I gave the opening keynote at a two-day workshop looking at ways to make work that is digital, inclusive and sustainable as part of part of programme to support transformation across the European opera and dance community. It was was organised by FEDORA – The European Circle of Philanthropists of Opera and Dance, a non-profit association committed to supporting and contributing to the future of opera and dance in Europe and took place in the wonderful Grand Théâtre de Genève at the same time as the Open Europa conference.

These are the notes I made, which I then used for my slides and as a reminder as I spoke. I didn’t say all of this, and this is not all I said.

Notes toward a talk

I have worked for the BBC for many years and was lucky enough to be part of one of our more risky, experimental and innovative arts initiatives, The Space, back in 2012.  We worked with England’s main arts funding organisation, ACE, to commission the first digital works from fifty-three organisations and created a special platform to put them online and – where it made sense – on television.

The BBC is an odd organisation. It starts from a mission that is written down in ink on vellum, part of a document that was signed by Queen Elizabeth II, and which is currently being revised for a new version to be signed by King Charles III. 

It’s this: “The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”  So no pressure.

The BBC’s Editorial Values, and the Editorial Guidelines, are rooted in the Royal Charter and the Agreement and guide it in ethical and moral deliberations about how to achieve the wider purposes.

They include things like the need “to reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom” and that “the BBC must promote technological innovation, and maintain a leading role in research and development”

And there is  commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 90% by 2050, which aligns with the UK’s national net zero target.

So as an organisation making work digital, inclusive and sustainable is already at the heart of what we do. However the ways this intersects with the mission and values is not straightforward, as you are all discovering in your own contexts. You can be clear what you want to achieve and have no idea how to get there.

The next two days should help with that, but I want to focus this morning on a specific piece of work that that BBC Research & Development did few years ago. R&D is the bit of the organisation that thinks more widely and more deeply about what the BBC stands for and how the approach to the BBC’svalues might need to change as the world changes and new technologies create new opportunities. Or risks.

That matters. Back in the 1950’s the BBC, and indeed any arts organisation, cared a lot less about diversity than we do now, while going digital and caring about sustainability would have been meaningless terms.

But human values, the guiding principles that shape our behaviour, decisions, and interactions with others, mattered even then, even if they were prioritised differently. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed in 1948, a time when, exhausted by global conflict, the many nations of the world decided to come together and pledge support for a set of values that all could endorse.

We find ourselves in a time when politicians in the UK calling for us to repeal our own Human Rights Act, withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and renege on our commitment to many of the values outlined in the Universal Declaration. If feels increasingly important for arts organisations to stand for the values that we collectively agreed on seventy-seven years ago.

We can express our commitment,  but translating those values into behaviour isn’t easy.I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy, because the values in the UN Declaration speak to our darker selves and instincts, and ask us to take the complicated path and not the easy one. They require us to face decisions with clarity and awareness, to decide not to do things that we might be tempted to do, or be asked to do by those with less moral integrity.

We see this being played out every day in the United States, where the regime is asking the population to comply in advance and not even challenge actions which seem to many to be clearly illegal.

Perhaps, just perhaps, art that embodies the values we want to express will help those who want to see a world within which we care for each other and support each other and try to reduce fear and hatred and separation.

So I want to talk about a project I worked on that attempted to map core human values onto product design, and to reflect on how the approach we took might be of use to you as you develop projects within your institutions.

And you’ll have noticed my sleight of hand here, because ‘digital’ is not normally included in discussions of human values. But it is to me, and it is to the BBC. My job is to explore how we  can deliver additional benefits to licence fee payers in the internet era, beyond the current suite of broadcast, online and mobile products, by providing novel services underpinned by our BBC’s values.

So I see digital, inclusive and sustainable as three complementary elements of creating spaces within which we can be more human, and where finding ways to translate human values into action is vitally important.

The Human Values Framework

Let me tell you about one approach to this.

The BBC’s Human Values Framework is an R&D initiative to shift from traditional usage metrics to measuring success based on human needs and well-being, using a toolkit of fourteen values to help design human-centric products and services. 

The framework is a collaborative design framework for anyone looking to put humans at the centre of their designs, and a resource that provides guidance for designing ethically humane digital products through patterns focused on user well-being.

It provides tools and resources for producers, designers, and commissioners to integrate fundamental human needs into their processes, fostering services that are more inclusive, meaningful, and aligned with the BBC’s mission.

It outlines ways to build these values into some of the most common design frameworks, like the Double Diamond, Prince2, and OKRs. You can see how on the Human Values website.

It starts from some research from the BBC to identify the core values that underpin software that is good for people, the antithesis to the design principles that we see applied in services like Facebook and TikTok which are designed to create ‘interest wells’ that keep people on the site or app in order to expose them to advertising.

The research identified fourteen core values that are underpinned by psychological needs, supported and validated by existing psychological research and key models of human need.

They aren’t perfect as they were developed within the context of European culture and part of the work we never did was to look at their wider applicability. But they are a helpful working set

1. Achieving goals	8. Feeling impactful
2. Being inspired	9. Growing myself
3. Being safe and well	10. Having autonomy
4. Belonging to a group	11. Having stability
5. Connecting with others	12. Pursuing pleasure
6. Exploring the world	13. Receiving recognition
7. Expressing myself	14. Understanding myself

Putting the values to use

Using these in your design process starts by identifying a subset from the list  that will be focused on whilst developing the idea. These should be the most important and central to the audience.  Between three and five is best, to ensure that efforts are tailored and focused.

The next stage is to ask yourself three questions

Who is the audience?

We recommend spending time discovering more about the audience. Learning about their stage of life, culture, skills, vocations and context.

Why this audience and these values?

Identify the main use cases. What are the audience objectives and how do the human values relate to this particular audience?

How will you know your idea is successful?

The measure of success in terms of meeting the needs you have identified. Spending time to learn what worked, what could be improved and takeaways from the experience.

Using the Double Diamond

One design technique we use in R&D is the Double Diamond, developed by the UK’s Design Council. The two diamonds represent a process of diverging and converging on an issue. This means exploring the issue wide and/or deep (divergent thinking) before narrowing down and taking focused action (convergent thinking).

The double diamond process is typically broken down into foiur defined stages to reflect the converging and diverging processes. This consists of: discover, define, develop and deliver. We describe how the values can be applied at each phase.

Discover: This stage involves understanding what drives your audience to think and act how they do. This information helps to identify the problem space and business challenge. 

Here, we recommend using the value cards and cultural probes to identify what is important to your audience in addition to their thoughts, actions and behaviours.

The cards can be used with audience members through a process of identifying human values (cards) that resonate, and discussing these to understand how the values translate to their lives. By allowing your audience to express their opinions through whichever discovery method you might use (e.g. interviews, focus groups, surveys), you start to understand their values and what is important to them. 

Define: The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help to define the challenge or problem that you are attempting to solve. In this stage, we recommend using the Human Values Desk Research Report to learn more about what those identified human values mean. The research report explains the psychology behind each human value, as well as empirical research conducted with over 3000 UK participants. 

Develop: This is where you approach the defined challenge or problem with the multidisciplinary team, by designing, developing and refining ideas. We recommend using the How Might We cards, to start to ideate around the human values, as well as the Human Values Ethical cards which can be used as discussion about how you intend to fulfil audience human values. It is important that this stage you co-design with a range of different people who identify with the value you are trying to meet. You will most likely develop a range of solutions to the problem you are intending to solve.

Deliver: Here is where you test out your potential solutions and reject ideas that will not deliver your human values, as well as improve the ones that will.  You can use the Human Values Proposition Canvas to map out your idea/s. In this canvas, you can define what your idea is, who it is intended for, why you think this approach is key, and how you know it will be a success. This is a great structure for when you are evaluating solutions within a cross discipline team.
Reference: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/fileadmin/uploads/dc/Documents/ElevenLessons_Design_Council%2520%25282%2529.pdf

That’s just one way of applying the model.

So What..

And why does this matter for our three focus areas of developing digital, inclusive, and sustainable work?  It matters because good things don’t happen by chance, so if we are to achieve these goals we have to do so consciously and with intent.

You’re here because you believe that too, of course, so I don’t think I’ll have to work hard to persuade you. But what the framework shows is a way to make it happen.

Incorporating this thinking into methods you already use may help to make it happen within organisations that may have hundreds of years of history, strong connections to certain audiences, ways of doing things that they are comfortable with, and senior leaders who believe that the art transcends such petty considerations as inclusivity, or reaching audiences outside the building, or delivering digital experiences, or minimising the inevitable impact of the climate emergency.

The three areas we’re looking at are of course very different:

Digital transformation is about adapting to the changed possibilities created by new ways of reaching and engaging audiences, and perhaps helping to shape those possiblities

Making work inclusive is about adapting to the changed possibilities created by new ways of understanding how societies are built and strengthened through inclusivity and openness to other cultures

And sustainability is of course about adapting to the changed possibilities created by new ways of understanding the impact of building modern industrial society on two hundred years of burning fossil fuels.

So actually they are all the same question: how do we shape traditional art forms in established institutions located in old buildings when the world around them has changed fundamentally and our potential audiences, funders, artists and staff live in the modern world where these issues intersect with their basic needs and core human values?

And that’s the challenge facing you all.

The framework I’ve outlined may be helpful in translating your wider goal into the specifics you need for any project, finding out what matters most to the audience you’re working with, and helping you shape your work around their needs instead of just assuming you know them.

Because I believe  the answer to how to create art that is inclusive and sustainable and that takes advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies is process. It’s about building these concerns into the way you do things, not adding them as extras or trying to fit them in where you can. They need to be there from the start and to be non-negotiable parts of the development and design of any project. And you need to go in and change the documentation and the metrics, and persuade everyone else in your organisation to follow processes that put these new approaches at the centre of your practice.

If you can do that, then the changes you make will outlast your tenure at your current venue, and when you move on to more powerful roles in other institutions you’ll be able to make bigger changes, faster.

Maybe even fast enough to translate the flawed enlightenment values we have all inherited into principles and practices that can shape the modern world in the interests of us all, bring people together, take full advantage of the opportunities offered by technology, and help us minimise the impact of the climate emergency.

Good luck.