5 Minutes With… Kaoru Sugano
The young Kaoru Sugano grew up with a burning passion for jazz and dreamed of living a life of music. His father, however, had other ideas and urged the aspiring Miles Davis to get a grounding in numbers. Considering the ground-breaking work that the Creative Technologist has produced while working at Dentsu, it looks like daddio knew best. These days Kaoru Sugano is all about combining technology, crowd-sourcing, data-crunching and creativity to produce visually – and aurally – stunning tools.
LBB> How did you get into advertising?
KS> Where to begin? I grew up in a very academic family. I originally wanted to have a career in mathematics or science because of my parents, but I wasn’t too successful. I was rather more successful at literature. My father advised me that I should study something that had atleast an element of mathematics in it, and so at university I did economics and marketing science. At the same time I was also learning about jazz music and how to compose and arrange. I think jazz is interactive music. I wanted to make my living as a musician but – it’s probably the same in Japan as it is everywhere else – it’s hard to make money with music. While I was studying marketing at university I discovered there were certain commonalities between the two areas. Both were about expressing an idea through craft, but with advertising you can still make money.
After that I went to work at Dentsu, a big Japanese agency – I was posted in the marketing division when I joined and never originally involved with the ‘creative’ departments. I became increasingly involved with figuring out how to analyse and visualise huge amounts of data and how to use that in design.
LBB> You were at Spikes in 2012, talking about art and advertising and technology. What was the core message of your talk?
KS> It was a panel discussion with Daito Manabe, a media artist. What we have in common is that we use technology to create art, and we’re both very aware of how the two disciplines overlap. Daito introduced me to some of his work, including this project for Perfume a Japanese pop group. He used motion capture technology to capture the girls dancing and shared the data so that fans could download it and create their own personal performance. They took the code and created their own CG animated ‘disguises’ of the dance and uploaded it to YouTube. One person fed the data to a robot which performed the dance! In the end there were over 500 versions, some created by professional programmers and animators.
It’s an interesting step forward in crowdsourcing – it seems that these days creativity is all about making and sharing tools to empower people to be creative themselves. If you can understand how to involve people, a piece of art can be so much more powerful. This project was about more than making a video, it was about inviting people into the band.
Quite often when you see creative work, it takes the form of top-down creativity. But I think this and the Honda Internavi projects I have been involved with are good examples of creativity that involves many people. You create a core tool and by merging that with the imaginations of many people you can turn it into a big, useful project. At the end of my Spikes presentation, my message to the audience was that it used to be that edgy, cutting-edge creative that saw themselves as the brains of the operation, the ones who had all the great skills that the audience did not have. The creative of the future is about making something that everyone can get involved in.
LBB> The Honda Internavi project ‘Connecting Lifelines’ in particular is a great example of using the brains of the crowd to create something genuinely useful. As I understand it, you turned it around in 20 hours following the 2011 earthquake. What was the thinking behind the project?
KS> I was already involved with Honda, working on the interface for Internavi, the in-car navigation system. It uses the 3G network to indicate where you are and to track the road ahead. The Internavi was originally created to discover traffic jams and to help drivers avoid busy roads or to point out alternative routes. After the earthquake struck, I figured out that we could use the data from the Internavi sets to find out which roads were blocked and which were free, and this would help the people who wanted to escape a particular area.
LBB> And what specific obstacles did you face putting together such a project following such a major disaster, and how did you work round the challenges?
KS> First of all, I was in Tokyo. Everything shut down, the traffic, everything. I was stuck in the office. Right after the Tsunami our client at Honda announced the Tsunami warning to all Internavi users. There was no phone connection in the office, but there was some Internet. I saw my client online and I started chatting via messenger, to check that they were all ok. I was able to communicate with them that way over the next few hours. I found out that the Internavi could tell us which roads were open and which were blocked. Basically, the cars using GPS give out a signal, and in the areas where roads were destroyed there were no cars giving out a signal. It meant that where we were receiving GPS data, that road was clear. Using the shaky Internet connection, I received all the data from Honda and was able to create a visualisation of this information.
The next day around 10am in the morning I was able to upload that information for Internavi users. However we needed was to create visualisations for people who were not Internavi users – but it would have taken far too long for me alone to code it for other devices
At the same time as I was collecting the data from Honda, I was also looking at Twitter because people were tweeting about the state of certain roads. I was trawling all the messages, anything connected to the transport system, to feed that information in too.
Instead of making it into a website I uploaded the data to Google Earth. I sent out the data with a message saying ‘please visualise this data for any devices that you may have’. Government agencies and individuals responded by using the data to create visualisations for smartphones and uploading it to websites.
LBB> What happened to Connecting Lifelines in the aftermath of the disaster?
KS> After the tsunami, we were able show how Japan was recovering by using the GPS information in much the same way. Connecting Lifelines had no budget but after that project we were inspired to create Honda Dots, which used the Internavi data to create visualisations. The idea is very simple – moving dots in different colours represent cars. You can use it to see what the weather will be like, where the heavy traffic is and what the road conditions will be like during a journey. It’s useful but also playful. There’s a social media element to Dots too, so as well as being a navigator, the Internavi becomes a tool to connect people.
We also created an app so that people who don’t have Internavi can join in. It’s really useful – say you’re meeting up with someone at a café or noodle place, you can see if your friend is likely to be late due to heavy traffic.
LBB> Even though you’re working with data and technology, these projects require an understanding of human behaviour, how we interact with technology. How much of your work involves researching this side of thing?
KS> A classic piece of creative work, like a film, is all about one-way communication. But in digital it’s all about interaction – you give something to someone, who then changes it. In traditional advertising you have to understand human behaviour – you have to know how to make someone feel a certain way, whether that’s shock or amusement. With the kind of work I do, you have to understand how to make things easy for people to use. Infographics are a good example of this. If I want people to interact with something, I have to bear that in mind and design it appropriately. Quite often you get a response that you don’t expect, but that’s absolutely fine.
If you look at the Honda Smile Mission we did, where we created a ‘talking car’ called Petiteco, the project was all about communication. The car would record the voices of the people who spoke to it and used voice recognition technology to analyse the language and tone of voice, and would use that information to modify the language used. It was always changing and improving.
Of course I have enormous respect for the craft that goes into traditional advertising, the writing and design and so on. What they do is like a love letter, telling that special someone how they feel. What I do is more like a proposal – I’m there in person and I can see the other person’s response straight away. It’s a whole different world. In the future, my personal goal is to invite more traditional creative into my world. The future of creativity lies in bringing these two sides together.
LBB> How well is the advertising industry doing to recruit people who have both technological and creative skillsets?
KS> This is only my personal opinion. So far, in most agencies in Japan it doesn’t look like technologists and scientists are considered truly ‘creative’. In most agencies ‘creative’ still just refers to copywriters and art directors. At the moment I feel a bit like an ‘alien’ because of my technologist’s background. My work has been well-received and won awards, which has opened up opportunities for more projects, however I think I’m still very unusual.
Maths and science students at University will naturally aim for companies like Sony, who produce technology. They would never even consider going into the creative industries. It’s understandable though because agencies are still not actively hiring them. Instead some people, like Daito Manabe, end up starting their own business. At the moment in Japan there are some interesting innovation and production companies. When people like Daito started they couldn’t get into agencies because they didn’t understand what they were doing. Now, though, their projects are getting attention – and coming to the attention of clients. It’s not just happening in Japan, it’s a global phenomenon. You don’t expect projects like that to come out of big established agencies; you expect innovation to come from smaller places. That’s how places like AKQA and R/GA started.
LBB> At the beginning of the interview you spoke about your love of composing and improvising jazz – and it strikes me that everything you are saying about digital communication shares a lot with jazz, in terms of improvisation and collaboration. Do you think that inspires your work?
KS> Any project I’m involved with is always about real-time, spontaneous interaction, so yes, they’re related. I often do projects which involve turning information into animations. But when I’m involved in a project at the agency, I always like to be involved in creating and overseeing the music and sound that goes with it. For example, with the InterNavi project, I created the music for that myself!
