On Distance and Place

I’ve been thinking about place, and what it means to our work at Cogapp.

On the surface, it seems strange that a company based in Brighton, on the south coast of England, works with some of the world’s great cultural institutions to help them tell their stories online. We do have “a very particular set of skills” (I’m from the same town as Liam Neeson, so I couldn’t resist), and we’ve been working with cultural organisations for around 40 years. We understand aesthetics, metadata standards, and why curators and registrars do what they do. But something we don’t talk about enough is how curious we are about the places our clients actually operate in.

Working at a distance, often across timezones, is something people ask us about a lot. We’ve delivered some of the sector’s largest and most ambitious projects with an ocean and several hours of time difference between us and our clients (not to mention the odd language barrier). We were doing this well before Zoom became second nature, and I think some of what we’ve learned along the way might be useful to others.

However much distance there is in the working relationship, a sense of place still matters, maybe even more so now that so much of working life has become remote. There’s something you can’t replace about getting out there and experiencing somewhere for yourself, whether it’s round the corner or across an ocean.

You can see this most clearly in the early part of our discovery process. Our design work moves through three stages, and the first is “immersion”: visiting the places that matter to our clients and their mission, not just making the time to go, but going with the right mindset to actually see what’s there.

This matters even more given who we tend to work with. Visiting The Huntington, situated only 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles, and seeing first-hand what a cultural refuge it is, tells you more about how to approach the work than a visit to a typical office would. We go to understand who our clients are and what they do, not to fill a few hours in a bigger meeting room.

Distance offers perspective

We’re currently working with the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, focused on the work of Andrew Wyeth. The landscapes of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the area around Cushing, Maine, are central to that story, and we’ve visited both, at the time of year Andrew and his wife Betsy would usually have been there. We’d spoken to experts, family, and friends, and read and watched everything we could find, but none of that compares to standing in the same spot the artist did.

Our work with Monterey Bay Aquarium benefited hugely from a visit to the Monterey coastline. Watching sea otters float happily in the wild, thanks to the Aquarium’s own work, made the point of what we were building together very clear.

Travelling that distance seems to sharpen our perspective. We take nothing for granted when we’re documenting a place, and we notice things our clients might walk past every day simply because they’re used to them. It’s definitely possible to build this mindset somewhere familiar to you, but it has to be intentional.

Early, in-person visits build deeper trust, faster

Clients are generous with their time when we visit, and they notice the effort involved in getting from the UK to the US, the Middle East, or wherever the project takes us. That effort tends to lead to evenings spent together after the working day ends, and that’s where trust gets built. I’ve seen and heard about other client/vendor relationships where this never happens, and others where it existed early on but wasn’t nurtured. Both seem like missed opportunities.

In my experience, counter-intuitively, the effort of making things work across distance often forms stronger relationships than being down the road would, and it’s those early, in-person visits that lay the groundwork.

A shared professional language beats distance

Speaking the same language as the people you’re serving, curators, registrars, archivists, means progress happens faster and more effectively, and that outweighs almost any issue caused by distance.

Cogapp works almost entirely in the cultural sector. If you’re lucky enough to have a specialism like that, distance stops mattering as much, because shared knowledge closes any gaps in geography.

That kind of depth is hard to build. It needs low staff turnover, genuine curiosity from your team, and thoughtful intent about which projects you take on. I don’t have a tidy explanation for how we’ve managed it at Cogapp, but I have a hunch it’s connected to my last point.

Shared values sustain curiosity

We have a decent handle on our shared principles at Cogapp. There’s plenty of diversity of thought, but a clear sense of what kind of work we want to do and why. We try to make the online world a better place, and we tend to stay interested in our clients long after a project ends. That, to me, is a good sign the relationship worked.

Mid-project, we’re immersed in our clients’ world. Something I appreciate is how long that connection lasts. Team members buying merch from client shops (recent merch I’ve spied includes MIT Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and Monterey Bay Aquarium t-shirts). People visiting clients in their own time (ticking off properties of the National Trust for Scotland). A company fun day inspired by a client’s history (a cyanotype session on Brighton beach, inspired by The Royal Society).

Our team cares about the work our clients do, not just the work we do for them. That alignment, and the immersion inherent in these visits, is what makes the whole thing worth doing, regardless of distance.

If you’re curious how immersion fits into the rest of our design process, you can read a little more here: https://www.cogapp.com/design.