there was no "you can't play with us." Like, everybody kind of fit, and we had, you know, kids from the apartments, kids from the homes. Like, everybody was just welcome to the crowd. I just remember I was one of the only girls on the block. I remember that, but even at that, it wasn't like, "You're not allowed to play with us, go play with your dolls." Like, it was as rough and tumble and bikes and soccer and tag and everything because that was what was expected. The parents kind of enforced that. It's like everybody was kicked out of the house after school and you were made to play together, and you had to figure out how to do it.
A lot of my work now looks at the very shrinking space of what are those truly public opportunities. Like, even back then, the pool—you know, the community pool—I think you got a free pass if you lived in the town, and if you didn't, it was like a quarter or something to get in. Now it's like 12 bucks, and there are so many ways in which public is actually no longer really available. So I look back on that moment and think about all of the lessons I learned and were afforded to me because I had to—had to and could, you know—interact with all these kids who were not me. So it's just like, that's where my head spins a lot.
I'm excited to hear about that work. What—before—while we're still in your childhood, did you have a memory of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Yeah, I totally wanted to be a forest ranger. So I'm about as far from that as you could be. I still love hiking. I'm not as—much sure I love tent camping as I get up in the decades, but I'm still trying. I really loved the idea of being outdoors, of the expansiveness that you feel when you're among trees that are, you know, hundreds of feet taller, when you're on the edge of a lake or an ocean or something and you just know that the world is so much bigger than you.
Then as I got into high school, I decided I wanted to run the World Bank, which was, you know—
It's a hard turn from—
Well, yes and no. All right, so I was—high school was during—I think high school kicked off with the Live Aid concert for me. So the whole crisis in Ethiopia and the famine in Ethiopia, and I remember writing a paper about the policy. That's—my sophomore year in high school, this is how geeky and nerdy I was. I wrote a policy paper about why—why just dropping aid was probably not going to solve the problem. Like, this was a political famine, and in order to solve a political famine, you had to address the roots of what was going on. I think my high school, like, sophomore English teacher was like, "Holy cow." Who is this weirdo?
Yeah. So when did you discover that you could make a living doing anthropology?
Way too late in my career, as I'm still paying off student loans from grad school. But it was 2010, and I had been out of grad school for eight years at that point. Largely, I had two kids. We—I had two kids right at the end of grad school, and my husband at the time was also a professor. So I was doing—I was on more of like a lecturer track because we couldn't afford child care even if both of us were faculty, which is a whole other conversation we can have.
But we had moved to Minnesota. I had spent a year teaching five classes, usually with 60 students, and—sorry, let me close this so it's a little quieter—and made less than I made my first year out of college. I was like, this is an unsustainable career path. One of my students had come into office hours and had found this job in marketing, working for a marketing firm, but they wanted somebody with an advanced degree and she was just finishing undergrad. So I always tell people I did not steal a job from a student, but she shared it with me.
I think at that point I'd been, you know, on this kind of lecture path for eight years and was a little bit jaded and definitely broke. I was like, "Oh, they need somebody who knows American culture. I know—you like, my dissertation work had been in the U.S. I was like, I could—I could do this. I've taught methods classes, I—you know, I can probably handle this." So I put my hat in the ring, got the job, and I finished teaching on a Friday and started in that group on a Monday.
Very quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing. It was a very hard toggle for me. I was a very traditional academic, you know. My fieldwork was two and a half years on site. You know, I—you know, I went to and then went to be a professor. So a lot of it is like deep ethnography and how do you do research and all of this stuff. Now here I was and they're like, "All right, we got like a week to figure this out. What are you doing?" Yeah, and so the pace was just a massive shift.
I still remember the first week I was there, I was put on a new business pitch and at that—they were like, "So where are your slides for the deck?" And I was like—or "Where's your stuff for the deck?" And I looked at them. I'm like, "What's a deck?" And that's when we all realized something was definitely—definitely not aligned here.
So it was—I am ever so grateful to the team I got to work with that first year who really brought me up to speed and were so very patient—patient with me. It also gave me—a lot of it was probably one of the biggest professional challenges of how do you do anthropology when it's not going to look like what you did?
Yeah, so—and what have you discovered? I mean, what was that transition like? I can imagine that being extremely difficult, right? To—to believe—I mean, I'm just putting myself in that situation. I would be very skeptical that you could do anything. Right? You must—must—well, you did it.
So well, I feel like I—I feel like I came up the commercial—the commercial way as a market researcher with people who were really smart and—but doing it. And then I discovered that there's this giant world of anthropology out there that I was not aware of. And now this is where I have this—I have a whole imposter syndrome around this now and why I talk—talk to people like you. But to be an academic anthropologist and—and then try to fit that into the commercial context seems like that would be really hard. I'd love to hear—but you've ended up in a place where it's—it's—it works, right? And it's valid.
So—so there are a couple things. I mean—Like, there's the hilarity of like, how do I even dress for work? And, you know, like, "Oh, I can't wear Birkenstocks and I can't do this." You know, I like—actually need clothes that match and maybe some jewelry too. So there were some little funny moments with that.
But in terms of the work itself, I think there were two big lessons. You—you will never have the time to do the studies that you want to do. That said, I firmly believe that most things that we see in the world come down to probably a handful of human questions, right? And so if you can think about where in the literature you can find those questions, you can actually tap into the wisdom and depth of somebody else's experience to give you at least a framework or a pathway to explore what it is you want to explore.
So it—you—and this has actually been one of the—how do I say—how do—I'm going to just sound like a horrible person when I say this, and I thoroughly agree—one of the disappointing things for me about how anthropology has often translated into industry is that it's—it's been reduced to qualitative methods. Like, "Oh, I just need to do interviews and I need to go watch some people." And I'm like, those are great, but if you don't know what you're looking for, if you don't know what you're thinking about, if you don't know what others have done, you're still not necessarily cognizant of what you're processing. And—and I've seen a lot of stuff come back and I'm like, "That's great." And—so to me, I always actually started with, "What do we know already from theory?" And what do we—in theory with like both a big T, like what do we know from Marxism or from structural functionalism, but theory with a little t too. Like, who's written a cool ethnography or paper or talk or something about this that can at least start to give me a framework?
So I spent a lot of time digging through every annual review article I could find that was like an overview of whatever I needed to do. So very quick example: we were working on a pitch for a cosmetics company. We literally had like two days to come up with a framework. And you know, everybody does the—"Oh, what's been done before?" But that doesn't necessarily tell you where an interesting white space is. So what I did was really look at, "Why do people disguise themselves? Why do people do anything that changes their appearance?" And then you can come up with like, "Oh well, there's like battle and then there's, you know, this deception and then there's these other categories." And then you can start to come up with a really interesting way of looking at how, you know, how other companies kind of fall. But it's falling within a framework that's coming out of this sort of rich world of—of work.
We did a very similar thing with—we were the agency of record for the country of Belize. Like, how do we grow tourism for the country of Belize? And you're—you're like, "All right, it's tropical country. Like, why do people go?" But then we really started to look at, well, why do people move? Like, why would you go from one place to another? And then we got into the idea of pilgrimage as this sort of exploratory space, which was something that was really not well explored but fit the context really well.
So a lot of my work was trying to see where this business question—like, what's the human dynamic that underlies this business question? And where can we find parallels of that in the literature so that I can come up with something that's a much more interesting framework for what's happening?
No, it's—it's wonderful. It's wonderful. And so how—what's happening in that first phase when you're developing the—that question, that human question for you?
I'm laughing because my dissertation advisor always looked at me. He's like, "I see where you are and I know it's the right place, and I have no idea how you got there." And so there are times I'm like, "I don't know how we got there." But I think that—I think it's really just pausing to—to think about a business problem not as a business problem but as a—as a person question. Like, the—the tourism problem isn't one about tourism. It's about what motivates people to—to move, right?
We had another one with a bank during, you know, right after the financial crisis, and it's like, "How do we—how do we get customers?" And it's like, that's not really the problem. Like, why do—what does trust look like after you've broken a relationship, right? And how do you—how do you start to reflect on that?
What do you love about this work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?
Oh my gosh, where is the joy in it? I think I—to me, the joy was partly at a very selfish level. It was the discovery, right? Of, "Oh, can we think about this really staid terrain in a radically different way?" That uses a discipline that I love and cherish in—in a way that you like—well, I got—I—the ritual. And so you talked about the ritual paper when we were chatting before this. That used Victor Turner in a way that Victor Turner would probably never have thought about. And then somebody told me like, "He'd probably be rolling in his grave to know that you used his framework to facilitate capitalism." And I was like, "Yeah, probably. I hear you on that, but I did it anyway, and it was super smart."
But—but to me, there was this joy of like, "How can I—can I leverage this like 100 years of really interesting creative thinking and bring it to an audience it's totally different?" So that was a selfish thing.
The second thing that I loved was working with people who were so radically different from me. Like, I remember going in and working with creative teams and particularly designers, and oh my god, you give them like a four-page brief and they just like—they flip it over. You give them a two-page brief and they still flip it over. So they're not going to read something like that. So it really forced me from a methods perspective to think about how do I communicate in non-written ways? And how can I tap their expert—more importantly, how can I tap their visual, their tactile, their sensory knowledge and their expertise there to make this thing come to life in a way that—that we know we do in fieldwork, but that we often don't do in—in how we communicate our results. So there was some really fun and close partnerships with creative teams that—that were fun for me.
So a quick side diversion into my fieldwork: I worked with teenagers who were in foster care and who were in a group home facility in Atlanta. Teenagers do a lot of their thinking through music, through art, and through non-verbal mediums. So a lot of my dissertation data was things like song lists and, you know, artists. And I gave them all cameras multiple times, so I had a lot of that. We had like big art projects that we built together. So it's very non-verbal data. And so to be able to dig back into that was super fun.
Can you—you said that the teenagers do thinking with music. Can you—that's a beautiful expression. Can you just explain what you mean when you say that somebody's thinking with music?
Sure, and I actually wouldn't necessarily restrict it to just teenagers. Or maybe I just have failed to grow up myself, which isn't entirely possible. But I think oftentimes, especially for teenagers, our emotional landscape can be quite complicated and very difficult to dissect. And what music enables is somebody—somebody else is giving shape to an experience that is potentially so new to us that we don't really know how to articulate it. And they are able to articulate it either with the sound structure, and suddenly it like literally resonates with you, or with the lyrics that, you know, you're like, "Oh my god, that's it. That's the thing that's the—that's the—that they've said the thing that I've always been trying to say." Or with the tone structure, right? So there's a big difference between, you know, jazz and punk and country in terms of often the tone of it.
And so to be able to have something that—that gives form to elements of our life where we are often struggling to do that—that's why it's so common in ritual, right? Like and especially rites of passage, like a lot of them use music and rhythm to bring that sort of visceral component to shape the sense of what you're—what's happening. And to me, it just made a ton of sense. Like, here you are in this moment of your life that's not making any sense at all, and other people who are further down that journey are giving you a way to structure it. And I loved that. And there are still moments, you know—I think in any moment of transition in our lives, music can be that.
So what was the role or how did—how did the—what was the role that that music played in that in the project you were talking about with the—the kids?
So if you look at my dissertation, it actually has a playlist to it. And so in a classic dissertation, you know, most of the chapters and sections of chapters open with like quotes from theory and, you know, quotes from the literature. Mine all open with song lyrics that the kids—so one of the things I did was I had all the kids make song lists for me, playlists, and then talk me through like, "Why this song? Why that song? You know, what do you like about this?" And so I understood sort of the emotional resonance that they were trying to add to at that moment. And so as the, you know, throughout the dissertation, each of the chapters can, you know, tries to bring that voice of the kids to life in a much more serious way. Like, this is actually about the same thing. And so it was my way of sort of honoring something that was such a deep and rich part of their world.
Yeah. Are there—you mentioned, you know, the—the centrality of theory and making the people—making it a people question up front. Are there touchstones that you keep returning to? Like when you—when a new challenge sits in front of you or if you have a different problem that arises, are there touchstones that you keep returning to to sort of frame your work?
So there are—simply because I—what I notice is that thing that we all notice with your professors like, they're kind of thinking often stops at the time that they stopped. And so I now see that in myself. A lot of my—a lot of the evolution in the theory that I cling to is the stuff that I covered both between my time as a—as a student but also my time as a faculty member. And so my familiarity with the literature post-2010 is much more tenuous—really post-2015 when I left the—the sort of marketing world. And I own that, and that's also why I was like, "Oh, I should be careful how I talk and think."
Jerome Bruner, I think, is probably one of the key thinkers who you'll see show up in a lot of my work. He's actually, I think, a legal scholar, but he has this brilliant book called "Acts of Meaning," really looking at how do—how do our behaviors create and meaning in our world and where do they come from. And so to me, it's this—one I always—I have a whole paper on this at EPIC, but essentially for—at a very simple level, one of the things that I—that he argues is that people align behaviors to values, right? So whatever your core values are, you can align any range of behaviors under that value if you think that it is aligned to that value, which is why, for example, in parts of the country, we can see freedom expressed by book banning, right? And we can see freedom expressed by—and, you know, it's like the devolution of rights to different—different controlling bodies.
So because it's all—once you know what that core value is, you can wrap a narrative that links any set of behaviors to that value. The good thing is that that's also how we change our behavior, right? You don't—you very rarely change what is deeply meaningful to you, but you can change how that looks. And that's that fuzziness that's often around—around—and that's how cultures evolve, right? It's the fact that those things are really fuzzy, that you can move it forward.
To me, Bruner links really closely with people like Victor Turner, who talk about this sort of fuzzy interplay between the poles that diametrically opposed poles within cultures and that it's in that interplay that things live. But as those move, those pools can also shift a little bit, or where we are shifts. And so to me, that's also where it's like, "Oh, this is really like"—you start to put some of these frameworks together.
My committee was deeply informed with cultural models. So Brad Shore was my chair, and his book "Culture in Mind," I think, has obviously been a big influence to me. I had a linguist on my committee, Deborah Spitalnik. She really introduced me to a lot of the Russian sociolinguists, so Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and a lot of their writing is really about what I say is not what you hear, what you read is not what I intend. And so really that, you know, kind of always getting back to that fuzziness and challenge of communication for how we all deal with each other.
You see the same with people like Brent Berlin, who were really early cognitive anthropologists. Like, what is the color red? What is a bird? Like, when we all look at a bird, it doesn't mean the same thing. And so really looking at that dialect, that negotiating process of how we create culture together.
So when I look back at my dissertation, there are a thousand—you know, for any of us, there's a thousand ways to spend what your dissertation was. But one of the things I was really looking at is how do we collectively talk about what is a successful life for young people, and how that path gets laid out for them, and how is it that we can all think we're on the same page and actually be in very different places? And what are the consequences for the people then—like the teenagers who have to walk this life knowing that they are being judged from two very diametrically opposed perspectives, and they will either lose or win. Like, there's no winning ultimately when you're stuck in the middle. So a lot of my work has centered in that—that space of fuzziness where we have to figure out what is—how are we working through this together?
Yeah. How do you talk about what you do? I mean, I feel like you're—I mean, you know, I'm always sort of fixated on the role of, you know, qualitative and anthropology and sort of business decision making and corporate decision making and all that stuff. And oftentimes I can feel kind of doomsday a little bit as the world becomes more—I always—I feel like I—there's—I don't know where I picked it up, but the idea that the corporation or the organization kind of wants to be a machine when it grows up. I have this feeling. Do you know what I mean? How do you describe—how do you talk about what you do?
At this point, I actually don't really—you know, at this point, I just—I manage a team and my whole goal is where are we going and how are we going to get there? And so I cheer really for some really brilliant people that I have the privilege of working with.
Yeah. Tell me where you are and what you're doing too, because we haven't really—so how did I do it when I was—
Really more on the research side? Metrics are—so I—so I can talk about like, there's the—there's the how do we measure like the success of a campaign part, but then there's also how do we think about being an anthropologist within an organization, which I think is a little bit of a different conversation. And it was one that actually took me a long time to figure out. And—and I wasn't like—so I'll kind of parse those two conversations.
When it comes to metrics, one of the things that I really tried to push hard on was, "What are we really measuring?" Right? So let's go back to, you know, it's like a business problem is actually a people problem. So do you understand what the people problem is? Right? And we're dealing—or we're working on a project about this right now with like morale and attrition. Right? So morale and attrition aren't actually your problem. Those are the first words—sorry. Morale and attrition are indicators of something else. And if we can actually understand what those other things are, then you have the ability to address the right problem because you're really focusing in on the right space.
So what we can see with metrics is usually a later stage thing, and so I've always tried to talk about it that way. When I worked in marketing, one of the things that that—I'm not a big fan and everybody knows I hate personas, and I'm not a big fan of demographics. I think that there's a wonderfully weird variety of people and they can all look the same on paper. And so what we tried to do was design a quantitative system that was actually built on social theory principles. Right? So when we like—what is people's preference for ritual and structure in their daily lives, and how can we—how can that actually be something that's an indicator, like a differentiator between people? How much do people use symbols of status in their daily life, and—and how—how is that actually a way of parsing people? What are people's perceptions of the threats that they're up against? How do people shop differently? Like online, in-store, do they want customer contact? Like, what is their preference for those kinds of relationships?
So we built this whole framework and then used the MRI—it was a survey of the American consumer—and structured all of the questions into these sort of sociological anthropological categories and then use that as a way to look at people rather than like, "Oh, women 25 to 50." And like, all shopping devolves to women who are 40 years old. And that's a really non-indicator of anything unless it's a Porsche, in which case you've got men who are 40 years old, right? And—and like, it doesn't tell you anything about why they bought a Porsche versus why they bought a Lamborghini, right? So it's still a ridiculous way to think about things.
What do you call the output of those—that framework sounds so beautiful. What's—what do you—what is—what's the—if it's not a—persona? What do you call that?
We just really started to look at it as is more indicators of why things are happening. And it was never like—first of all, never, you know—so we did it against the question. So then you could run any brand against it, right? But it always looked different. Right? So and it was never really just one thing. It was like, there's this cluster of these three things that we're seeing that we think tell a story about your people versus when we look at your competitors where they're different on these other elements. So it was more just to kind of understand the landscape differently and in a more theory—but what it also allowed, actually getting back to the very original thing, is I didn't have time for qual, right?
So I don't have time to interview everybody who, you know, uses Schwab versus, you know, some—some other investment firm. Right? So we were able to get it—get it—some of the things that you would look at in—in a richer qualitative study from a much more quantitative perspective.
Yeah, because it's focused on what—it's focused more on the driver, what I would consider the drivers of behavior.
Yeah, right. So, you know, and because then it's also category agnostic, right? So a lot of how personas are developed in marketing is like, "Oh, we're a food company, so we're going to look at how people shop for food." And then we're going to maybe add in like spending or maybe a couple of questions on well-being. And then, you know, "Are they busy?" Right? But you've artificially constrained what you get to look at by your own assumptions rather than thinking how I shop for groceries might have everything to do with my perspectives on, you know, the environment or like how I think about credit cards. Or like—like the—like anyone who's done long-term ethnographic work knows that those things are often all driven by something similar, which is where we get back to Bruner, right? Like those core values can shape a ton of behaviors, and we'll all rationalize our behavior according to those values.
Right? So you can start to understand how those values play out. You get a much richer sense of why people are doing what they're doing, not just what are they doing and when are they doing where they're doing it. So that's what we're really trying to do is take some of these big theories about why people do what they do and see if we could see that in data patterns.
So how would you describe your relationship with AI in turn? I mean, it's so new and unformed and amorphous and it's all very sort of bewildering, honestly. But how do you think about it? How do you—what's your relationship—
That's kind of funny because I lead an AI team and I'm still like desperately learning how to do this. And again, I always find myself in environments where I am ever so grateful that there are people who have tremendous expertise and they teach me. And together we bring these sort of multiple—multiple pathways forward.
Where is AI? First of all, I think a lot of machine learning has actually a pretty rich history. And again, going back to where did it start and how did it work and when did it, you know, when did—where did it come from? I think if we assume that it's just this like blip that happened last, you know, the last year with LLMs, we've missed a lot of what brought it forward. All of that said, I think that a lot of the—what we're seeing with the neural nets and, you know, the diffusion policy—diffusion models and all of those things is a little bit different.
Where do I live with it? My goal is partly like, what's actually in some of these, you know—so we do talk as a team about which data sets, why, how are we thinking about them, how is the data aggregated. Do we want to use somewhere where, you know, they have like pretty abusive policies about how people are coding this data? Can we think about other data sets? We've built several of our own because of some of that. So we do try to kind of think about the ethics of what's going on and how this data is formed.
The second thing that we really try to do is—as a team, our goal is where can AI complement and supplement the things that that humans may not be good at and get us to a place that's a little bit where we can bring our own skills to the table. So that comes up in two ways for my team.
At one level, when you're looking—you're using it to like summarize or categorize notes, AI is really good. LLMs and stuff like that are really good at pattern recognition. What they're not good at is outlier recognition, right? And so when we think about the richness of anthropology, where the fun typically happens is actually in the outlier space. So if you're using it to summarize your notes, it'll be great, but then you need to keep your brain attuned to what's not—what is it missing that I remember, or what's not getting covered? Or this is great, but what in the data pattern is maybe on the fringes of it?
And so I would strongly encourage all anthropologists who feel like they are getting replaced to remember it's actually doing the thing that's kind of like the—like the—the grunt part of the work, which is the categorizing. So think about that.
The second thing that we try to do is think about how can we use some of these platforms like I said to supplement where we're bad. Like, I am a horrible designer, can't draw my way out of a paper bag. It is hilarious. My dad is this amazing person, you know, amazing designer. I live in my—entire family have these incredible design skills—my kids, my husband—and literally like, I can barely draw a straight line.
And going back to kind of Bakhtin and—and some of the early work, what I say isn't what you hear, what you hear isn't what I say. Can we design systems—can we use AI to help people better communicate when they're—they think that they disagree about something and use the sort of generative capability of AI to create a shared language? So if I say on this empty lot, I want to put in, you know, some affordable housing, and I'm thinking like cute cottages that have little gardens and there's a space and blah blah. And you're thinking cinder block tower with guard posts. We're not talking the same language, and we might end up in—in quite a—quite some disarray around that.
So can—can some of the generative capabilities of AI allow us to express those concepts more richly in a visual format so then we can both go, "Oh, like we're kind of actually on the same page." And I'm—you thought that, but this is what I was thinking. And is there a shared space for us to move forward? So that's one way that we start to think about it.
And—but our team—Toyota in particular is adamant that AI should never replace. It should supplement and complement either the hard parts or the—the tedious parts where people tend to—you know, when things are—people actually stop paying attention and then your notes might not be accurate anyway. So that's really where we really focus a lot of our work.
Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about what—where you are now and the work you're doing at Toyota—the Toyota Research Institute?
So I am a director of a team called the Harmonious Communities Department at Toyota Research Institute. We were stood up about two and a half years ago. Toyota's overall corporate mission often is translated as "happiness for all," but it's really this deep concern for the well-being and welfare not just of the people who use our products, but the people who build and—and work on, you know, work in and through Toyota, but also the communities where we are based.
So when you think that we are one of the largest global corporations and we are almost 400,000 people, like that's a pretty big network of people. And they are committed to thinking about technology and products and problems that really—or technology and products that really address this comprehensive range of challenges that people face.
And so one of the things that that we were tasked with doing was how do we really help people live together in a more harmonious way? Like harmony implies difference. We don't all have to be the same, right? So how do we live together amidst our differences, and how can community—this gets me back to my childhood, right—how can community be a celebration of difference and not like, "Oh, I finally feel like I belong because everyone is exactly like me?" And—and really, what can we learn and foster in that difference?
In many ways, it is the perfect dream job for me. Like, it's even better than the World Bank because I don't have to do econ. And I get to work with this unbelievably talented team of researchers where collectively we are tasked with high risk, high reward projects. So if it sounds—if we have an easy solution to it, we are not thinking big enough.
We're working on something right now that the entire team is like, "Man, if we could do this, this would be super cool," but nobody's really sure how we're gonna do it or if it's even possible. So I take a lot of joy and gratitude and pride in being in an organization that is pushing the boundaries of what's possible to solve the challenges that we have to solve.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I'm so connected with the beginning of the—well, yeah, you talked about—so in my own experience, I live in a small town in Hudson, a small town Hudson, and have experienced, you know, a whole variety of divisions and divisiveness and like the lack of shared space, the lack of this idea of something that's called public, that there aren't very many places where we gather or mix naturally. And the places where we do, more and more they're sort of private. And so I think about this idea of civic design. Have you encountered that? Right? And exactly—this guy James Howard Kunstler, do you know him? He wrote "Geography of Nowhere."
Yes.
So he wrote a book and he and an architect who lives in Hudson is friends with him. And so we organized—he gave a talk at the library and was it was called "The American Small Town Is Where It's At, Don't Don't Screw It Up" or something like that. But I asked him, I'm like, "What do you mean by civic design? What does that mean?" And he said, "It's the relationships between all the buildings." And I just thought it was the most beautiful thing. And I feel like I didn't know this coming into this conversation that this is very much where your work seems to be focusing, that this idea of public—The dwindling public is that what you said?
Yeah. So I think that—I mean, when you look at public schools, right? So they're increasingly under fire in terms of like who gets to be there and the in and who's in charge. Like, are parents in charge? Are teachers in charge? Are educators in charge? Is a school board in charge? And who gets the right to say what's there?
We're increasingly diverting funds for public schools into private schools, right? Where—where people can can say, you know, "This is what I want and I'm going to take tax dollars to go there." Libraries have long been one of the last bastions of the public, and they are under massive attack in terms of what's acceptable and not and who gets to decide whose stories are represented and included in a library.
We also see this in parks, right? Like no kids, you know, no adults over here and no kids over there, and nobody after this time and nobody before this time. And we look at the—I live in Los Angeles, and we see all of these public benches popping up that are deliberately designed to be uncomfortable and, you know, uninviting because they don't want people staying there.
And probably like it's—we're just seeing the—the like massive—and even a lot of communities now are run by HOAs, right? So you have to have—I think that there's some huge number, some significant percentage of just neighborhoods that have HOA fees, which means they also have rules about what you can put in your front yard and how your landscaping can be and what color—You get to paint your house and like—
There's a whole genre of TikTok videos of HOA people harassing members at their door.
And it's just like, you know, like who decides? When we moved here, we, you know, our neighbors were like, "You can—we're so excited, but you can't build this kind of house." And we're like, "Okay, are you paying our taxes? Like, are you buying the house for us?" You know? And—and just this idea of who owns what and where are the limits of what our voice gets to be.
And I remember thinking when the—with the rise of—of like targeted marketing through social media, I was like, "Oh, in some ways it's brilliant because there are so many people who really did feel alone." In social media and allowed them to know you are not alone. There is this world of people who are just like you, and they have all found ways of building rich and good lives going forward.
At the same time, we—so we increasingly see everything devolving to the worlds that are just like me. And when you look at the voting map in a lot of states, it's not 50-50. It is 90-10 in almost all the counties, or 80-20 in most counties. And when I lived in Georgia, there are like 150-some counties in Georgia. It is entirely possible to live in a county where you are surrounded by 10 other counties where you don't know anybody who actually voted for Biden.
So it's entirely possible to think, "Yes, of course the election was stolen because there's nobody in my universe who would have ever voted for him." So how is it that this matter—like how does this make sense? And that to me is the really, really worrisome part of what's happening in—in a world where we fail to recognize the humanity, dignity, and respect that is due to—Everybody. So back to my childhood.
Yeah. So—so what's the role of social science or research, qualitative research in this—in this project of harmonious communities?
So there's a bunch. Part of it is all of our technology is always developed in—in collaboration with who is it that we're working with. And so there remains this kind of always give and take and—and, you know, participatory design. A lot of our work grows from—from—from theory. Like, what's out there? What do we know? What's been tried? What's working? And can we take a nugget of something that's working and then do it differently or apply it differently?
Like we know immersive technologies help people feel and greater empathy towards others, right? Can we do that at scale, and can we use AI to back-end it so that it's not just immersive, but you actually have the ability to—to redesign and change it so that somebody feels like they're listened to, like they're respected, like they're included?
Those are the kinds of things that my team—we don't start a single thing without really looking at like, what is the space where we need to be? And Toyota Research really focuses on what we call use-inspired research. So we ladder—we leverage everything that's happening in the academic world on all of our topics and then think about, you know, what are the challenges out in the real world? And can we start to create these like pilot things? Like, I call them my ugly beta babies that—that start to move us toward something. And if it works, then it goes to Toyota big Toyota where they make it into like products or put it into their technology or something along those lines.
What's an example of an ugly beta baby?
So they'll—my team actually—I'll talk about the one thing that my team's been publishing on lately, which is this tool that we call Envision, which is actually like when you have—when you have a community conflict about what should happen in a space, can we use generative AI to help where you listen to—you read stories and see what matters to other people who are really different from you? And then you are tasked with changing the thing that you most love to accommodate somebody else. And generative AI helps you to redesign the images and areas that you love the most to really think deeply about how to include somebody else and see that like the changes might not be as horrible or radical as you're afraid of.
What's an example? Can you give me an—Is that—I mean, I feel like you're talking about housing, but—
Yeah, so it actually started because—so I work up in Silicon Valley, and we see this all over California, though, is fights about affordable housing. Yeah, there's a new affordable housing unit or affordable housing complex that was going in, and the neighbors were really angry. The homeowner neighbors—
Yeah.
And this is so—right? So these are expensive neighborhoods—were really angry because there were going to be windows on the side, and they were afraid people would look into their backyard. And you know, and I'm like, first of all, what are you doing in your backyard that you're like that worried about? But the—the solution was that they took away the windows. And I'm like, why is it that we keep punishing people? Like, windows are not a luxury, right? In housing, we know light and—and all of those things make our lives better and calmer and—and—and happier. So why would you do that? And why would you demand that? Like, what gives you the right to think—right?—can demand that somebody doesn't have a window?
And so we feel like there's—had to be 10,000 other ways to think about how to do that where you could have included, right, and seen how it would look without just wiping, you know, like putting up a brick wall. Yeah, so that's where it started—was—was around housing. But we see it—like I live near Venice Beach, Venice, California, and a lot of the—like what do we do about RVs parking on the neighborhood? And so they just keep putting up parking restrictions, and then the RVs just move to new neighborhoods rather than thinking about why are they here? What would be a better solution? If we ask them, what would they prefer? Could we actually start to co-design things that are—that are better?
Like, we literally have thousands of parking spots right along the beach. How could we think about something differently? And—and I feel like we just get stuck in our little worlds and don't think about how we could—how we could collaborate towards, you know, better solutions for everyone. So that's really what drove it.
Wow. So exciting. I mean, I have—I mean, I've had exactly—just had that same experience here in Hudson where the local housing authority, you know, was proposing a giant housing development. They released a very sort of rudimentary watercolor, you know what I mean? And—and—and as far as I'm—there wasn't enough space given for anybody to process what might have been happening. So people have reactions, and then you end up in the—with this whole—this really limited set of options which are horrible, right? Like, oh, you're just gonna—it's like—like it's like a binary. You just like—oh, you don't—
Let us know—we can come to Hudson.
All right. Please do. I might—I might actually invite you.
There was another one here in Santa Monica. They were like—the high school, they were wanting to replace one of the buildings, and people were like, "Oh, it's historic and we went there and it was beautiful." And I'm like, "You went there 50 years ago, and there's no AC, and it's crumbling, and my kids are really uncomfortable. Maybe we could actually have the current students and you who want this preserved like work together and talk about what's actually going on with this." So—so there we go. So that's our goal.
It's beautiful. I mean, I really—it's so exciting. I—before we end, I mean, I guess there's two things that I wanted to make sure I talked to you about. One is the ritual-based research, and then the other one is just to hear you—because I want to get the first principles in these conversations with professionals like you about why is qualitative important? What is it—what is its value? Like, how do you make the case for it? I always feel like it's existential for me, but—so how do you make the case for qualitative? What's the proper role and the value of it? And then I'd love to hear you talk about the ritual-based research.
Sure. So I think to me, qualitative is one other methodology that you have to have in a range of things. Like I said, we always start with lit reviews. We do tons of quant. I have a lot of people who are anthropologists who apply for my team, and they have like no quant backup. And I'm like, "Oh, I'd so love to hire you. Can you—can you just learn some R?"
And—and then qualitative—but what qualitative brings is—and I think it also depends on where you use it in a project, right? So a lot of our work starts with that moment of going, "Huh, like this is an unusual thing that I'm seeing. How do I start to understand why this is happening?" Right? So to me, qualitative tees up the—the spaces where we should be moving.
Right? So when you see somebody like—we worked on a project for McDonald's, and there's all these like Whole Foods, like granola-y parents who still go to McDonald's. Yeah, but I was like, "When?" Because it's not every—it's road trips or it's divorced families finding a shared space where they can meet and hand off kids, right? And I was like, "Oh, that's what you get." And qualitative is a little bit of like, "Huh, what's happening here?"
And it should always be the starting ground, and every brand should do this of like, who's using your brand? Who's doing it in a different way? What are the unique and weird things they're doing? Where's it going actually in ways that you don't want it to go? And how do you celebrate some of what you're seeing? And also who's on the fringes of where you think—who's kind of coming up, right? And some of that is just like basic out and about having a real life. Right? So you should always be attending to some of that.
And the second place where I think qualitative really comes in is understanding why, right? So qualitative will never give you—in—sorry, let me slow down. Qualitative should always help you understand why, how—like some of the nuances of all of this. If you have done your quantitative data properly, you should know kind of the breadth of what it is you're trying to do. And so you can recruit against that breadth of, "I need some people who are—who do this, who do that, who do these other things."
And like, we did a project for Reynolds Wrap. We needed some people who had, you know, kids at home, who did a lot of entertaining. We knew that like the roommate scenario was a whole other thing we wanted to try. And so we recruited against—and then people who were like really serious cooks and foodies. So we recruited against that rather than just being like, "I just need 20 people," right? So thinking about how your quantitative can help you start to dig into like, "This is an interesting place that I want to explore. This is an interesting use scenario that seems to be showing up. What's going on with that?" That's also why when you do your quantitative differently, it gives you some more of that.
Yeah, to think—
Yeah. And then qualitative can come through whether it's design or whether it's data analysis. Like, is—are we on the right path? Is this the right way of thinking about something? It becomes this way of validating or sort of co-collaboration at the end. Or, you know, at the start as you may think about it that way. Is this resonating? Does—you—and not so much as like—I know a lot of companies use it as a thumbs up, thumbs down for product launches or, right, campaign launches. I wouldn't necessarily do that. But—but how is it that we either miss something or where is it going?
But I think that those are probably some of the ways that you use it. But to me, data—data is—data by default is always partial, whether it's quantitative or qualitative or anything else. It is always partial. And what you get when you parallel and mix all of these is you're trying to offset where things are partial. Quantitative data can give you a good picture of a lot of things, but it doesn't necessarily tell you anything else. Or it doesn't tell you the experience, doesn't tell you the why, like all of that stuff.
What do you make of—I mean, I feel like I—I bump into people using the word data to be synonymous or quantitative, and qualitative is this sort of—you know, nobody really takes it seriously and they don't—you know, I always tell this story. There's a—the—there's some quote that's that—that Freakonomics looked into that "The plural of anecdote is not data." And that quote is more popular in Google even though it's wrong, and they find it's because the plural of anecdote is data according to the—I guess where do you fall out on this? Is it that business culture just chooses not to see the value in qualitative data? How do you make sense of this?
That's why I get so frustrated with like AI and LLMs. Is like, do you know what you gathered? Any idea what's in your data? Yes. Ovetta Sampson posted something on LinkedIn the other day of like, "Quantitative data is just a lot of opinions, but it's still opinion, you just have more of them. But this is such an interesting anthropological question, isn't it too?
This is where I think I'm gonna go back to—to a point I made earlier. If you don't know what you're doing as a qualitative researcher, if you don't have some framework, if you don't have some idea of theory, if you don't know why you are looking at something, your qualitative data will suck. Very frankly, it's not going to be good. But the same is true of quantitative data. If you don't know why you are asking questions, if you don't know why you are polling a certain group of people, if you don't have a theory about why it should look certain ways or not, and you just somehow expect it to show you the truth, right, it's also going to be crap.
And so that to me is where—we're in a rush to bring richness to the—the industry world. I think we often missed what it was about a lot of the early qualitative researchers who were in industry. What they brought was that like huge background in theory, in ethnography, and like not just, "Oh, I'm gonna go look," but you know, like "I'm looking in a certain way for certain kinds of things at certain types of behaviors," and that's what matters. And we haven't held that level of rigor.
I—let me be clear—lots of people do this and they do it incredibly well, and I want to be really mindful that I'm not like painting a wide brush. Yes, but we're—when it has failed, to me it has largely failed because it's just like, "Oh, I interviewed 15 people and I learned this," right? And why does that matter? And how does that connect? And where does it link? And what else—
[Speaker 2]
Does that show you? Yeah, that's where I think we have failed. Yeah. No, what do you mean—what are you—like, I just feel like I—like this is definitely a passion point for me because it was—sad when anthropology and—and ethnography started to lose value. When did that happen? What are you pointing—
[Speaker 1]
I feel like when data sciences really started to come forward, kind of the late 2010s, everyone's like, "Oh, we don't need ethnography anymore. We can just like run it and big data." And then certainly with—with the LLMs, people like, "Yeah, I can just ask the LLM to—what would a woman who's 40 in—"
[Speaker 2]
Michigan think about this? Right, yeah. Yeah. So it's just sad. So—do you feel like qualitative research is undervalued, ethnography is undervalued, that it's not really considered real data by—by many? Is there a need to sort of to champion this role?
[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I do feel like it's probably undervalued. And yet at the same time, I can't tell you the number of business meetings I sit in where people—like senior leaders will essentially offer what I call anecdata. Oh yeah, oh that's—that's qualitative. And—and helping them understand where they're doing it themselves.
Yeah, I think it's actually kind of a—one of the—the more joyful parts of my current role since I don't do like outward-facing research so much anymore.
And then can you tell—I want to talk about the ritual-based research. I mean, this is a few—while—a while ago, this paper, but it's so interesting and wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about the origins?
So it basically started from a kind of conflict we were having about qualitative versus quantitative data. And this other thing like—marketing is fundamentally a discipline that we want people to do something different from what they're doing, right? Like, I need you to buy more of this. I need you to tell your friends about buying this. I need you to—switch brands and buy more of mine and less of theirs. So it's fundamentally a behavior change discipline. Policy is fundamentally a behavior change discipline.
And so I started to think about, all right, well, how do cultures change behavior? Right? So back to my like, I don't have time for this. Like, I gotta figure this out quickly. And cultures change behavior in two typical ways. The first is like the slow enculturation of how you like raise a child and the steady, you know, "Let's do that. Let's do this other thing. Like, let's not do this third thing."
But the other big way they do it is actually through rituals, right? So you have—we all can think about like graduations or weddings as you are literally changing the status of somebody in those moments from student to graduate and from single to coupled. And there are whole categories—there are whole categories of rituals that are around behavior change.
So even if you think about anniversaries or birthdays or—anniversaries in particular, those are moments that are really intended to kind of bring you right back to what was the commitment you made? What was the promise? Are you living up to that? Are you in that same space? And if not, how do you re—how do you re-get—how do you get yourself back there?
And so I was like, well, if rituals are designed to change behavior, maybe we could think about how rituals align to certain types of behavior change. And then can we ladder different business and product challenges against those types of behaviors so that we can not just do like qualitative research, but do research that's actually trying to get people to do the thing that we want them to do anyway?
And so the way that we thought about it was like—graduations, weddings, things like that are—are status change, right? So this is where you're welcoming somebody new, welcoming somebody into a new community. So I need you to not buy that and I need you to buy this. So how do we think about, "Oh wow, what does it take to welcome somebody into a new product community? And what do they want to feel? How do you want them to belong? What do you want to celebrate about who you are? How do you—how do you also tell them like what the rules are and what the expectations are and where we go, where we don't go?"
At the same time, like I said, anniversaries are rituals of remembrance, right, where you remember why you made a commitment to something. So how is it that we can structure something where—where you remember why it is you are part of this thing that you are doing?
So we use that for Saucony. We worked on the—all the brand work for—elite runners have a very difficult time talking about why they run. They're like, "I—I just do it. Like, I—my shoes are there and I do it and I just—I have to do this. It's like who I am." But if you get them talking, they all have—they all save race bibs and medals and stuff like that. If you get them talking about specific races, they talk about—you get these really rich, fun narratives about, you know, the challenges and the hilarious moments in the community and that other stuff.
And those become moments of remembrance about why they do what they do. And so we had a whole campaign that was really around like the hilarious moments that happen in racing and running that—that were kind of like insider jokes to the running community to celebrate why we all get up at four in the morning and put on shoes and ache all day long.
So—so and then—so there were a whole bunch of ways that we tried to do it. But it was kind of back to that bigger point like, what's the theory? What's the human question I'm trying to get at? And how can I think about not just like, "Oh, we'll do a deprivation study." Or like—well, why do you want to do a deprivation study? Is that the right study? Is that a right approach? Is that to get you the challenge that your customer—like your—your people actually have to make? So that's where it all started. And it was—it turned out to be super fun and actually worked, which was kind of surprising.
[Speaker 2]
Really? Because a lot of my stuff, I'm like, "It should work—"
[Speaker 1]
Should work in theory. I can see this.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah, it's amazing. So it was really fun. One final question because we've talked for a while and I could keep talking, but I'm—I have this—the Jerome Bruner book. I have not read it, but he uses the word meaning. I use the word meaning in this—that business of meaning. I pretend I know what I'm talking about, but it's a big mushy thing. What are we talking about when we talk about meaning?
I don't know. It's a big mushy word, right? And I'm gonna go like, words can mean a lot of things, right?
Yeah.
What does meaning mean? I think at one level, it's—it literally is how we organize and make sense of what we do and the world around us. And it shapes that—that's kind of glib.
I think at another level, it shapes the way that we engage with the world and the kinds of choices we make, which then kind of create the world that we're in, right? So I think it works at two levels. Or it's kind of that—that sort of pre-conscious—this is what I should do because this is what I've always been raised and taught. Like—like I was saying, the uncultivated consequences of—
Yeah, like this is—this is what is—makes it—matters.
It's then also how we go back and re-narrativize what's happened in our world to make sense of the choices we made and to leave things out. But the thing that's really interesting for me about meaning, and this ties a bit to some of my worries with AI—meaning—a lot of stuff that's meaningful, we—we take for granted because it's sort of the backdrop of our everyday, right? It's the—it's—and things stand out because they are different or unexpected or unique or unusual. And—and we pay attention to those. Sometimes they're good, like that's—it's an unexpectedly good moment. And sometimes they're outlier, like they're not.
But we find ways to craft narratives that kind of weave those back through. And my goal with a lot of qualitative research is how do we keep bringing more of that surprise, more of that unexpected? Because that's where—and how do we focus on that unexpected? Because that's where people have to articulate why is it unexpected, right? And how do I make sense of this thing that I didn't know was going to happen?
That's really the brilliance of long-term fieldwork is you get to ask people like, "Oh, why did you do that?" And it's the everyday of their world, and they look at you like, "Well, because we always do that." But then you push and you get the underlying why. I think those whys change over time. Let me also be clear. But—but I think to me, that's what meaning is. It's the frameworks that start to pattern and organize our lives, but it's also those frameworks that pull in the stuff that's unexpected.
And I—I also think that sometimes those—sorry, I'm gonna go one more step further. When something is so far askew and we can't process it, we just like—yes, that thing never happened. And we don't have any way—like—like the—the framework breaks if we pull it in. And I think that when I look at politics and some of the social divides that we're now seeing, I think that that's part of why I'm really afraid about—I'm not afraid, but—I think that that's the big challenge when something's so different that we—that we have to like other it. And can't create a narrative in which that makes sense.
What's the opposite of othering?
Is it belonging, isn't it?
It's a—okay, Tom—Thomas Tornish was one of my favorite phenomenologists who said self and other always existed the same boundary, right? You define yourself by defining what is other. So if the opposite of othering, it's selfing, right? How is—how am I like this thing? Yes, that—how is this thing like me? Where did it—A totally made-up word on the moment. I think the—yeah, I think the opposite is selfing.
Oh, it's beautiful. Awesome. Well, what a beautiful—what a wonderful way to end. This has been such a joy. I—I really am really grateful that you—you—you agreed to speak with me, and this has been a real pleasure. So thank you so much.
Thank you. I always learn so much more about myself and about my discipline when I have these conversations. So absolutely love what you do. Please keep it up. I—and it makes my Friday every day. I'm excited to now finish this and go read your newsletter for today.
