
I'm a designer, researcher, and maker løving in Copenhagen.

I'm [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/readywater) and [Insagram](https://instagram.com/lovettbarron)

I'm also on [Github](https://github.com/lovettbarron) and [Printables](https://www.printables.com/social/115124-andrewlb)


Andrew Lovett-Barron

Remaking this page a bit to reflect new needs, and the newsletter will restart in 2023

Seeing with Making


I’m wrapping up on the end of year two running Diverge Weekly, a personal writing and newsletter project that’s taken two big shifts since it started. Reflecting on the end of 2021, I’m thinking it's time for a third.

There were 40 articles this year, 35 of which were written this year (I ended up reposting one or two which stood out for me). For context, there’s about 400 of you who subscribe, with a 40% open rate and 10% average click rate.

This year, the top performing posts were:

[A More Intentional Wardrobe | Diverge Weekly](https://andrewlb.com/a-more-intentional-wardrobe/)

[Full Hamcus: Finding the Spark in Sci-fi Workwear | Diverge Weekly](https://andrewlb.com/full-hamcus/)

And [Speculative Surplus | Diverge Weekly](https://andrewlb.com/speculative-surplus/)

So weirdly, all fashion oriented posts, with the exception of the first which is fashion-related, but more of a process/systems oriented “Here’s how I did a project” post.

But. I primarily write Diverge as a mechanism to share my thinking and discuss process with others. I get an email from one or two of you most times that I write a post, and there’s often a pretty exciting dialogue that emerges from it.

Of these, what seems to be most evocative of conversation is the merged Theory/Process post.

## **Writing about Process**

I enjoy writing about interrogating process — both my own and others. Writing about Rick Owens, for example, is a bit of a dream because there is a substantive body of self-reflection about his process either in writing or interview. In Rick’s own draw towards brutalism and stoicism (or rather his particular tension-celebrating variant thereof, a kind of Dionysian stoicism), there’s a fascinating theme that emerges — softness and discomfort, hard edges and flowing forms. The visual and sensory experience created is fascinating, and I’m always curious to untangle the mystery of how a designer (or team of designers) got from a need to a form.

The other thing that I get a huge kick out of is writing about workspaces and tools. It’s a bit of a slippery slope because we can often confuse the tools with the process they are meant to facilitate. I do this sometimes in my own purchase decisions, and while it's occasionally an exciting revelation, more often it’s a wasted opportunity and expense. Which does serve as an exciting tool for exploration is the work SPACE though. In comparison to individual tools, workspaces (both digital and physical) tend to shape a real narrative around how people work. Of course, it's more difficult to sell a workspace via affiliate links, so we tend to see a greater focus on individual tools over workspaces, but such is the time.

So, in terms of a content focus for next year, I intend to take a **more explicit focus on the processes of creators and the physical/digital spaces where they work**. My hope is to do this through more interviews and conversation as well, so if you’re working on something interesting or know someone who has a compelling and unique space where they create, please send me a note!

## **Schedule for Next Year**

The next bit is the schedule for next year. I’ve been slowly chipping away at a masters degree over the course of the pandemic — with work-life and a toddler alongside. The last sprint of the masters is coming up in the first quarter of 2022, and my writing focus needs to be on my thesis for that period. As such, **Diverge is going to be taking a scheduled break in January and February and will return with the prototype of the new format in March.**

I might still be writing if the inspiration strikes me, but for the most part, my mind will be wrapped up in Syria, climate, and security narratives.

Secondly, I’ll be switching to a cadence of every two weeks for the main content blocks. I love writing, but the reality is that I’d like to spend more time editing, refining, and building more substance in what I write. So while things will be less frequent, hopefully, the product will be of higher quality.

## **A Thank You**

I also want to send a specific thank you to [Charlotte](https://www.instagram.com/makewavesva/), who’s been helping me over the past year to keep the cadence of the newsletter up. I’ve never worked with a remote assistant before, and she’s helped with editing, scheduling, advice, and just generally framing up the operations of the newsletter. We’ve worked together to find aspects of her work that can be automated, and that process has been revelatory for me in how to think about and approach automation. It’s also helped me understand what processes and skills belie automation. If you’re looking for something similar or want to work with a very capable VA based in the EU, give Charlotte a shout via her [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/makewavesva/).

## **Rest of 2021**

We’ll have one more essay this year, which is my standard reflection on the year. I have a feeling that this year there will be a lot of these “REFLECTING ON 2021: WTF JUST HAPPENED” posts. I can’t guarantee that mine will be all that different — it has been a weird year. But nonetheless, keep an eye open for that.

All in all though, I’ve been really grateful for everyone’s readership, contact, and curiosity in this. Year one of Diverge started with the idea of fusing international relations theory with design and trying to make the argument that they had considerable overlap. It had a strict overall structure and was fairly locked in that way. I had fun writing it but it wasn't quite right.

Year two was an opening of that structure to a looser design lens, but still oriented around that idea of design, systems, and strategy. The strategic component was a bit more diffuse, but a lot of it I think boils down to intention and applying design skills in the definition of spaces and forms that emerge outcomes along a desired trajectory. Pretty fun stuff (and you all responded to it), but I think at a certain point it gets a bit wishy-washy. I want to ground it in something with more substance.

Hopefully you'll join me for year three. It'll be familiar, but with some luck and effort, I hope to bring you all some writing that goes a bit deeper, and serves as a good grounding for future dialogue.


Next Steps for Diverge


For the past few years, I’ve been independent — as a consultant, as a contractor, as an indie developer, or in different kind of liminal states. It’s been overall awesome, though with its host of stressors. It’s also been uniquely beneficial as a new father, giving me a degree of agency to be present and learn what life is with a child. But a thing that I discovered about “being independent” is that while I had a huge amount of control over my work and what I did — the content of that work (with the exception of [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com) and an absolutely awesome year working with IKEA) never presented the novelty that I’d kicked down the door seeking in the first place.

I started a new job last week — I’m joining as a design director and team lead for a team of creative technologists and researchers at [ManyOne](https://manyone.com). After five years of being independent and mostly solo, the idea of working with a co-located (covid pending) team again was something that felt like a whole new adventure despite also being very familiar. I’ve read a lot about the great resignation and the changes that’ve come over the past few years; and somehow I was drawn to something different this time.

What's odd is that I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to break up with consulting. There’s a draft blog from about four years ago titled “Breaking up with Design Consulting” which I never published because it never felt particularly true. The first attempt after IDEO was with the US Digital Service. I was so excited to dive into the biggest institution I could find (the department of defense) and just get my mind completely blown. Which happened. But as I hung out with a Marine teaching himself javascript out of frustration or marvelled at the excel spreadsheets masquerading as software platforms (while running hundred million dollar ops), the main thing I DID with the US Digital Service was … consult. We built a product or two, but mostly the real value was going into institutions and teams that didn’t have the same access or privilege I had, and just trying to help them out. I had one lens, they had another, and I had the privilege of learning while being paid, and they benefited from my experience and abilities to make connections. I was still a design consultant. All the skills got stressed and grown.

The second attempt was with a research fellowship — researching social enterprise with the New America foundation. I’d originally been accepted to the fellowship as a small software enterprise, but the whole thing changed at the 11th hour and I decided to take the risk. It was a pretty cool learning experience. I got to build some software (again), collaborated with some awesome people (foremost amongst them [Dahna Goldstein](https://www.halcyonhouse.org/about/team/dahna-goldstein-2/)), and generally had the time and opportunities to write and explore a space that I was interested in. And it wasn’t that different from consulting. I was being paid to listen, and synthesize, and produce from that synthesis. I was given space to explore an interest that meshed with the needs of an organization, and that organization incubated those interests and connections. Those connections multiplied, and I helped (and had help) turning them into some kind of meaning. Still design consulting.

Then, the past few years I’ve run my own company, Stupid Systems. I built Knowsi through that, but I’ve also been consulting in different capacities with companies like IKEA, Mozilla, CIID, Cookpad, Opentrons, and Innovation Fund Denmark. I’ve been a product manager, a research lead, an interaction designer, a prototyper, a facilitator, an advisor. Bunch of different “design consultant” roles. And I’ve had a blast consulting, despite this lurking idea in my head that I was trying to change that mechanism for sustaining myself and my explorations.

So, with this new role, I know pretty well what I want — a platform to become better as a manager and coach; a team to learn from and help with their own journey; and portfolio of work that is both novel and familiar seen from a different angle. I also feel like I can put to rest the idea of breaking up with design consulting, because it's taken me six years of exploration to realize I missed the point.

I suspect that the impulse to do so was coming from two things: my impulsivity as someone who is drawn towards the new, and my personal conflation of disposition with career path.

Being drawn to the new (and the impulsive and occasionally obsessive tendencies that come with that) is something that lots of us share, and even more of then have foisted on them through advertising. If you’ve been reading along, you might have noticed my drive to writing a non-stop stream of abstract posts about amateurism and such. This is partially because I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this impulse and figure out how to make a workspace and a skillset that is intrinsically responsive to the new. I want to be able to do something well enough to use it for sense making, and to clue me into something hidden underneath. That’s fun. That’s exploration.

But it’s also a bit of a crutch. If you can’t focus long enough on getting proficient at a discipline, then you’re not a useful generalist. Rather, being amateur at many things and deep in one or two things seems to be the sweet spot, and that’s been a cautionary tale I’ve held onto for a while now. Being wary of that impulse might help you realize that the shiny new thing over that isn’t necessarily better — it just refracts the same light in a marginally different way.

The other side is conflating disposition with career path. I’m intrinsically motivated towards a particular kind of exploration and growth. I need a thing to learn, otherwise I get bored. On one hand, this has been useful. On the other hand, it makes me a weak maintainer of things that don’t grow alongside me. The things that I have been able to maintain effectively are those things that fit into the narrative of continuously new knowledge. Skills and hobbies are really good examples of this, where the new depth unlocked as you get deeper keeps your interest up. Unfortunately, that can come at the risk of losing ones attention to rote practice, and the skill itself being hollowed out. Eventually, enough accreted layers over a weak foundation will collapse in on itself.

Because I saw other things being built with skills analogous to mine, I figured that the thing to do was to end the consulting work, and go do whatever else those others were doing to create what I was interested in. It wasn’t nearly so simple, and as I discovered, it also wasn’t all that different. The fact that the same feelings, motions, curiosities, and mysteries emerged as a fellow, as a civil servant, as a product manager, as an indie dev… I kept seeing the commonalities with what I was convinced I was trying to escape, instead of appreciate that maybe I was bringing something intrinsic to the way that I approach creation, problem solving, and intention regardless of where I was.

Anyway, last week I stepped into an old kind of new, and it’s already feeling different.


An Old Kind of New


Every few months, my wife and I change around our apartments configuration. The way this manifests is always a bit different. On the extreme end, we might move the bed into a different room, discard or donate a beloved piece of furniture, or engage in something vaguely reminiscent of a Konmari via scorched earth campaign.

The spirit of this activity is three fold:

- Sometimes we might feel in a rut, and any spatial change is good. It’s cheaper than a vacation or moving house,
- Some activity or ambition might not be happening, and a possible cause is the space being non-amenable to the ambition,
- or we are just ambiently and non-specifically annoyed with our space.

So, when this happens, we have a few techniques to (usually with a weekend’s effort) test whether a significant change is needed (like moving house) or whether we’re just bored.

## **The Shuffle**

The shuffle is used when you have a pretty good idea of a problem, but aren’t sure how exactly to go about fixing it. We’ve had a “shuffle” moment a few times in the past two years: first when our son got the one closed bedroom in our house (moving my wife and I into the space that had once been my office), and more recently when a number of robots and workshop spaces invaded our home. You’d be amazed at how few spaces in a toddler inhabited home don’t work for 3D printing.

In each of these cases, the was a function-first need that necessitated the movement. Reducing clutter, creating a workspace, creating a quiet space for reflection and retreat, etc. This is also what most think of when approaching a renewal of their space. Unfortunately, functional primacy rarely makes for a home that reflects the nuance of the word, and so while the shuffle might make for a good start to things, it’s rarely the end.

## **The Add**

The next step, and usually the most fraught, is trying to add something. I personally fall prey to this constantly – as anyone who has seen my desk can attest. In these situations, a shuffle may have extraneous materials in its drive for addressing a functional need, but these things need their own home. Well, clearly a home most be procured to address these orphaned fragments of home. Though not always a bad idea, the Additive approach to renewal rarely provides for the outcomes we want. Instead, the usable space within our home (or workspace) becomes constrained, and our options around reconfiguration even more so.

Instead, a strategy might be applied to question the newly orphaned items, and — in a Marie Kondo fashion — ask if they really are necessary and as emotionally central as we think they are. I’ve gone through this process with my instruments, which I used to play often yet haven’t really found space for in years. Each time we reshuffle, I go to my one remaining synthesizer and ask the question. I’ve always made it a home, but I’ve resisted the urge to add so far.

## **The Rotate**

Sometimes your space just doesn’t feel right though. This can be because something else isn’t working, because you yourself have changed and evolved past what the space provides, or maybe it just really didn’t work in the first place. Regardless, a quick and truncated spin can sometimes address these quandaries.

Rotating ones space 90 degrees forces a change in aspect and perspective that can open up a room, or create a comfortable nook. It changes the way light plays across your work and relaxation spaces, it shifts the textures that make up the backdrop of your focus, and it can change the view for your video chat companions as well.

A few months after I lost my office and was relegated to the living room (I’m not actually complaining, though I would dearly love a proper workshop), things hadn’t quite felt right. And so we just up and tried a 90 degree rotation, not really being all that confident about what might fix things. I’m still not sure why it did. Maybe it’s something to do with the views from our entrances, but somehow the space opened up. And the rest was relatively slow and steady iteration.

## **The Mirror**

Like the rotation, the mirror is a direct flip of your existing space. What’s interesting about mirroring an existing layout is that the bits you’ve acclimated to which perhaps causing problems suddenly stand in relief: ready for you to make the more intentional changes that will get you to a space that feels right to you.

This is basically a trick I was taught in graphic design (a discipline where my skill are fairly pathetic) when it comes to logo design and typography: flipping and mirroring your design; casting it in greyscale; and generally applying different techniques to make the familiar unfamiliar enough for effective self critique and correct. Because our homes are so intimate and complex, yet banal — we are often the ones best equipped to intuit an effective layout for us. That intuition just needs to be triggered.

## **Iteration and Living**

I’m a very firm believer in rapid, bordering on frantic iteration with the belief in something emergent. In a project or product, that’s a good way to get to something that one refines; but in a home, we’re often provided the baseline that we then need to work our way around.

![](/assets/4e97abc2c8342ee0f7b63320e6cb92b4dd12ef10-739x546.png)

If we take Stuart Brand’s (who I got to meet once, supremely cool human) idea of shearing layers as a map of personal agency over a space, most of us at best affect the stuff and space plan layer. Some of us have the foresight and capital to organize aspects of the others, but even then the pace of change is dramatically slower, measures in years, decades, even centuries. By focusing on and valuing the quick, rapidly changing layers in our home, we have the opportunity to visit a new place in an old space time and time again — celebrating something loved with renewal and helping it grow alongside us.


Renewing Spaces


The skills we develop aren’t permanent. They’re things that develop within a particular context — education, a workspace, a team, etc. — that accrete and slough off over time unless continuously reinforced. The now aged youth who studied piano might retain their ear for beat and pitch, but can’t find the chords or read the music without placing themselves in a place to reacquire that skill. The lapsed skateboarder might struggle with their new body upon return to the practice to teach their child a former passion — centre of gravity, mobility, and forgotten detail hampering their efforts.

I tend to think of this process as a kind of spalling to our identities and our interests. We’re moving time collecting experiences and skills that contribute to our understanding and realization of selves (especially as makers), and the realization and manifestation of those skills contribute to our construction of self. But the reality of life creates friction — through labour (whatever that labour might be) under a capitalist society, through the responsibilities to family and community, through the remaining responsibility to one's self. Under this friction and heat, little bits of these skills start to spall off — fragmenting and spinning away as we continue on.

![](/assets/cb175a16a479a7b375709d296bf82e5f2da67c75-2880x2160.jpg)

This probably isn’t too bad of a thing. For one thing, skill maintenance always includes skill acquisition. It can’t be helped. Practising a favourite song will inevitably introduce something new; reviewing old vocabulary will expose new idioms or trigger a forgotten conversation. Basically, [mindless practice often begets synthesis](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sometimes-mindlessness-is-better-than-mindfulness/). And that synthesis might unlock something special. Running is one of the most accessible examples of this — to the point that many artists, designers, and engineers understand that the practice of these endurance sports is not just a hobby, but absolutely critical to their creative work.

Other skills require similar perseverance. Painting is a great example of this, where understanding of technique and form must go hand-in-hand with muscle memory, conscious practice (usually in the form of a study), and a certain amount of risk when engaging in the creation of a new piece. A lapsed painter trying to get back into the practice is a pretty unpleasant person to be around while they reacquire their confidence — surrounded by the evidence of their past skills, they simply can’t get the paint to move like it used to.

What’s worse, sometimes the skill is a moving target as well. Software engineering is a quixotic example that an increasingly large cohort is familiar with. Here, the knowledge of a language, common engineering patterns, and mental flexibility to apply them, makes someone a good programmer — BUT the communal baseline is constantly shifting under their feet. I’ve experienced this plenty myself as someone who is more of a hobby programmer. I’m frequently making something, but every time I start on a new “big project,” I find myself in a new country with a whole new culture to learn.

![](/assets/5bd7af662707311c82b79fce4aaaf0cb6ed0ec85-658x449.png)

So. Is it worth trying to stop this spalling process? I don’t really think so, though I think a lot can be done to retard its process. In material spalling with concrete, rebar (the crosshatched metal bars that form the frame of a safe concrete structure) is one of the core mechanisms used to increase the strength of something made with concrete and accounts for one of the foundational weaknesses of the material. If we accept that our skills will naturally spall, then by extension, what can we use to increase its strength and reduce its susceptibility to life?

The habit developed through regular practice and continued applicability of the skill is ultimately the best route forward. Lifelong musicians often have two familiar traits: a regular and joyful practice of practising and playing with the instrument, and the presence of that instrument in countless other aspects of their life — in school, bands, religious community, etc. For me, I’ve been programming since I was in high school, and the constant through-line has been making the things I dream up real. It started with a book writing platform for Nanowrimo, went to synthesizers and music, then installation art, then apps, and now simulation. It’s a hobby skill that’s been maintained now for almost twenty years, and never stops being a struggle and a joy.

The rebar analogue is pretty clear: the example musician has the core of habit and community; my example is projects and explorations through making. These two qualities make for skillsets that spall (please don’t ask me to write a MySQL statement), but retain a core of resilience that allows for the skillset itself to be maintained over time (I could figure out how to write those MySQL statements pretty quickly and effectively). The problem is, resilience is not permanence, as anyone who has seen rusted rebar and crumpled walls can attest. A habit is easy to maintain when your quotidian infrastructure supports it — less so when it becomes disrupted. I’ve personally had a pretty hard time pursuing larger hobby projects since my son was born — the demands of being a parent kinda supersede everything else, and frankly, the many little projects as a parent are their own discrete and wonderful thing. A new job, living situation, or romantic interest (i.e. the infrastructure of others) can just as easily disrupt if you don’t know what to look for.

![](/assets/0846caf5ddfbe05979b3345fc49ff552d9e54fc7-1080x1080.jpg)

The other side to permanence is accepting and embracing the process of mending. Japanese boro mending (as artistically rendered above with a Kapital boro jacket) is a great example of this — layering patches of old material overtop of tears, abrasions, and holes to construct and retain a well-loved piece of clothing over decades (though in the above photo’s case, Kapital is heavily leveraging a belt sander). True skill maintained applies exactly this process: the layering and mending of experience over time, as our past selves spall off; fixed before the core of our skillsets get a chance to decay. Over years and decades, the form is retained and recognizable, but with a diversity of texture and colour that represents something original.

As a hobby coder, my foundation is having regular projects (a few each year) that keep me stimulated, aware, and in practice. But my process of continuous mending is the diversity of projects that I approach: creating a synthesizer, developing a web app, contributing to an open-source project, or writing a game in Unity (the greatest trick the Devil ever played on humanity was using C# in Unity). A painter might develop their foundational skillset in a formal art school, then move across different mediums at different points in their life: digital illustration, miniature or sculptural painting, a return to canvas, then onto murals. Each of these experiences layers and accentuates the core skillset and experience. While returning to one frame on the skill (let’s say a return to oil on canvas) might be arduous, the form remains — richer and more textured than before.


Skill Spalling


Since moving to Copenhagen, one of the things I’ve been experimenting with has been how to learn very new (or functionally new) things effectively — especially given all the constraints of the job, family, and existing commitments and passions.

The past few posts have been about this idea of amateurism and getting into new areas of expertise and interest, but I have something of a professional interest in this too. Because I teach a fair number of workshops and facilitations each year (usually around design, navigating systems, research methods, etc), I’ve also wanted to understand, how to empower the folk in my workshops, not just to “go to a workshop”, but actually fit it into some kind of broader arc of understanding.

Anyway, for my own purposes, I’ve tried a bunch of different things, but there’s three modes that seem to “work“ for me (and work is a multidimensional property here): learning under pressure (or sprints), learning over time (grinding and practice), and learning via “surface area”, i.e. through osmosis or repeated exposure.

The thing that I’ve really learned here is that an enduring form of learning — continuing to evolve past a surface level or functional understanding, not to mention retaining what you learned in the first place — requires more of an ensemble of these techniques.

![](/assets/3748399ba5635611bebd0b2acbb90d1e67fa0c68-690x491.png)

First, **learning under pressure** is what most of us experience when we’re doing a retreat, studying for a test, or getting a certification. It’s a dedicated and focused period of time when we are absorbing some predetermined block of knowledge — often with some kind of test at the end. I personally LOVE this mode of learning and almost think of it as a vacation. I actually did do a “vacation” in this way with my American Wilderness EMT certification in 2018 — flying from Copenhagen to Conway, New Hampshire to spend a few weeks learning the trade and getting certified as an EMT-B. This is a really fun and focused way of learning. It’s a great way to rapidly get into something new, and develop shortcuts for growing from there. It also has some disadvantages: it’s usually expensive in time and treasure, it precludes other activities (mostly), and it’s pretty inaccessible if you have family or community commitments. More importantly, it’s impermanent unless cultivated over time. For me with the EMT-B work, while I’ve done plenty of continued education courses (especially paediatrics because of Emil), the knowledge fades pretty quickly without use. Things like drug interactions, detailed measurements, etc. are all things that slipped from my mind now, long after leaving the workshop, but are rote knowledge to those classmates who went on to work as EMTs. Finally, because the curricula is usually predetermined, we’re less likely to really discover new things about the practice during this time. It’s less a time of synthesis and more a time of focused absorption towards a known outcome.

![](/assets/f5e2a62305c194f2727c8482fa32a73cd693d747-750x500.png)

This brings us to l**earning over time**, which is what most of us experience with traditional education, in our work, and in the hobbies we stick with. This is a less prescriptive, but often still guided learning process, where we aren’t just shaped by our teachers, but also shape our own education. Learning over time is the foundation of competency in any given topic, and while it can be augmented by other learning modes, there’s realistically not much of a substitute — we really do just need time to experience things. Craft-based disciplines (art, design, engineering) are perfect examples of this because of the fundamental gap that exists between theory and working with physical things. Slumming your way over to Hacker News, you’ll find plenty of good examples of this: one of my favourite is the example of the Terminal which got hacked together by an experienced engineer in a few days, vs. the supposed theoretical development over years. Or, if you’ve ever tried to throw a pot, the red mist of frustration that descends, as you attempt to replicate the practiced ease with which your instructor manipulates clay.

Learning over time works so well because we learn from failure. We fret over our inabilities, we strategize how to overcome them, we adapt to our missteps and the way we visualize our success changes with those experiences. It also has the fantastic advantage of facilitating synthesis in a way that pressure-based learning doesn’t. But it has its disadvantages as well. We can easily slip into repetition if we fail to be critical of our practice. This in turn leads to plateaus in our learning — forward progress sputters and stops, and the next step is not always obvious. It can also be demoralizing. Time moves differently for all of us when it comes to learning: some of us have aptitudes that speed things up; or are differently advantaged physically and cognitively to acquire a particular learning goal. We don’t always grant ourselves the flexibility and time to really learn as we need to, and so fall short in our learning journey.

![](/assets/f1c9a1a1fbb663a24bea49b4591ddccda3ecaddb-3000x1688.png)

Finally, there’s what I tend to think of as **learning via “surface area.”** This is a kind of passive but protracted information absorption that educates, interests, and changes us over time. Spend an extended period of time in nature, or the city, or a company, and you’ll develop a sensitivity to the spaces you’re inhabiting. These passive forms of learning are critical for navigating and inhabiting the systems that have formed around us and are very, very difficult to teach. It’s a type of learning that comes from inhabiting a space over time. This is different (though overlapping) from the time-based mode, in that the time-based version is often somewhat guided by goal and intent, whereas this surface area model is primarily passive in nature. It’s the situation where you take a job to improve your engineering skills, and accidentally end up learning a lot about managing people. It’s the expectation that no matter how good you are, you won’t be effective in a new job for months (if not years) because it takes that long to build muscle memory for the institution.

Unfortunately, this can be a bit of a pernicious mode of learning because of its passive quality. This is often the mode that instills and entrenches biases within particular environments, such as stereotypes around gender in engineering and management. This is also often where things like radicalization or ideological shifts happen — repeated, protracted, and multimodal exposure to concepts lead to an internalization and adoption of these views. The journey from Joe Rogan to Infowars to QAnon to January 6 is one example of this. Just as moisture left unattended between materials can lead to their delamination and dissolution, constant exposure to information and argumentation that constructs a particular worldview will indoctrinate one into that worldview. This (usually overlapping and reinforcing) passive exposure then serves to reinforce one's learning goals against which the other modes — time and pressure — come to be applied.

In principle, you can also use this to your advantage. If you’re interested in a topic that is pretty difficult to access (eg. International relations), you can increase the surface area of your exposure by signing up for newsletters, listening to podcasts, following the news, and signing up for notifications about events (eg. Treaties, summits, etc). It’s no substitute for either pressure-based learning (eg. Attending the NATO field school) or time-based learning (eg. Doing a degree or doing an internship), but it creates a larger area for ideas, concepts, and more formal learning to stick to. It also creates interesting (albeit somewhat questionable) opportunities for synthesis as your previous experiences overlap with this new knowledge.

![](/assets/0ea32cd30b43938845c107d0db8e9eac29120b72-768x512.png)

Naturally, **these different modes of learning work best in an ensemble.** I’ve mentioned different ways they overlap naturally, but when it comes to planning your own or another’s learning journey, how would you best combine these modes to facilitate your learning outcome?

One personal example I can give is from building [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com), which was the first non-prototype, non-experiment app I’d built. I already knew how to code, but all my coding skills had been applied as a designer building prototypes and proofs of concepts to communicate ideas, not things for others to use. So I needed to learn how to build apps. To do this, I started with **pressure** by doing two fairly intensive online courses in a short period of time by [Wes Bos](https://wesbos.com), which took me through building a few simple web apps and introduced me to many of the frameworks (and how to make decisions around them) that I would end up using to build Knowsi. For **Time**, I had already been programming in Python, C, C++, Javascript, and even Java (via processing) for years, so was familiar with the idioms and techniques of software development, but not necessarily that of application development. This was knowledge acquired over years, albeit with its share of plateaus whenever I lacked for a specific project. Finally, for **surface area**, I listened to a LOT of podcasts and audiobooks about app development, which perhaps didn’t serve me as well as I thought. Beyond consuming plenty of podcasts around programming and javascript, I listened to things about the business of app development (eg. The Undercover podcast, Indiehackers, the Side Hustle Show), and made sure I was signed up for things around privacy, the GDPR, and various other topics related to the Knowsi concept.

Reflecting on this, there’s a few things I would have done differently: I wouldn’t have listened to quite as much about the business side, because ultimately, I think it entrenched some ideas on the business model and expectations of self that were unhelpful at various points along the way. It created a certain cognitive dissonance around what I wanted this tool to be that became difficult to control and reconcile. I also believe that I over-indexed the early pressure learning through courses, and should have scheduled specific intervals or times for revisiting and taking new courses, to keep my own knowledge and infrastructure decisions current. Much of last year was spend updating and securing the existing Knowsi infrastructure, for example, but I should have taken some courses to perhaps even migrate to new infrastructure entirely. The new vs. maintain argument is always difficult though.

Anyway, this turned into a longer post than I had anticipated, but hopefully, it’s useful. I’m applying the above thinking pretty explicitly in my current side project (I’ve mentioned learning Unity before), and then ultimately the challenge becomes managing different and overlapping interests — and how they all come together to create something cohesive (or at least interesting).


Learning with Pressure, Time, and Surface Area


We’re amateurs continuously throughout our lives. For some skills — vital but sporadic skills — we remain that way. And that’s totally fine. Amateurism, over time, is its own skill to develop — and we should endeavour to leave amateur amateurism behind.

I get a personal thrill out of amateurism. It’s something I need to hold in check in favour of getting better at the things that I’ve already invested in, to be honest. For someone who is discovery-oriented (i.e. a person who gets massive dopamine hits from protracted novelty, so not necessarily a good thing), amateurism is an idealized state where the plateaus of a skill are still hidden by the slope of a new skill’s introduction. There’s a compelling challenge ahead, no particular end in sight (because it’s hidden), and it’s just on you to start climbing. Any mountaineer will tell you that this is the perspective of one of those frost-bitten Everest corpses. A search and rescue volunteer will shoot you first to save themselves time.

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Amateurism is its own skill that comes with experience, and it's an experience we all have. We’ve all been new to things, and even the most proficient practitioners and savant-like wielders of a skill started with ham fists and missed notes. Usually, when we’re young, amateurism is easier — some combination of excessive time to learn (both structured and unstructured), fluidity of interests and influence, and a more plastic sense of self (both in the more abstract sense of one's identity, and formation of neural connections). As we get older, it’s less so — for a variety of reasons both internal and external. But, when we’re older it’s easier to be a good amateur.

To take a moment to actually describe and define amateurism, we need to define being amateur IN something. I tend to think job and professional skills are a bit different here, so let’s focus on things that are hobbies. I tend to think of a hobby as a communally defined collection mutually reinforcing hard and soft skills that facilitate the creation or modification of something. This covers the range from triathlon to miniature painting to cinematography. Given then, amateurism is the experience of acquiring those skills and gradually shifting from mimicry to ad-hoc application, to true creative application of a given hobby.

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This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. If you look at coding as an example (which can definitely be a hobby), coding skill starts as something specialized in one language around a specific project, then transitions into being multilingual by necessity as the core concepts are internalized, and then further transitions into a structural awareness around how to make something happen. Somewhere in there, one transitions from having the hobby of coding to being a “coder” or a developer, or what have you. And then — just as you start to transition from amateurism into skill — you hit the protracted nightmare of imposter syndrome that comes with navigating skilled communities as a peer. But that’s something different — let’s focus on the first few plateaus of amateurism.

Unfortunately, being a bad amateur is quite easy and can become a hazard to themselves and others. The novice 3D printer hobbyist likely inhales no small quantity of plastic particles or resin fumes, the novice triathlete strains tendons and stresses their immune system unnecessarily, the novice mountaineer damages climbing routes and annoys SAR volunteers. Thankfully, because hobbies tend to be communally (and historically) defined, these early hazards are often pretty well identified by the time most of us follow in their footsteps. The harmful vapours from 3D printing are well known from those involved in plastics professionally, not to mention decades' worth of hobbyists working in resin and plastic for model trains, theatre sets, miniature wargaming, etc. My friend Paul (a mountaineer and sailor in his 70s) put it once — “you avoid the small risks to take the big risks, because the big risks are always more fun.”

Where amateurism becomes a bit problematic is twofold: where one's amateurism compounds risk for others; and where unskilled amateurism serves to erode the communal side of the hobby. 3D printing presents another effective example. If one is learning in a maker space, it’s very easy for an amateur hobbyist to spoil a communal resource simply for lack of experience. Damaging a printer bed, improper calibration, damage to a nozzle, FEP membrane, or UV screen, spoiling a pot of resin, improperly storing filament, etc. These are troubleshooting steps which are non-obvious to the neophyte, but critical to the maintenance of the communal resource. For the amateur climber, improperly set up anchors, gear left behind because of poor placement and insufficient skill to retrieve, and even damage to the rock face through the use of pitons or other kinds of hard gear can at the least diminish the experience for others, and at worst put others’ lives in danger.

Thankfully many (if not most) of these safety concerns can be alleviated through mentorship and “help” from the community surrounding the hobby. But as many of us amateurs have encountered, goodwill towards new initiates into a hobby can be pretty thin at times. Gatekeeping is a pernicious quality in most hobbies for a host of reasons (some understandable, many not). So if we’re getting into a new hobby independently (i.e. not assisted by a mentor or friend), how do we navigate this?

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This is where being a good amateur really comes into play. I tend to believe that good amateurism is mostly a pretty simple heuristic: reflective confidence, project orientation, appreciation for history, community participation, mentor empathy, and managing up.

**Reflective Confidence** is the main trick for older amateurs. When you have a lot of experience and identity wrapped up in other hobbies or expertise, it’s hard to start over in something new. Worse yet, getting back into a student mindset while still being motivated by one's past successes can easily lead to burnout as one's expectations of self exceed what’s realistic for new skill acquisition, and mentors (either long term or transactional) become frustrated in turn. Instead, the trick here lies in continual reassessment of skill or self-development through self- and peer-assessment. Many hobbyist communities will have Work-In-Progress or “Get Feedback” forums in place for exactly this reason. But what becomes the source of that feedback?

The answer is **Project Orientation**, which gives you two things: artifacts to present for feedback, and repeatable outcomes that can be returned to time-and-time again while developing a skill. In my last post on [avoiding kits](https://andrewlb.com/avoiding-kits/), I mentioned that consumable kits (like an Arduino Starter Kit) are highly preferable to tool-based starter kits, which saddle the amateur with a preconceived toolkit for entry into a hobby. This is because consumable kits are often oriented around a single project which introduces the user to expertise and provides a specific experience outcome, whereas toolkits are simply normative reflections on what’s required to enter into a hobby. By engaging in project-based learning, we get a few things: a point of being done, a discrete set of tasks that can be divided up (often with assistance from a mentor), the ability to “right size” the task, an artifact that can be used for feedback and comparison to later progress, and finally, a way to “plan” one's progression towards a more abstract and sophisticated goal.

**Appreciation for History** is an under-rated one, but has personally served me well. When I got into building synthesizers and installation art, learning about artists like [Nam June Paik](https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/nam-june-paik), Delia Derbyshire, and [Wendy Carlos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos), and tool makers like [Miller Puckette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Puckette) provided a huge amount of context for the hobby I was entering into, and also provided a point of reference for mentors to understand where I was coming from. Many hobbies are “trendy”, and that’s fine. Getting into DJing in the early 2000s, or pottery in 2018, or whatever, is 100% awesome. You’re learning something new, you’re probably financially supporting existing hobbyists and artists, and you’re introducing others to a hobby through your own endeavours. But each of these endeavours has its own deep history, and so learning about Sugar Hill Records as a neophyte DJ, or exploring the work of local ceramicists (there’s a different tradition everywhere) will act as a primer against which the hobby’s skills and community will better attach.

**Community Participation **should be approached with enthusiasm and caution. Frequently, particularly adept members of a given community serve as marketing for a particular hobby and often make some or all of their livelihood from it. Crossfit and running clubs are a good example of this; Instagram and YouTube craft-folk drive of this. But the gap between those folk and the neophyte is massive, and so how is an amateur to approach getting from A to B? Communities often have FAQs and “getting started” content in place to help saturate the new hobbyist with information, questions, and ideas about where to get started. But beyond this, participation in a hobby community means explicitly participating in the hobby. Sharing one's projects, asking for (and constructively receiving) feedback, and helping to support peers who are also just entering into a community all help build the social capital that in turn builds mentorship networks for your own development.

**Mentor Empathy** means appreciating your mentors as the multifaceted and growing individuals that they are. Often, entering into a new hobby or skill places oneself in an asymmetric relationship to others, from whom you hope to learn. This often sets the relationship as very one-sided and extractive of the mentor. This is rarely intentional, but it’s not always obvious to the mentee how the relationship can be of value and growth to the mentor. A way of addressing this is simply thinking about (and empathizing with) how the mentor grows with the mentee in their own practice, asking how the mentee might contribute, or support the mentor in their own way. The best mentorship relationships are a dialogue

**Managing Up** is the last trick to good amateurism. Taking on a new hobby and the role of amateur is always situating oneself as the junior, but being junior is not a role devoid of power. You are the one with the most agency in how you progress in your new hobby and can shape the way that journey unfolds. By framing things as projects and managing your relationships with the community and your mentors, you’ll have the agency to shape how support manifests for your development through the slopes of amateurism and into competency. Managing up, in this case, means acting to empower the community and your mentors in supporting you (and others) in development.

Hopefully the above is — if not helpful — at least prompts some reflection on one's own approach to amateurism. Personally, I think it’s a wonderful thing. Learning new skills is (at least for me) intrinsically enjoyable, and the bonus is that you end up building a library of skill-based metaphors with which to approach the many unknowns encountered in life. I’d love to hear any additions (or subtractions) to the above heuristic, and I’d be happy to add them to the list with credit. Just reply direct to the newsletter and we’ll chat!
