Mapping Change: How One Design Studio Navigated 20 Years at the Forefront of a Changing Industry

Applied Works is a London-based design studio celebrating their 20th anniversary. I sat down recently with founders Joe Sharpe and Paul Kettle to discuss their work, changes they’ve seen in the industry over time, and to talk about the core principles that guide and focus their work.

Early influences

Joe and Paul met while in university. With a background in motion graphics, Joe has always kept an eye out for how a story evolves, frame-by-frame. Paul has a more classic graphic design background: his emphasis is information design and creating clarity for the user through in-depth understanding of his audiences. 

The two worked independently for a few years, and they joined forces to create Applied Works in 2005. Over the years, the studio has remained relatively small and has shifted focus multiple times to stay relevant in a changing landscape. Now, with 15 people, they’re on a growth path.  

Through their projects and clients, Applied Works has had unprecedented opportunities to witness the growth and transformation of an industry over time. From their early days working in moving image, branding, and websites, they had front row seats through the dot com bubble and learned how to code on the job. They ran tests on prototype devices like early satellite communications and the first iPad, and collaborated on many high-profile data vis projects, with the BBC, the Times in London, the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and others.

As web technologies advanced, they upgraded their methods to support live data feeds, establishing style and component systems for code reuse. They also experimented with 3D maps for the 2014 Tour de France and advanced image filters for a Black Mirror project in 2018. Their Class Calculator project for the BBC became the broadcaster’s most-shared data tool in 2013. Lately, they have pivoted toward climate and environmental work with nonprofit partners — as well as projects tackling societal issues and inequality — collaborating with philanthropists, intergovernmental agencies, and think tanks to help them communicate complex data and nuanced narratives. They are also expanding their skills into data science and machine learning. 

Themes

The team relies on several “north star” behaviors to guide their exploration, helping to chart a course over complicated and changing terrain. Throughout our conversation, a few strong themes stood out.

Push the boundaries

In design school, Paul observed that the coursework was very structured and quite strict, but the most successful students were often the ones who did their own thing. To develop your own perspective, he realized early on that you need to push the edges to test who you are and find out what you think. Your initial instincts might be wrong, but that’s how you learn. This principle continues to shape how the studio approaches its work. An exploratory mindset and keen appetite for learning helps to feed their creativity and ideas.

Experiment to find out

In our influencer age, it’s worth emphasizing that success is not just about broadcasting your ideas and opinions and hoping that someone else follows along. You also need to test and refine those ideas based on feedback from the world. 

Experimentation and prototyping are a key part of the process at Applied Works. In order to find the limits, you need to push an idea as far as it will go, and then just a little bit further. When it starts to fail, you can pull back and find the place where it works. This process of tuning their approach through experiment, feedback, and course correction has been a consistent theme for Joe and Paul throughout their design practice.

Follow the creative tension

In addition to doing your own thing, you need to find something to push against and someone to negotiate with. Joe and Paul bring different contributions and viewpoints to their collaboration, producing a natural creative tension that drives their approach. 

Joe has a more technical bent. He often starts by analysing complex datasets to propose a narrative, and then they iterate together until it makes sense from both a user and a technical perspective. This collaboration allows the pair to use each other to get to a better solution than either would have achieved alone.

Creative tension also forms the foundation of client engagements. Clients bring new and interesting problems and constraints, and together the group negotiates a new set of solutions to meet those needs. They start by asking challenging questions to get the team thinking, and then they get deeply involved with a client problem and the data, understanding as much as they can about the science of what the client is doing. This process helps them identify the underlying need, and the solutions emerge from that. 

When designing a call center dashboard for Genesys, the team identified a fundamental relationship in the way the key performance metrics are presented. They transformed the data into a user-friendly dashboard build around just three key insights, streamlining the display to allow users to monitor and address issues in real time. This approach later became a foundation for how Genesys designs its products.

Have a perspective

Over time, the team’s projects and creative experiments added up to experience, creating a sense of identity that is both unique to the studio and informed by the external world. This gives them the confidence to stand their ground when needed, which sometimes means forging an alternate path. 

One of their biggest breaks as a studio came in 2010, when the iPad first came out. At the time, most of the industry was using Adobe Flash for infographics. For accessibility reasons, Applied Works had resisted using Flash in favour of HTML5 and CSS. When the Times got a pre-release version of the first iPad, their existing projects worked natively where many others did not.

By following their own inner guidance rather than an industry fad, Applied Works was positioned to take advantage of a major opportunity when the technology changed. The team was quick to point out that it doesn’t always work out this well, but independent thinking sometimes pays off in unexpected ways.

New technologies

Over and over again, Paul and Joe’s experimental approach positioned them to embrace new technologies as they emerged. They are often approached by people who want something done and aren’t quite sure yet what it is. Starting from an unformed idea, they work collaboratively to shape and co-define the work, and that often leads to new and innovative projects that they might not otherwise have created. 

Although the team has often been among the first to embrace a new technology, they work hard not to be defined (or confined) by it. Technologies are a medium or a tool that they use to achieve better results for their clients, but the process often starts on paper, outside of the constraints and limitations of a screen. 

Instead, the team comes back to core design principles to guide their work. Usability has always been central to what the team does. The term has changed over time, from accessibility and user centered design to usability, human centered design, and now inclusive design. It’s similar for data visualization: the team sees it both as a practice and a tool that’s best applied to a problem, and not necessarily the skill that defines an artist in its own right.

Regardless of terms or technology, the quality standards remain the same: is the design easy to use? Interesting? Intuitive? Coming back to Joe’s background in motion graphics, does the sequence and hierarchy of information over time make sense? Everybody learns differently, and the team focuses on using a mix of technologies and skills to facilitate core use cases and needs. A recent article on a project about trade flow for Chatham House shows how all of these different pieces work together. 

Embracing change

Across all of the team’s experiences, there is a strong pattern of learning and embracing change. Where there are no precedents, Joe and Paul see opportunities. Learning alongside their clients makes experimenting and trying new approaches a more collaborative way of introducing fresh perspectives.

Applied Work’s content focus has changed over time, shifting with their interests and the industry. Starting out with websites, corporate work and data journalism, they transitioned into data products and design systems as those opportunities emerged. They are now refining their focus again, focusing on enlarging their scope and creating a better future for the planet. 

The team’s process has also changed over the years. In the beginning, they worked mostly from creative briefs. As their experience and expertise grew, they moved into more open-ended engagements based on client trust. Paul likened it to going on a journey together: the ideal situation is when a client has an open-ended idea, and they can sit down and work out how to approach it together. 

They’ve also been working to make their work more scalable, developing a process and a system to support a larger, more distributed team. They’re deliberately creating more opportunities for R&D and making space to explore their personal interests and curiosities to keep the team engaged. Joe in particular is interested to see what happens if they let technology lead the way a bit more, to help them invent what could be. In 2017, the team got the chance to work on chapter artwork for a book about the Netflix series Black Mirror. Taking inspiration from the anthology’s dystopian themes of losing control of technology, the team used creative coding to generate imagery of each episode, relinquishing a certain level of control over the visual aesthetic. 

Looking back

Applied Work’s 20th anniversary has been an opportunity to pause and make sense of the journey the team has taken over the years. This kind of progress usually doesn’t follow a linear path. You can’t draw these connections with a ruler: you can only look back and connect the dots after the fact. The guiding principles above helped the team to navigate the shifting terrain, and to find their way. 

Joe and Paul created a successful studio built around care for their people and their team, their clients and affected audience, and the legacy that they leave behind in the world. They negotiated an ever-changing landscape by optimizing at each point in the process, following their principles and intuition to find the best path.  

Imagining the future

Looking forward, the Applied Works team is excited to help their clients navigate a world that is subject to ever-increasing change. They are interested in partnering with climate and environmentally-minded non-profits, data scientists and academic partners to understand and share their impact, communicate their mission, and design their approach to funding and future research. They hope to go deeper with their clients to articulate the core identity of their organization, to help them see further and ensure the continued success of their work.  

Especially in the area of climate awareness, some of the team’s major clients are already thinking far into the future, asking questions like: “if we do our job properly, in 10 years we won’t need to exist in our current form. What should we do next?” Paul and Joe would like to help them to answer that question. They are also positioned to help facilitate new connections between their clients, creating an exchange of ideas that could lead to more collaborative and impactful work. 

Of course, Applied Works will continue leveraging technology to solve problems and experimenting to push beyond the current limits. They’re excited to shape our technical evolution beyond the screen into a more immersive and experiential virtual environment. Joe recently completed a MSc in geographic data science to expand his skillset for an AI-enabled world. The team is also ready to engage with the many new creative tensions introduced by AI: questions of bias and ethics, where and how we should use AI methods, and the many conversations about profitability and exploitation that this new technology poses. 

Overall, Joe and Paul are looking to help lead the push toward ethical, sustainable progress, both globally and for design. With two decades of experience navigating complex landscapes, they are well-positioned to “work together with clients to take each other into the future.” It will be interesting to see where they go next. 

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Get in touch if you are interested in working with Applied Works, or subscribe to Rows and Columns to get updates on what’s happening with the team. They are also accepting applications to their Springboard program to solve big, global problems until Dec 17, 2025.

For more information about the team’s projects and history, see their recent anniversary post on LinkedIn.