A Chat With: David Yates at Recursive Digital

By Donna Fielder and Sarah Cronk

David Yates moved his business, Recursive Digital, to Eastbourne a year ago. We caught up with him to discover more about his audio, visual and software work and how his company has changed over the past ten years.

David, tell us about your background and your business - what do you do?

David: “When we started up Recursive Digital ten years ago, I’d come from a consultancy-based business that focused on technology, specifically those across audio, video IT and acoustics. I had been fortunate to have worked on some very large-scale projects around the globe, including some more local to home, such as the sound design for the Olympic Park ahead of 2012.

“The project which really brought Recursive Digital into being, was the building-wide technology design for the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in 2012 on John Adams Street in London. The aim of the project was to neatly fit 21st-century technology into an 18th-century building with a core focus on forward-facing tech which would best communicate the ideas and aims of the organisation. We worked across all of their public-facing spaces, such as the Great Room and the Benjamin Franklin room below, however they also wanted something forward-thinking in the main foyer of the building, which is an ornate vestibule.

*The Great Room at the RSA on John Adam Street, London*

“We built them a bespoke system, effectively a giant iPad on the wall, to help them engage with their audience and communicate their ideas, including through live streaming. It served as a juxtaposition between their cultural heritage and new technology, connecting directly into their CMS as an extension of their digital publishing workflow.

“Since then, we’ve provided Audio Visual focused digital projects in a range of buildings, mostly those with a public-facing environment. We’ve worked on projects all around the world. We’ve worked everywhere from the Institution of Engineering and Technology to the Adidas store in Paris, as well as in medical-based environments. We consider how people use buildings and how the tech can make the best of that environment. We’re currently working with a sports brand to develop a new environment with them which involves three different experiences. We can’t use anything we have done before for this, so we’re building from scratch.

“But it was the project at the RSA at that time which really made it dawn on me that you can have all this technology hardware, and design interesting and functional spaces with this, but it is actually the software and the content that sits on top of this that can really change how this works. It changes an environment. So alongside the design consultancy side of things, we decided that the business should also be focused on designing and developing bespoke interactive and experiential systems, which would make use of this hardware, creating unique ways for people to engage with their audiences and expressing their business better through digital. This means we can be working on all kinds of different interactive projects. We create and present unique content, monitor interactions, and adjust the content based on that - the lighting, sound, machine learning, and object tracking.

“In the last five years, we’ve merged the two businesses together, the AV and the software, as clients were telling us they wanted us and trusted us to help with both sides of things.

“Growth has not been a key driver for us as a business. It has really been organic, taking it at the pace that works best for us and our clients. Nearly all of our work comes from referrals, so we have been in the lucky position over the years that we don’t have to go out and look for work constantly. But saying that, it is something we are conscious of as we do grow and we are looking at more closely.”

You must be very busy - how many do you have on your team?

“We have a small team of six and we are very specific in how we work. We do have trusted freelancers too, who have their own businesses. We like to find good partnerships.”

What’s the typical lifespan of your projects?

“A project with Recursive Digital can last from 6 months for a rapid development project, through to four years when designing technology for a building.

“By way of example, one of the UK’s oldest institutions, on the physical side the Royal College of Physicians recently moved from London to Liverpool and they brought us in to design how that new building would operate and would work for them from a technology perspective. That project took four years and we are likely to do follow-up work afterwards too.

“The software side of the business tends to be faster projects with a quick turnaround, which is a nice balance.”

What tech do you use?

“We’re Agile in our approach and make use of a whole host of different technologies, everything from AR and VR through to depth sensing, and then more traditional elements like Autocad. From a software side of things, we use Unreal and Touch Designer heavily. We’re quite focused on Python as our main language which plays nicely in Touchdesigner and we have found a great and slightly unique way to use both Unreal and Touch together on our projects.”

How would you say your clients' needs have adapted over the past few years?

“Tech has moved at such a pace. We’re constantly challenged to do things that no one has done before. There’s a big growth of Unreal in content. Content is such a growing thing, and everyone is a content producer in some respect these days!

“Visual impact in content plays a big part, so companies are wanting us to do more and more content generation as a way of expressing themselves. There wasn’t such a strong demand for this before. I would say this has been the biggest change and adaptation – content and its place in everything.”

What advice would you give people trying to start working in your field?

“This is one of the big questions we ask ourselves a lot.

“Traditionally the skills we use and look for were developed through a university route with subjects like acoustics, engineering, physics or computer science. The cost of going to uni today however means an average student can come out with around £50k debt. To me, this starts to feel somewhat prohibitive and, at the same time, there is an immense amount of online resources and training courses. These provide an alternative option, with very rich and in-depth training to develop the skills that are needed.

“When it comes to software development, you are really only as good as the stuff you’ve been immersed in and are doing regularly, as things change so quickly. So if you do go to Uni and finish your course but you are not continuing to develop, your value will drop, which will further impact that worth. Whichever route you take, you need to be self-motivated and driven to explore and to keep learning.

“So overall, the best thing is to have a keen interest and drive to explore new things. Go to uni or use the resources available on the internet. Have an attitude driven towards wanting to do interesting stuff and for continual learning. Be inquisitive. Have an awareness of what is happening and what technologies can offer us. Have ideas and interests.

“Whether you choose to go to uni or not, it will be your attitude that is the most important thing to an employer.”

Have you taken on apprentices or interns in the past? How has that worked out for you?

“Yes, we have, and we have a commitment as a business to make it work. It’s a question of how it can be the best value for everyone involved. Can we dedicate the time needed to make this valuable to both parties and give exposure, learning, and a feel for being in a work environment? What is an intern going to be able to deliver for us if we can’t find the right project?

“We were approached by a student looking for an internship and we decided to invest in the process. We carved off a section of a project and asked them to explore how it could be developed further. We met the student in person to get to know them and explained what we would like to see. We provided a little brief and broke the work up into small sprints, then touched base every day. It worked well: they were able to explore stuff that we hadn’t got time for and were highly self-motivated. The experience was face-to-face at first, then remote, and then they spent some time back in the office.

“We have found that Covid has had a big impact on students coming into work now. They haven’t been in face-to-face lectures and, even when they could go back in person, universities decided not to do lectures in that form for a long while afterwards. Some students have been in that mode for a significant section of their Uni life, especially if they were in the first year during lockdown, so coming into the office and collaborating with people can feel a little alien to them. They question why they need to come to an office: The answer from us is that it’s healthy to have the social interaction.

“Graduates need to be able to communicate, listen, and challenge. You get a lot from the subtleties of face-to-face conversation, especially in client meetings. As a local business, we are keen to help with that process amongst the community.”

Why did you return to Eastbourne with your business?

“I was already living in Eastbourne in 2012 when I set the business up, on my own to start with, however because of the dev side of things, I decided on Brighton as an office location because I thought that was the right location to find the local talent I needed.

“I was using four or five freelancers in Brighton, who were easy to find through Wired Sussex at that time. As we got into bigger projects, we needed more space to try out physical tests which we just couldn’t find in Brighton, so we moved to Ashford where we had negotiated access to a warehouse from another like-minded organisation. This enabled us to do larger-scale physical mock-ups. We found Ashford to be very well placed with quick train links to London. The Council there is also super proactive and very keen on digital and business growth. They helped us find temporary offices whilst waiting to move into a more suitable building which was being purpose-built for digital businesses, which we had first refusal on.

“This, unfortunately, got delayed and then its purpose and aims changed, so it was no longer suitable, which was a shame. Covid then happened shortly afterwards and changed things further: we could no longer get clients down anymore to look at mock-ups, so we gave up the warehouse, closed the office down and decided to start again once the pandemic had (hopefully) subsided, giving time for a rethink.

“Post-covid, driven largely by a change to working habits, the need to have clients down for face-to-face meetings regularly has altered, with the majority being happy with remote working and demoing. We could also see a trend of a lot of people leaving London and starting to work further away.

“These changes empowered us to feel that it would be ok to say we are a globally focused tech firm working from Eastbourne, whereas it didn’t feel like it would make sense before then. That was the turning point and we have now been here a year, with an additional member of the team recruited from Eastbourne too, with recruitment active currently to find more.”

What are you and the business looking forward to in the next year?

“Over the next 12 months, we’re really focusing on consolidating everything we have been working towards in our development work centred around Unreal.

“At the end of 2020 at the height of covid, we undertook a very large and unique immersive project for Burberry in China, specifically exploring how Unreal could be used to power the physical environment.

“We were awarded a Megagrant from Epic for our work in this area, which has helped to drive forwards physical interaction and Unreal’s place in crossing between the digital and physical. This has kickstarted a whole series of more in-depth experiments and trials to see how much further we can push this. We have learned a huge amount from these, so we’re looking forwards to putting this into practice across the different projects we have around the world right now.

“We are also looking forward to expanding the team locally in Eastbourne and adding new skills and approaches to the Studio as we continue to explore new techniques such as machine learning.”