Off-grid with Jan Chipchase
Path #17: The globetrotting designer on the 12 stages of life, leading expeditions in Afghanistan, the rise of cuneiform & AI, Kickstarting books, and being self-sufficient.
Almost a decade ago, while schmoozing at a Monocle conference in Lisbon, I met Jan Chipchase. I hosted Monocle’s podcast The Entrepreneurs back then, and my spidey sense was on high alert for ‘interesting people’. Quiet, thoughtful and hyper-smart, Jan stood out immediately. He was at the event with Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, for whom Jan was working on a fascinating project. The more I talked with Jan—and, serendipitously, again at the airport—the more I was intrigued.
Born in the UK and based in Japan, Jan runs a research, design & strategy consultancy called Studio D Radiodurans. Named after a type of bacteria that can survive extreme conditions, a run-of-the-mill business this is not. Billion-dollar companies hire Studio D to explore certain human behaviours, understand problems, and identify opportunities and threats. These projects involve Jan assembling temporary teams and ‘pop-up studios’ occasionally in highly remote locations, more Tajikistan than San Francisco. It’s design-meets-risk-analysis-meets-anthropology. Sort of.
If all this sounds a bit mysterious, well, Jan’s work isn’t something he tends to shout about. (Bloomberg profiled him in 2016, though he generally keeps quiet). We’ve stayed in touch since Lisbon and I’ve enjoyed following his adventures and projects, from raising $336,000 on Kickstarter to fund his superb Field Study Handbook, to launching SDR Traveller (and a bag that can hold $1m in cash), to leading expeditions in Afghanistan, involving brushes with the Taliban.
I’m so happy Jan agreed to talk with me for Desire Paths about his career and life—him from his beautiful home in Japan, and me from my new home in London.*
It’s a long one but a good one, so open this in a new browser tab, pour a big cup of coffee… and enjoy.
Hello again, Jan! So… where are you from?
The UK. Wembley of all places. German mother, British father, and I moved to Brighton in my teenage years. Brighton is where I got the travel bug, seeing all the foreign tourists coming in. I was a terrible student, but at age 15 my school offered a small stipend for a project. I wanted to go to Egypt, so they gave me and a friend a tiny amount of money. That was my first solo trip abroad. We went right up to the Sudanese border. It lasted five weeks and we lived on a few dollars a day.
An incredible trip for a teenager.
It sparked things in me that have lasted a lifetime: being immersed in other cultures, being comfortable seeking out stimuli. And as part of that process, you tend to go through periods of discomfort, whether cultural, physical or mental.
What happened next in life?
I failed my university exams the first time I took them. Had to redo a year. I failed German and I’m half German. My parents were nudging me towards doing something that would take me out of whatever cycle I was in, so I went to Berlin and lived with my uncle and aunt. Got a job in a restaurant, then returned to the UK, redid my exams and got into one of the worst universities in the UK, which no longer exists.
It was only in my twenties, when I got a master’s degree, that I realised I might be good at something that I also enjoyed, which was design. I got a job developing software for teaching and moved to Bristol. I bought an apartment, which I still have, in the servant’s quarters of a 150 year-old building, and at a dinner party there, my flatmate brought a friend. That turned out to be the woman I’d marry. It took me on an entirely new and wonderful journey. It’s such a life force to be with someone who you amplify and who amplifies you.
Indeed. And it took you to Japan…
Yes. In the early 2000s, Japan was more or less at the forefront of physical interaction of objects. Sony was producing these amazing, tangible UIs. And so we went to Japan, where I did remote consulting. After about nine months I would have had to leave the country and come back in to retain the visa. So I thought, fuck it, I’ll apply for a job instead. So I applied at Nokia. I didn’t even own a cell phone. I was hired as a usability engineer. I don’t want to say I was useless, but I was surrounded by so many other talented people who were patient and kind.
What was your real skillset as a designer at that point?
User interface design. And probably 70% of those skills today would appear in a UX design course. It’s not just about the layout of things—a lot of it is around psychology and interaction. Honestly, I’ve designed some things, but I don’t think of myself as a designer. When one is surrounded by people who are just so obviously better than one at a thing, one hesitates to call oneself that thing!
The word ‘design’ is a bit amorphous though: industrial design, graphic design, design thinking for businesses. So you were in Japan, at Nokia, with all these talented people around you...
And I learned how to do things in the way that the company did them. But in my spare time, I would go out and do field research. Nobody asked me to do it. I kind of got away with it in the beginning. And I started writing. This was when Movable Type was emerging. For the first three years I wrote complete rubbish. I tried different formats. I’d explore. The details of what I was doing in the research lab were highly confidential, but after about three years I started writing things like, So, I’m in India and here are the things I’m thinking about. Nokia was a vibrant, growing company. Someone on the inside, writing about it and engaging an audience, was attractive to many people. Learning how to write and what it means to build an audience that’s willing to engage in what one writes is such a great life skill.
And you’ve since written a few books, including Hidden in Plain Sight and The Field Study Handbook. Got any more up your sleeve?
Yes, I’m working on a new book and I’m about two years in. I think it’s about organisational sensemaking and how humans make sense to the world. I’m writing this in a time of very rapid change, particularly with generative AI and other forms of AI and computational processing. As part of my research, I’ve been going back and looking at linguistics and a whole bunch of other things. One of the questions I circle back to every so often is Will we ever live in a post-literate world? There was a time before literacy, of course. There’s a fantastic book I’ve got here, called How Writing Came About by Denise Schmandt-Besserat.
We’re talking pre-cuneiform, pre-hieroglyphics?
Exactly that. It’s about how archeologists and anthropologists made the connection between what were essentially clay lumps that they would find scattered all around Iraq and Mesopotamia and linking them to clay envelopes which had scratchings on the outside. Essentially, a trader in one village would give a clay envelope to a trader in another village, and it was secret what was inside. The person would crack open the envelope, count the lumps, and would be, like, Okay, I’m getting everything that I should get. But that’s relatively inefficient, right? Instead, you could put markings on the outside. That was how cuneiform came about, and the first systematic use of writing, which became a language system. It’s a wonderfully unpretentious book. I would love to write an equivalent of that. I don’t know if I’ve got it in me.
So now you’re wondering if we’re dismantling all that literacy and devolving into a post-literate era. A world of emojis and grunts?
I’m interested in that, yes. At Nokia I was lucky enough to work with some fantastic researchers on projects that sought to answer the question: Should we design a phone for illiterate people? But we realised the question was wrong. The better question is: What level of competency is required to complete the things that you want to complete? Literacy is just one tool.
For example, you could have an illiterate person who could use a phone to make and receive calls, and even receive messages, but they can also go to a corner store or a neighbour to ask, Can you translate this for me? And so the binary idea of literate or illiterate is messy. You can have a kind of social literacy, which, in a community with high levels of illiteracy, is having a person who you can ask to translate something in the same way that you might 15 years ago ask someone the time.
And I imagine AI and voice recognition will completely change the game.
Yes. Is there a point where being able to make sense of words and letters and the skills that we associate with textual literacy—as opposed to some kind of technical literacy or literacy for a particular domain like marketing—is no longer required to survive or even thrive in society, because the tools enable us to move beyond that? Don’t get me wrong: I love words and books. But I think we might get to that point where literacy is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. And yes, you could say, Is that really where we want to go? Think of what will be lost. But history has shown that other forms of creation exist and what we appreciate as societies changes as well. Anyway, it’s a big and fascinating topic!
I’d love to talk about your consultancy. How did you get from Nokia to setting up something of your own? What was the journey?
Sure. I eventually became a ‘principal scientist’ at Nokia, which sounds grand, but it’s a relatively junior position in the corporate hierarchy. But because I’d had a lot of media exposure for my research, I’d also been exposed to things like being on stage with the CEO. So I moved to LA, leaving Tokyo for the first time since starting my corporate career, and I was headhunted relatively quickly. I was asked by Mark Rolston of Frog if I would build a global insights organisation. I spent so much time travelling, learning how consultancy worked at that scale, and learning from so many talented colleagues. But I also burned out after four years. So I left. And I decided to take a year off as a sabbatical.
And during that period, the seeds of Studio D were planted. How would you describe Studio D? What’s the mission statement?
We don’t have a mission statement. Actually, I don't think I’ve ever pitched in 10 years. All of the work has been pretty much inbound. When I left Frog, a colleague and really smart strategist said that when you start your own thing, you’ve got a window of about three years before you really need to figure out how to position it. And every year for a decade I remember that conversation and thinking This is the year!
Studio D’s sweet spot is a large tech client—often with billions of customers—that wants to understand something happening in multiple cultures that affects their business. For example, their platform is being abused by a particular thing or group of people, at scale. The work often involves standard ethnographic research, but we also look into things that stretch over into illegality or legal grey areas. We figure out how to do these projects in a way that’s respectful of the communities we’re in, and respectful of the people who are doing the illegal stuff as well, so that they’re willing to trust us and give us insight. It’s all grounded in a strong ethical stance. And then we deliver something of value to the client.
Are you pulling from different disciplines or inventing your own?
I don’t think anyone today is doing anything particularly unique. The question is just how long the practice has been going for. We do a lot of ethnographic research, so there’s obviously a few centuries or more of practice to draw on. What’s different is we’re working for large corporations. Think about how they function, the things they worry about, the things they do, and the things they can be seen doing. For example, if somebody is abusing a platform that has hundreds of millions or low billions of users and they acknowledge that there are problems on the platform, they can get a lot of political heat. So they need someone who can discreetly research it, recognizing that there are many legal grey areas. Just to be seen to be trying to address a thing, well, the blowback can be significant.
How do you set up each project in a practical sense?
I’ll hire a core international team of 2-5 people and an equivalent number for each country we’re in. That wasn't so common when we started. At the time, the default was you build a studio and make a few hires. I didn’t know if you could build teams on a per-project basis. But it turns out, yes you can and still deliver world-class results, but with fewer headaches. We rent a large house for each project and everyone lives together. We call them pop-up studios. Is that unique? No. Is it unique in a corporate sense, bringing a cross-cultural team into a state of flow? I would say, resolutely, yes. And the model works very well.
What’s the pace at which you take on clients, normally?
We don't take on more than three projects in a year. And I love that. You can do that and still impact at meaningful scale. I’m thinking of a project for one of our tech clients. Within three months they had changed their regulatory stance on an issue worldwide, and changed the design of certain applications that affected more than a billion people.
Alright let’s talk Afghanistan. You’re leading expeditions there. Why?
I was lucky enough to work on various projects in Afghanistan, pre-Taliban takeover. And a while back, I did a 7,000km overland trip through China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, to the border of Afghanistan. I decided to get to know a region far better. A region I would invest in returning to many times. One that was personally interesting and potentially strongly misconstrued because of how it appears in the media. And to possibly support the socioeconomic development of a region in a way that aligns with my values and my skills.
When we put The Field Study Handbook on Kickstarter, the goal was $30,000. One of the stretch rewards was that if we hit $200,000 or so, I would offer an expedition: Come with me to Afghanistan! That reward cost $10,000—the maximum amount you could set on Kickstarter. I thought: Nobody’s going to sign up for this. Well, we ended up raising $336,000. The ‘risks’ section on that project was something else. And then I thought, Oh, okay, I’m guess I’m in the expedition business now…
Our first expedition was in 2018—there were five of us. In 2019 there were 8. In 2020 we had 35 people ready to go on six expeditions and a little thing called the pandemic hit, so we cancelled everything and refunded everyone. In 2022, I went to Pakistan and thought I’d cross the border, but that wasn’t possible for me. And we back last year—you probably saw our trip report.
What’s the purpose of going there, though? What are you trying to do?
There are brilliant companies, such as the British outfit Untamed Borders, that have been taking people into Afghanistan for years. It might sound exotic to go to somewhere like that on holiday, but there is actually a tourism industry that supports this, run by people with a lot of experience.
Our main aim is to support the socioeconomic development of the region by trying to encourage appropriate tourism in the region, which aligns broadly to what locals want. The money that one person spends is probably enough to support four or five families for a year in terms of what they spend locally, if the money is equitably distributed. And so when I talk of appropriate tourism, it's really about paying the people who do the work and spending locally. So we’re working on a trekking map where we’re logging trail routes. At some point, there could be too many people going into that region, but you are years away from even having to go down that route. I think in 2019 there was something like 500 people who went into that valley system. Most of them went in cars, probably maybe 40 went trekking.
But there’s another aim, which is, at a higher level, that I want everyone who comes to understand what it takes to plan something like this. And this is where we differ from tour companies. We’ve got a WhatsApp group where we’re planning, spreadsheets and documents where everyone is contributing. I’d love for everyone that participates to be able to run a similar challenging expedition anywhere in the world. Not that they would know everything, but they would at least have a process in place.
‘Life-changing’ is thrown around a lot – i.e. backpacking around southeast Asia – but I imagine it’s particularly appropriate in Afghanistan.
The biggest takeaway for most people isn’t the trek or riding on a yak or watching buzkashi, the headless goat polo-esque game, or the physical exertion of being at high altitude, or all these fascinating conversations they have. The biggest thing people take away is internalising the idea that their life and wellbeing—and the wellbeing and life of the people around them—is their responsibility. There is nobody coming to rescue you. There’s no insurance that covers you when you’re there. Some people get really freaked out by the idea that you can't just call someone to figure a thing out. The beauty of being there is that you have to figure out how to manage that emotionally. I love seeing people go through a metamorphosis and emerging as something different. You should come, Danny! What are you doing in August?
I’d love to one day. Give me another year! Your last trip took place after the Taliban re-takeover. How did that work?
That was definitely a question: is it smart to continue doing this? If we finish the mapping this year, we’ll distribute printed maps gratis to the stakeholders so they can use it to generate revenue and encourage tourism. Once that’s done, I have to figure out what to do next year. Do I go back or explore another mountain range? I mean… I honestly have to see what the Taliban make of all of this. Last year there were a lot of questions, like Who's paying you to be here? I didn’t even tell them about the mapping project. Even pre-Taliban, the plan wasn’t to talk with the government, but just with the local communities. But at some point there will be an artefact and I’ll speak to an official and get their take on it. I’m curious how they’ll receive it. That will be the next big challenge. As a foreigner who’s a citizen of the country they were at war with, going up to borders and pottering around, there’s an inherent suspicion, as there would be in any country.
In our last trip, we went through about 27 checkpoints. At most of them they’ll wave you through. Sometimes they’ll ask lots of questions. Up in the Wakhan, there were two patrols and one of them had quite a senior Taliban official with them. Two technicals, big guns. Then an hour of suspicion, followed by tea, followed by We just killed a goat, do you want to join us for the evening?, followed by a two-hour conversation, kalashnikovs and RPGs against the wall. One of them leaned over, and said, through a translator, Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? What’s life like in Japan? Certainly a bizarre situation. I was expecting more dogma, yet so many of the interactions were driven by curiosity. It’s really difficult to square that with what we understand about Taliban policy such as female education and religious persecution.
One last one: been down any rabbit holes recently?
There’s a framework which I really enjoy, which is Armstrong’s 12 stages of life. I’m 54, though sometimes I feel 94, and occasionally I feel 24. But I have a 14-year-old daughter and I love seeing things through her eyes. She’s the most important thing in the world to me, and the researcher in me is constantly asking what mindset and ways of approaching things would be most useful to equip her with. How can I amplify the innate curiosity that’s within her and take it to the next level?
The 12 stages of life is a model that says there are certain life stages and as you get older, these stages get longer. I found this to be a useful model to reflect on motivations: what is important to me as a 54-year-old as opposed to a 44, 34, 24 or 14-year-old? I’m not suggesting this is the only model or it’s accurate for all cultures and people, but it’s interesting to recognize how motivations change over a lifetime.
In what sense?
In my early twenties I had no idea what I wanted to do. In my thirties I discovered that I could be paid to do a thing. And in my forties I realised all of this chaotic travel that I did in my twenties—lots of long trips, to Nicaragua and other places—formed insights into how to go off the beaten path; to follow my own desire path in a way.
And now in my 50s, I’m working on my book. When you’re two years into writing a book, people think you're going to have an artefact at some point, and honestly I can’t even see that horizon. I’ll probably research and write for another three years and try and figure out what I want it to be. And that’s okay. I love being in this life stage and having the financial freedom from years of hard work to not have the pressure to figure that out. To be able to ask bigger, deeper, thornier, societal-level questions.
You’ve arrived at Armstrong's 10th stage, benevolence! That's 50 to 80 years old. A mighty big span if you ask me…
While these models are lovely and they may work for a whole bunch of people in some places, every society has compressions and contractions. Like Japan—the model stops at 80 years old! Actually, I used this model on a project once, and since some of our cohort were Buddhists, we added a 13th stage: resurrection.
GO DEEPER… Jan’s site // Studio D // Masterclasses // The Field Study Handbook
Want to go on the next Afghanistan expedition in August?
—
*I began writing Desire Paths immediately after moving to LA, after 12 years in London, in the hopes of a fresh start. I’m writing this having just moved back to London, 18 months wiser and a lot tanner. Why? LA holds many wonders, but London’s more our speed. I regret nothing. If anything, this newsletter has proven that life is all about the twists in the journey.
—
Onwards and upwards,
this is exactly how i enjoyed this one: "open this in a new browser tab, pour a big cup of coffee… and enjoy." and wow, took me completely off-guard. so many things to dig deeper into. thanks. love it.
What an amazing interview! Going to check out all of the books linked!