An interview with the RSA’s Mairi Ryan and Abi Stephenson

Described as ‘the internet’s highest honour’ by the New York Times, the Webby Awards celebrate the best of the internet. This year the RSA have won in the animation category for their RSA Shorts series. To celebrate this achievement, we interviewed the RSA’s Mairi Ryan and Abi Stephenson. We asked them about the experience of curating and creating the RSA Shorts, and looked at the deeper impacts of ideas enhanced by animation and their impact on society.

Congratulations on your award, what was your vision for the RSA Shorts when you launched the series?

Abi Stephenson (A): Thank you so much! After the runaway success of the RSA Animate series, we wanted to create a complementary series of much shorter animations for all the time-poor, ideas-hungry folk out there. We originally conceived of them as a sort of afternoon espresso pick-me-up for the mind. We wanted them to be accessible, information-rich, and to shed light on some of the most important topics and ideas in the world today. Like the Animates, they all come from live events given as part of the RSA’s public events programme, so they have that energy and authenticity that comes from a raw, unscripted recording.

Mairi Ryan (M): RSA Animates had proved so incredibly popular and showed us that people were hungry for ideas presented in creative, engaging and accessible ways. So, we wanted to expand our output, and to open up our content to a wider animator community – and especially to animators at early stages in their careers. RSA Shorts began as an animation competition and we commissioned the winners of that competition - Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle - for our first official piece in the series. Where RSA Animates unpacked a thesis or set of ideas in detail, with RSA Shorts (as the name suggested!) we decided to zero in on more bitesize insights, to introduce a new way of thinking about a topic, pique curiosity and kickstart a journey to further exploration. Just like an espresso hit, we wanted the films to be petite but potent!

How do the RSA Shorts fit into the RSA’s broader mission?

A: Ever since the Enlightenment it has been a fundamental part of the RSA’s mission to share world-changing, socially progressive ideas. We very consciously developed both animation series in line with that guiding mission, and by evolving and harnessing the power of digital we’ve been able to completely transform the size and nature of the RSA’s audience. Whereas a couple of hundred years ago our talks and lectures were influencing the great minds of the European enlightenment, they now reach millions of people from all sorts of backgrounds, nationalities, ways of seeing the world.

M: The RSA’s mission is to unite people and ideas to solve the challenges of our time. We choose audio content that addresses an idea, a topical debate or a universal challenge relating to the human condition. We want the Shorts to offer an insight or a fresh idea that helps people understand themselves and the world around them a little bit better - and to inspire them to find out more about a subject.

What do you think the medium of animation does for the sharing of important and complex ideas? Have the challenges caused by coronavirus changed this?

A: Crucial information about the world often comes with barriers that prevent people from accessing it – whether it be couched in impenetrable jargon, boring packaging, or deliberately alienating language. Animation reduces those barriers and opens up a world of ideas to everyone, so that we don’t have to fight to become informed about the world around us. Coronavirus shows us how dependent we are on digital technologies AND evidence-based public health information, and to my mind animation is more necessary today than ever.

M: Animation helps democratize access to the world of ideas – it draws people in, and acts as an aid to the understanding of the content. People respond to the creativity, wit and beauty of the images in addition to appreciating the message itself. The combination of words and images makes for a powerful package that often resonates with people at an emotional level, which means they are extra motivated to share. The coronavirus means that people are spending more time online and amid a sea of online material, they are looking to trusted sources to offer content that’s informative, intellectually nourishing and emotionally uplifting.

You have an open call for animators to work on the Shorts, is this also part of the RSA’s mission?

A: Absolutely. We wanted to encourage and expose lots of talented, early-stage animators, which really fits in with the RSA’s history of fostering and crowdsourcing great minds in the community – either through the Premiums a couple of hundred years ago, or the Student Design Awards today.

M: The RSA has always had an inclusive approach throughout its history – issuing open calls to innovators to offer creative solutions to contemporary challenges since its very foundation. We carry on that tradition of openness by expanding our community of animators and constantly seeking out new talents and perspectives.

Your speakers provide fascinating new lenses to view the world through, how to you find them? And then how do you match your speakers with your animators?

A: Finding the speakers for our events programme is a full-time job – a few full-time jobs in fact! We have very close links with publishing houses, and often do a lot of talent-spotting in the pages of their catalogues. We also keep a close eye on academic publishing, leading journals, public policy developments and cultural shifts around the world, and are always reading obsessively to try to find the crème de la crème of the world’s big thinkers and doers. Matching the speaker to the animator is a really organic process – often I’ve had an animator in mind as soon as I’ve finished the audio edit. You just get a good feel for which style is best suited to unpack different types of content.

M: As a programming team we are relentlessly curious and keep our octopus-like curatorial tentacles roving widely across contemporary culture and politics! We stay up to date with the latest academic research and the most interesting public thinkers through our strong links to publishing and the print and broadcast media. And we are social media junkies – deep diving across online channels to seek out exciting new voices. We do the same for spotting creative talent – bookmarking styles, looks and sensibilities that excite us – and then matching them when we unearth a piece of audio content that we think will pair well tonally.

Your work linking world changing ideas with animation paved the way for the practice more generally, what impact have you seen from your animation series?

A: I find it quite hard to get my head around the extent of the impact that the RSA animations have had. We were right there at the very beginning of the information-animation boom (many say we created a whole genre) and it’s incredible to see how many organisations and companies use it now as a way of explaining themselves and their ideas. It has become an entirely ubiquitous feature of the online world now. Our animations been used in various training courses, festivals, conferences and larger educational efforts around the world. On a more personal level, we’ve seen thousands of comments from people saying an animation has completely changed the path of their life, or encouraged them to interact with the world differently. Those ones are really moving, and totally confirm our suspicion that a few well-packaged ideas can change the world!

M: We have seen a huge impact from our animation series: we are contacted daily by organisations worldwide, large and small – from the US army and major multinational corporations to local schools and community support groups - who use our videos in training courses and as educational resources. We also receive many messages of thanks from individual viewers who find the videos have been helpful to them in their personal lives, having enriched and influenced their thinking; changed their attitudes and behaviours; and helped them understand themselves and relate to others more compassionately.

Thinking more broadly, what are the challenges organisations face today when they try to share complex and big ideas with a broad audience? What trends have you noticed about the way your audiences like to receive your content?

A: Saturation is one of the main challenges I think – there’s so much brilliant content out there that it can be very hard to break through and become visible. Also, organisations can tend to get very myopic about their own content, and fall into the trap of explaining from the inside, rather than translating their ideas into a language that everyone can understand. Audiences don’t want to be patronized, but they do need to be hooked by something universal – it’s a really delicate balance, and it’s so easy to spot when an organization has fallen short of the mark.

M: People are time-poor and so animation has to be of the very best quality and to offer a fresh and incisive insight to really take off online. And even if it is, it won’t always ‘go viral’ in the traditional sense. But for us, though, it is not about chasing viewing numbers – we are interested in the value of the message, and the quality of engagement. To be able to make important and timely messages freely and accessibly available is our number one goal.

Today, how do you the view the interplay between ideas, delivery mediums and social change?

A: I’m more convinced than ever that ideas are only as strong as their packaging. Without being seen and heard, an idea can’t have impact – no matter how transformative or necessary it seems. Like a virus, an idea needs to replicate and spread to be successful, and so often people seem to think that good will and good content alone will generate a movement. Smart, appealing, creative communication of ideas is an ESSENTIAL part of social change – far too often I see worthy, evidence-based causes falter because their advocates assume the arguments are self-evident, rather than spending 90% of their effort communicating that idea in a way that resonates with people from all sorts of backgrounds and ways of seeing the world.

M: Rutger Bregman says in his RSA Short, and we agree, that ‘ideas really can and do change the world’. So, we are committed to continuing to seek out the most valuable ideas from our talks and working with a talented community of creatives to make them as appealing and accessible to people as possible, at a time when it’s more important than ever that everyone has access to knowledge, information and insight that can help them understand our fast-changing world and the turbulent times we’re living through.

We would like to say a massive thank you to Abi and Mairi for taking time to talk to us and provide these interesting and thought provoking insights into the RSA Shorts series and the relationship between animation, ideas and society. Read our interview with Katy Ross, the animator behind the RSA Short ‘Brené Brown on Empathy’ here. We ask Katy about the experience of creating an RSA Short and her creative process. Watch all the RSA Shorts here.

Could a whiteboard animation help you share your idea far and wide? We’d love to hear about your vision and discuss how we could help. Book a discovery call today.

Cognitive are award-winning pioneers of whiteboard animation, and the creators behind the RSA Animates series. We help corporate, academic and charitable organisations like the BBC, TED, Coca Cola and Sanofi to tell their stories more powerfully. Find out more about us here.