The Art of Seeing Differently
One of the questions I am asked most often is how my team and I keep finding new stories to tell in industries we have been writing about for years.
The assumption behind the question is understandable. After all, how many times can you write about IP monitoring, Live/sports production, workflows management, interoperability, latency, synchronisation, IPMX, streaming, before everything begins reiterating?
What if you approached the same topic with a different lens?
Imagine standing in front of Milan Cathedral (the Duomo, a Gothic pearl…) while taking shots. You wouldn’t really photograph the same subject twice unless you are motivated by an ‘impressionistic’ experiment. Sometimes your eye is drawn to the intricate reliefs carved into the great marble doors and sometimes it follows the cathedral’s 135 spires upward toward the golden Madonnina, watching how changing light transforms her appearance throughout the day. At other times, the cathedral itself recedes into the background as the lens captures a child feeding pigeons in the piazza, introducing an entirely different human dimension to the scene. Morning light reveals one character; twilight reveals another. The building remains the same. Yet every shift in angle, focus, colour, illumination and perspective uncover details that were always present but previously unseen.
Writing works in much the same way.
Many people imagine content creation as a process of finding new subjects. In reality, it is often about finding new ways of seeing existing subjects. The challenge is not only to avoid repetition. The challenge is to avoid looking at the world through the same lens every time.
Perhaps that is why I often think of writing in terms of vision.
A myopic view focuses on what is immediately in front of us: the product launch, the technical specification, the quarterly result. A hyperopic perspective steps back and examines broader implications, future developments and long-term consequences. An astigmatic lens distorts certain elements while sharpening others, revealing how different stakeholders can perceive exactly the same reality in completely different ways. Every topic contains multiple realities waiting to be explored.
The Polymathic Pursuit
At Xpresso, this conceiving process is driven by curiosity. The kind of curiosity that compels writers to read beyond their own discipline, researchers to venture beyond their own field and communicators to look for connections where others see boundaries. It is a polymathic curiosity that constantly crosses between technology, psychology, physics, philosophy, science, business, linguistics, history and the arts.
Technology does not exist in isolation. Its essence, like that of most things, is revealed through its connections to a wider ecosystem of ideas, people, and purposes. This observation touches on a much older philosophical question: is essence univocal, possessing a single and self-contained meaning, or is it fundamentally relational? Medieval thinkers such as John Duns Scotus argued for the univocity of being, while others understood reality through analogy and interconnectedness. From this perspective, essence may indeed exist, but it is rarely encountered in a pure, isolated form. Instead, it reveals itself through a web of relationships, contexts, and interactions. Technology, perhaps more than anything else, reminds us that meaning emerges not from isolation, but from connection.
A blog about Artificial Intelligence can expand on cognition. A story about IP Production can evolve into a reflection on trust and control. A piece on monitoring can become an exploration of pattern recognition and/or the underground network of fungal connections. An article exploring orchestration can lead to questions about entanglement.
The most compelling content often emerges from the intersections between multiple disciplines.
This interdisciplinary approach allows us to uncover unexpected connections and create new frames of reference. Metaphors, for example, allow to make complex concepts more accessible. Sometimes, borrowing concepts from neuroscience, philosophy or art helps clarify tangled concepts and elicit new ideas.
Questioning the Obvious
At Xpresso, we have always been wary of taking things for granted. The obvious angle is usually the one everyone else has already chosen. The conventional narrative often hides more interesting questions beneath the surface. We deliberately challenge assumptions, explore alternative viewpoints and search for perspectives that have not yet been fully examined. Not because uniqueness is an objective in itself, but because genuine insight often lives beyond familiarity.
Mind-stretching content is the natural outcome of this process.
It encourages people to see technologies differently. To wander beyond disciplinary borders and investigate the relationships between ideas that are rarely discussed in the same conversation. It is often at these intersections that fresh perspectives emerge and familiar topics reveal unexpected dimensions. To think not only about what a specific technology does, but why it matters.
Creating Waves of Insight
Information has never been more abundant: it inundates the mental spaces through which we think, learn, and make decisions. The challenge is no longer finding information, but extracting meaning from the flood.
Our objective is not simply to produce more content. It is to create refreshing waves of insight that people can embrace, explore and remember.
Uniqueness comes from perception. From changing the focal length. From adjusting the exposure. From examining the shadows as carefully as the highlights. From recognising that every subject contains more colours than are visible at first glance. And from understanding that the writer’s role is not merely to describe what is there, but to reveal what others have overlooked.
The topic may remain the same. The view never has to.
Perhaps that is why we continue to do what we do. Not simply to communicate information, but to inspire curiosity. To connect disciplines. To stretch thinking. To challenge assumptions and be…challenged.
