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.

![](/assets/71ed265c00962bdf6ac6029141e36dfe289ad479-490x500.png)

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.

![](/assets/571d24cd7802d78f7f5ce97891d7dd3e16f9843e-882x960.png)

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?

![](/assets/1ed42f3e0e037f68843b1a376456ef6ac60ed0cb-1320x748.png)

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!


Being a Good Amateur


I am often “getting started.” Part of the theory of Diverge, to be honest, is being in that frequent state of beginning something new as past explorations manifest in new curiosity. Usually, these things end up being related. For much of this year, I’ve gone back and forth in 3D printing, modelling, and some rudimentary game development. That’s included a few (maybe helpful) diversions, like getting a bit too interested in flight simulators.

In each of these things there’s the necessity of having the basic things in place to get started, and transition from curious to amateur. I’m writing a bit about the nature of being amateur next week, but that space before being amateur — the state of becoming amateur — is something that I think is somewhat unnecessarily fraught thanks to the nature of the internet and its dominant business model.

Most hobbies and skills require some kind of infrastructure. It might be a book, it might be paints, it might be a machine, it might just be space. A fundamental part of navigating any new hobby then becomes navigating the infrastructure that makes that hobby possible. Take sewing. In theory, you can sew with a needle and thread. Some artisans even make a point of primarily working in that mode ([Mutsu is an example of that](https://www.youtube.com/c/MUTSUBYPROSPECTIVEFLOW)), but really you need a sewing machine to make a diverse array of things. But then which sewing machine? An industrial Juki can do a lot more than a home sewing machine. A [Sailrite walking foot machine](https://www.quiltersreview.com/sailrite-lsz-1/) (like what I have) works great for thick materials and allows me to make bags and accessories, but then working with thinner or stretchier materials becomes a hassle. Then you start getting into overlocking, coverstitches, etc. etc. etc. — it spirals quickly.

![](/assets/f62121c5864b61a52b2fe652d250ede6f7381bd3-1100x600.jpg)

When you’re first learning about something, there’s a fairly dangerous period between your desire to get enmeshed in the thing and acquiring enough knowledge to understand how different tools act together. During this period, you might be tempted to get cheaper equipment or, worse yet, find a getting started kit.

Never, ever buy a getting started kit.

Or, maybe reframed, never ever buy into the getting started kit.

Getting started kits are everywhere, and have an obvious value proposition: to the individual seeking to acquire new knowledge and skill, all the things one needs to get started are arrayed before you for some middling price. A fashion designer getting started kit might include a cheap sewing machine, pattern paper, measuring tape, pins, bobbins, etc. An electronic music starter pack (which would result in pain and horror) might include a Microkorg, an audio interface, Ableton lite, and some shutter shades. Neither of these kits really get you started.

The getting started kit is a commoditization of the journey towards having skill around a practice. It provides you with the artefacts of that practice, but not the points of reference around which those artefacts take on meaning and contribute to the practice itself. Take the electronic music example: the microkorg is objectively an awesome tool for getting started in electronic music. It’s also awful for it, depending on your need.

![](/assets/86c7796e6505dedd01837c03ac8d8e065df4ee91-1140x560.jpg)

Equipped with a vocoder, a mini sequencer/arpeggiator, 37 mini keys that are fiddly af, and a grid-based modulation section, it’s a really handy mini tool for performance and a fun tool for exploration early on. You also very, very quickly can get frustrated with it, and outgrow it — or at least on the surface.

The Microkorg’s synthesis engine is borrowed from the Korg MS2000, and they basically have the same overall capacity for audio synthesis. Except, ya know, the MS2000 is huge.

![](/assets/376d6f1768f39721816a153a958d5d3b3719ee26-512x250.jpg)

If I could repeat my synthesizer journey, I probably would have bought the MS2000 first and the Microkorg second. But in the language of getting started, the MS2000 is framed as being inaccessible, whereas the microkorg is more easily set as something commodified.

Part of my journey with synthesizers and music was getting utterly obsessed with the sound design of it. The microkorg is a great tool for performance and play — it’s small, easy, and approachable. The MS2000 has a bajillion knobs and settings and is seen as unapproachable as a result. Yet the transparency and access to those settings unlock a whole range of new possibilities with the tool.

Getting Started is a journey, not a package. Getting started in sewing for me was learning to make bags and backpacks, and then accidentally getting interested in garment making (which I’m terrible at). Getting started in synthesizers and music for me was being drawn in by bands I liked (using synths), and then falling down the Max/MSP and DSP rabbit hole. The few shows that I had the opportunity to play were done with monome, Ableton, and home-brewed VJ or audio software. What getting started pack would contain that?

The problem with the commodification of the Getting Started pack is that it locks you into a popularized and predictable model for getting into a hobby or domain — and maybe not one that reflects your needs as a creator. Had I grabbed the “getting started kit” for sewing, I never would have been able to make the cordura backpack that my wife often uses for travel, or the quilted magnetic wrap scarf I made for a friend. Picking my own machine and taking the time to orient the tools to my interests paid off in capability and low frustration. While it HAS proven frustrating from the garment making front, it’s also reframed how I think about making those garments: reinforcing stitches, thinking in terms of stress points, leveraging barracking, etc. My vision of garment making comes from bag making.

![](/assets/d08e9c1d73bb79e5af837439c441afeeef17cf0a-1556x813.webp)

Choosing your own adventure when it comes to your own, personalized Getting Started arsenal makes for the interesting set of constraints that shapes your own experience. Of course, you won’t get everything right the first time. And you definitely shouldn’t get the “best” of everything as described by wirecutter and YouTubers. But establishing your own personal constraints early on — and codifying those constraints in the tools that you choose to get started with — becomes the earliest seed of originality in what might become an incredibly fruitful hobby or path to skill development.

All of this said, sometimes a getting started kit is totally okay. Arduino and Adafruit make really good getting started kits. [Take this one by Adafruit for building your own computer with a raspberry pi.](https://www.adafruit.com/product/4796) These kits come with everything you need to build skill in a hobby and are “consumed” in the process of acquiring knowledge. Usually, a getting started kit consists of core tools you’ll be using over an extended period of time, and consequently, your constraints are dictated by those tools. But in these cases, the kit gets you started on a path to knowledge, where you end up being better equipped to make decisions on your next project based on that knowledge.

Just to wrap this up and give a bit of a TL;DR: we are shaped by our introduction to skills in rather nefarious ways. The getting started kit is the worst way to get into something because it takes us down a path of likely mediocrity, and doesn’t encourage us to pick up the tools that fit our skills and interests as we discover what those skills and interests are. They construct an artificial set of constraints around us that maybe don’t reflect the intrinsic qualities that got us interested in this thing in the first place.

Instead, it’s perhaps better to learn through doing small and easily discarded projects that don’t lock us into one tool path. We’ll accrue tools and knowledge along the way, and those tools will better reflect our interests in the thing itself.


Avoiding Kits


I was one course away from a minor in Classics when I graduated from the University of Toronto. It was a weird rabbit hole that I fell down — utterly engrossed by the overlapping systems of symbol and myth that had wrapped itself around the Greco-Roman psyche. It got to the point that years later, I’d get [a pretty large tattoo](https://www.instagram.com/p/BCJ3W5dStd-/?taken-by=freeorgy&hl=en) depicting the Golden Bough scenes from the Aeneid on my leg where the titular character descends into the underworld to commune with his past and learn of his future (really a bald-faced Imperial puff piece by Virgil, the poet come propagandist).

![](/assets/ee895fd94edd14b70364a2f60cc85930cec5e74c-962x1196.png)

The storytelling and symbolism of the Greco-Roman classics are quite casually affecting us today. We associate vain individuals with the cautionary tale of [Narcissus](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)>), we visualize entrapment and confusion with the [Minotaur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur) holding Labyrinth of Crete, or one’s contradictory nature with the “two-face” preface — referencing the Roman deity [Janus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus). The sticking power of these concepts is frankly incredible given how quickly language changes, but it's also unsurprising. References build up over time — becoming networked in their own way to one original source. So the oral tales of Narcissus become tied to individuals, places, curricula, stories, and things (like flowers) — and perpetuate themselves over time despite individual references being pruned from time to time.

The Greco-Roman classics are the founding lore of the Romance languages, in the same way, that much of the Norse lore is tied to the Germanic languages of Northern Europe. And that lore has incredible staying power. Generated both individually and collectively, the early stories of entertainment and moralistic pedagogy were shared by the [many bards we call Homer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer) and became a many-thousand-year frame of reference for two billion English speakers globally — whether they know it or not.

What’s somewhat scary and fascinating is that lore is kind of easy. We excrete and accrete lore automatically. One of my personal strategy consultant tricks, when I start working with a new organization, is to pay super close attention to repeated words, phrases, and jargon in the context of process work, decision making, and tension points. These frames of reference almost always harken back to some past experience the team or company has — either positive or negative. A file format like JSON might accumulate meaning associated with individuals or factions, with past history and decisions, with firings or promotions, and with cautionary or elevating frames of reference.

In 2021, most of you have probably heard of the legendary design sprint — a mythical tactic where an intrepid but divided team forces themselves into a wedge area, following a series of purification and summoning rituals to elicit direction and guidance from the gods of 3M and Prototyping. Codified by the shamanistic designer Jake Knapp, many try the design sprint but few do it with sacrifice and intention — the necessary steps to see that guidance emerge. Still, upon the lips of designers and leaders around the world, we constantly hear a ward against the unknown uttered — design sprint.

Lore emerges by default, but it can be a bit difficult to manufacture. We see this a lot with different companies attempting to imbue their products with a narrative “special sauce.” It often works. Apple’s history of filled with tales of genius, individual heroism, loss, and redemption. Individuals come to play very specific narrative roles, even if their own contributions were much more complex than that role would describe. Steve Wozniak, by way of example, might be compared to the [Hephaestus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestus) character in Greek myth — the craftsperson and blacksmith, content to create the vital armour and weapons that the more bombastic gods. He is also one of the few gods with a physical impediment. Hephaestus becomes an allegorical figure depicting humility and deference despite great competence; a figure who is focused, dedicated, but ultimately in the background. This is pretty objectively not Wozniak, yet in a lot of media he is depicted as the quiet and focused inventor — part of the computer club that was happy to Tinker while the Great God Jobs went out to share the true value of that invention. The truth is that their roles were much more overlapping and complex. Apple has done a brilliant job shifting and simplifying their lore, such that one of the wealthiest companies there is becomes somehow personable.

![](/assets/c81c327cc422351c1c9493031792ade36b76459d-1200x630.webp)

Sometimes, companies specifically manufacture lore. Games Workshop emerged as a tabletop gaming company in the mid 1970s, but only really started to gain traction with the advent of its Warhammer games and the dense layers of storytelling associated with them. The now wildly popular universe of Warhammer 40k emerged from a small boardgames and story called Rogue Traders, which sets the scene with the following paragraph:

> “For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods and the master of a million worlds by the will of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is Carrion Lord of the Imperium to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed each day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh is eaten. Human blood and human flesh- the stuff which the Imperium is made.

> To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of these times. It is a universe that you can live today if you dare- for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort of hope. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But the universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed….”

>

([My source for all of this is here](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/62o27b/history_lesson_where_does_warhammer_40000_come/), as an aside)

Here’s the 90 second version of the “Grim Dark”:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-MeVxKZBOfM" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This open and loosely defined universe planted a seed that 30-some years later is one of the most successful narrative franchises of all time. So much of this success isn’t in the expensive plastics and paints the company sells (though those are certainly the profitable endpoints of the enterprise), but through their Black Library enterprise — hundreds of books that weave together the histories and references of the universe and serve to establish the “lore” of that universe — and the critiques of fascism and dogma that are the dystopic setting for the universe. That lore, in turn, finds its way into countless pop culture references: from the visual aesthetic of the Starship Troopers movie (itself a more overt critique of fascistic creep in society) to the weirdly ubiquitous [“BLANK for the BLANK god!”](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/blood-for-the-blood-god) meme, and beyond. Personally, I accidentally fell down the rabbit hole on the narrative side with the Horus Heresy books — [Horus Rising](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9781849707435) in particular (_send help_).

![](/assets/e21be1b8cf829e778469d96ab52b8fbed488473c-2000x1125.png)

What’s fascinating about this is that as much as we might try to shape “Lore”, it has a life of its own. Games Workshop does so with an iron fist, but is constantly running afoul its fans who becomes frustrated by the monetization of a universe they feel ownership over 40 years down the line. Apple does so through secrecy and careful media releases, but quarterly deals with the fear that their prestige and genius narrative will slip with the release of weaker products or things that lack a market fit. Now, Musk’s Space X is doing so with [its brilliant but somewhat flawed Inspiration 4 show](https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/08/1035219/netflix-spacex-docuseries-inspiration4-countdown/)), attempting to reignite popular interest in space flight and give an accessible-but-still-heroic face to extraterrestrial travel — as a direct competitive counter to Bezos’ cowboy-hat wielding Blue Origin, and Branson’s playboy stylings of Virgin Galactic. All three of these companies are taking civilians to space, and all are crafting lore around their endeavours whether they intend it (like Space X) or not (like Blue Origin’s phallactic launch).

I’m always on the lookout for the lore. It’s everywhere, it’s exciting, and it can become the hook that might make an otherwise banal experience or body of work compelling. It can also explain so much about the dysfunction you find yourself in. The lore provides those clues and cues for deeper exploration, and whether you’re diving into a decades-old game universe or a 160k+ person company (like I experienced with Ikea), the lore becomes the hook, the map, and the troubleshooting guide for your own small contribution to that universe.


Homeric Design Strategy


We’re in a golden age (cue: ominous sound that comes with a loaded word) of prototyping. For most digital designers, it’s never been easier to express ideas in forms that can be clicked, tested, interrogated, and discarded. This should lead to a Cambrian explosion of creativity and diversity — but instead, we find ourselves in a period of incredibly homogenized experiences. Websites follow similar patterns, coffee shops and restaurants barely differ around the details, and connected devices compete for control over your networked ecosystem.

Actually, this isn’t all bad. The obvious example is that many of these experiences are put together by absolutely tiny teams, and so the homogeneity comes from these teams leveraging existing tools. The creativity — at least for our purposes now, let’s call it the novel thing applied to a problem space that hasn’t encountered that thing before — is around some other margin that we might not even recognize until much later in the process.

So, in a way, our golden age of prototyping is actually facilitating something very specific: the ability to get creative on the things that normally don’t make themselves accessible to iteration and development until business and teams are quite established. This is the great side of this work, and honestly is something that facilitated a more strategic type of design work. But there is a problem in that it does really limit the playground around that core site of inquiry. The business model innovation you’re working on can be quickly realized through templates and off-the-shelf design systems, but that very act of framing narrows what might otherwise have been possible.

So, in a way, our golden age of prototyping is actually facilitating something very specific: the ability to get creative on the things that normally don’t make themselves accessible to iteration and development until business and teams are quite established. This is the great side of this work, and honestly is something that facilitated a more strategic type of design work. But there is a problem in that it does really limit the playground around that core site of inquiry. The business model innovation you’re working on can be quickly realized through templates and off-the-shelf design systems, but that very act of framing narrows what might otherwise have been possible.

Great design is emergent — from teams, from moments, from what we immerse ourselves in, from talent, from practice. But it also emerges from the iterative nature of design itself. I create a dozen, three dozen, a hundred things — from scratch or in parts — and the form of the things we design starts to emerge, and the decisions that we make around that design are pulled by the gravity of those past iterations.

So the real problem with this is that when we leverage these toolkits for moving and prototyping quickly without recognizing them for what they are — scaffolding — we run the risk of mixing the detritus of many, many past decisions in with our otherwise novel inquiry. A disruption becomes disrupted.

##

Sprues

There’s thankfully tons of solutions for this, and one that occurred to me recently was around kit bashing. I [shared a really interesting article about this last week](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/greebles-how-tiny-details-make-a-huge-star-wars-universe/) about ILM using Kitbashing techniques to help design the “used future” feeling in Star Wars. Kit Bashing is basically just a technique for taking a lot of different scale model kits — a tank, a giant robot, a train, a car — and combining the individual cast parts into some greater whole.

That way, you can go from something like this (called a sprue card):

![](/assets/82c5cc6b4f899f34a0c9681f379d0ac336217f44-1431x820.jpg)

And, after combining it with lots and lots of other such contraptions, end up with something like this — a just-believable-enough take on another world.

![](/assets/1ca5ec1f4a396ae5ee8cc6ef7ee8893cb40920fc-1024x768.jpg)

Now, in theory, what I just lambasted as a potentially poisonous design approach falls into this category: after all, isn’t a toolkit approach the same as using spurs? What is a tool like [Uber’s Base Web](https://eng.uber.com/introducing-base-web/), or [Twitter’s Bootstrap](https://getbootstrap.com), or the [US Government’s Web Design Standards](https://designsystem.digital.gov) but a collection of UI sprues?

Kitbashing is different though. You can think of a lot of design templates as almost like sticker sheets: you get an aesthetic, a form, a prescribed function that gets pasted over different types of functionality — and those stickers end up being recognizable cues for the functionality underneath. Dropdowns select options, buttons trigger interactions, a large or small X demarcates exiting an experience, etc.

Kitbashing, on the other hand, takes many different pieces of potential functionality — an engine shape, a wheel, a barrel, an antenna — and mixes them up into different forms that eventually emerge something all-together different.

One of the classic kit bashing examples is from designer Kow Yokoyama, who created a [model making brand in the 80s called SF3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinen_Krieger_ZbV_3000). Working quickly with two friends in creating a narrative and visual aesthetic for the world, he took a large collection of existing scale model kits — planes, tanks, motorcycles, etc — and starting drilling, gluing, and sculpting connections between the disparate parts of those kits to create something entirely new.

Something like this:

![](/assets/b90741d3544b6cbc9c24a8c355c04391fa403ccc-793x570.png)

## **Kitbashing Experiences**

This mechanism for design is exciting partially because it empowers us to mix and match functionality outside of its usual context. Combined and remixed, they have the potential to create something new.

One example might be [Nathalie Miebach’s](https://nathaliemiebach.com) weather data visualization sculptures. Crafted using traditional basketweaving techniques, the technique is applied not to imply the form of the basket, but rather borrow a structured and quantitatively receptive process from which the forms she displays emerge. Combined with other disciplines like sculpture, the focusing backdrop of a gallery or museum, and the polish applied in colour selection and proportion — and something entirely new emerges.

![](/assets/091f71061e71c6fabc216a039392a9bd593a9eef-1440x1742.jpg)

Another example might be the game (which I’ve yet to try, but sounds incredible) [Carrier Command 2](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/). You are apparently put in charge of an aircraft carrier, and command a drone fleet to capture territory around an archipelago. But it does this by combining a few different styles of play, and idioms of interaction: first person movement, flight simulation and “menu surfing”, top down strategy, and tower defense (which has become incredibly popular in the smartphone gaming era). Jammed together, the design of this game seems to rock back-and-forth between the different modes of play, using that frame to keep the player off balance and wholly engaged. Something I wonder is what came first: the idea of merging these different mechanics, or the idea of situating such a game on an aircraft carrier from which those mechanics otherwise emerged?

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w22l8tzaA2c" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Finally on the web side, I might point to a weekend project I did two years ago called [Fit Faj](https://fitfaj.com). The idea was to try and build a mini business in just a few days (based off of my own experience as a new father), and I did it through form of kit bashing.

![](/assets/25829a2c2c5a2bf18c3413679f455dffa8b57528-2172x1602.png)

Taking a chatbot library meant for support purposes, I used that to structure the overall signup flow and write a small script that was friendly and let me tailor plans to specific needs and timeframes. This got mashed into a payment portal (Stripe) which I was already using for [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com), and which also connected into Google Sheets to give me a quick and easy sense of who my customers were.

Then, again using google sheets, I created a quick script that customized a plan I’d commissioned a certified personal trainer to develop, and scaled it to the needs of the customer. Then, the plan itself is tied to a basic transactional email system — sending the customer that week’s plan every Sunday so they can plan ahead without getting overwhelmed, as well as potentially update their plan depending on their adherence.

Addressing the challenge expressed earlier — homogenized experiences — this project came together as an experiment around designing a product and business that considered a very specific need, but tried to take a non-traditional approach to the experience of purchasing and delivery. Using chatbots and mailing lists, the different touchpoint for the experience came about not necessarily because I thought they were the best thing available, but rather because I had some spare parts lying about my desk (or hard drive, rather). Even design wise, it’s a kitbash between **custom components** (the images, the content), **templates** (the site structure is literally just a component from Knowsi), **libraries** (the chatbot), **services** (google, stripe), and **interaction modes** (web, mail, conversation, print-outs).

The neat thing about this approach is that it can be scaled and iterated upon with relative ease. If an experiment or part of the experience doesn’t work, discard it and try something different. If two parts feel disjointed, explore a smoother experience by adding something new to the mix, or rolling a small, custom interface.

Instead of building blocks — structured pieces that fit together — designing an experience through kitbashing is about turning that block around to catch the light differently, sanding off the connectors so it fits with a different brand, and gluing the whole mess together so that the component parts are only recognizable if you squint.


Kitbashing Experience


I’ve fairly recently changed my mind about virtual reality.

Much of my sensibility as an interaction designer has been tempered by the writings of authors like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson for whom VR was almost a foregone conclusion. In Stephenson’s case, Diamond Age presents the vision I found most compelling (vs. say the golems of Snow Crash) — with engineers manipulating auto-assembling nano machines through fully-interactive haptic controllers, and that mechanism of engineering and design only made possible through immersion in a different — much smaller workspace. One could imagine the interface of a Photoshop or Blender becoming ever deeper and more physical as we get closer, closer, closer to our work.

On the other side of that spectrum, you have the Ractives — imagine some combination of a first person interactive game and [Sleep No More](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k12NZLh_Xvg) — which see whole economies built around content creation and realization in the virtual. [I’m sure this is what Zuckerberg is imagining](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/facebook-wants-us-to-live-in-the-metaverse) — constant, unending entertainment over which Facebook provides the infrastructure utility and collects its fee (there’s a whole separate discussion around what happens to the FAANG companies if advertising becomes undermined — one strategy is to become the utility provider).

The thing is, we don’t have immersive virtual reality, and perhaps until we’re experiencing the jacked-in [overloading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_overloading) of our own sensory network — like Case experiences while riding along in Molly’s brain in Neuromancer — we won’t. We might never, it might just not be a “this lifetime” kind of thing. That is what it is. That might keep us from the world of Ractives, which isn’t so bad. We may be time-delaying a truly new art form from emerging in that case, but then, new art will always emerge with what we’ve got, so I don’t really believe we’re missing out there.

What I’m curious about is what we might get if we had “functional” immersion, that former vision of the engineer or designer manipulating tiny things to create something emergent. Right now, we have a pretty substantive control gap in VR. The controllers that most of us have access to are pretty limited — crudely track hand position through IR broadcast picked up by some fixed or relative sensor. This limits what we can do pretty heavily, [though things are changing pretty quickly](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320089681_The_New_Era_of_Virtual_Reality_Locomotion_A_Systematic_Literature_Review_of_Techniques_and_a_Proposed_Typology). And, of course, [there’s this](https://www.cybershoes.com/us/). ([Seriously](https://cybershoescom.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/Features_1_3.mp4))

![](/assets/c8bf5c8211630d53ce8e215e2b74abf61340889b-850x293.png)

Take a game like Half Life Alyx. It’s limited by its controllers, and so from a movement standpoint, we use a “teleportation” mechanism to navigate through the world. You point your controller, press a button, judge where you will “cast” yourself forward, and move. In some ways, it’s almost like Myst ([which is now also in VR?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UhHAsEdEKg)), in that your positioning and problem solving is fixed. One would think this is a problem, but then, Alyx also providers [one of the most harrowing and immersive video game experiences I’ve ever encountered in the form of “Jeff.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd34m1ovR4Y)

What’s fascinating about Alyx is that you're very quickly settling into your limitations — accepting the constraints of the game as a given and learning to navigate the world from there. So while the game is immersive, its immersion is in the context of the body and our projection of those limitations of the tool being wielded. A very non-tech example might be using a hand plane on wood — used to flatten and “smooth” (by removing rough surfaces) a piece of wood. The first thing one encounters with a plane is that one works through the constraints of the tool itself — situating the manipulation of the material along a singular axis, using the grain of the wood to one's advantage, exerting force, etc.

Current VR is incredibly similar to that tactile feeling of constraints, in a way that most visual and keyboard/mouse style computing isn’t. When we’re engaging with a flat, mouse and keyboard-controlled UI interface to create complex things, we’re forced to engage with constraints at a much less natural and more intellectual level. Moving a UI representation of a slider to affect highlights is very different to moving a physical slider in physical space — hence the popularity of such peripherals amongst musicians and visual artists who are, ultimately, trying to leverage every tool they can to craft high dimensional sensory experiences. As I mentioned before, [a simple waveform is a very complex thing](https://andrewlb.com/peripherals/). Of course, we still manage to make things. [Watching the “speed runs” of people modelling complex objects in Blender](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts-7YnQEe3A) with just mouse and keyboard has become a pandemic pastime for me.

So, we’re good at intuiting constraints. We are quick and natural to find our way in the world that way. But so much of our ability to navigate these constraints is tied to our ability to sense and test those constraints in consistent and predictable ways. Just watching my son, for example, try to fit something (or himself) through a space is an example of that. He tried, fails, manipulates, maybe finds a tool, possibly makes an engine revving sound, and then eventually — through sheer force of will and the power of low-consequence iteration — makes his way through.

In VR as it stands now, our sensory feedback is so much less, and so the ability to navigate those spaces and iterate meaningfully in those spaces is also deadened. Alyx manages that by providing an absolutely brilliant universe of cues and triggers to help us navigate those spaces, but what about a game like DCS or an experience like Blender?

Having tried DCS in VR, I was both confronted with the immersive quality of it (the flight feels incredibly natural) and the complete disjointedness of it (where the hell is my keyboard?). And this, in my usual ramble-prone way, is where I think there’s some reallllly interesting opportunities to design **functional immersion.**

If you had asked me a year or two ago my thoughts on VR, I’d have projected back to my experience at IDEO (in 2014 or 2015) trying on the early Oculus headset and feeling sick for the rest of the day. It was pretty awful. Right now, that experience has changed. With a powerful enough computer and software programmed with the user’s experience (especially when nausea is a risk for this particular UX) in mind, there’s none of that effect. It’s accessible and good. Also not that expensive if you’re willing to [take the Facebook risk](https://onezero.medium.com/facebooks-oculus-quest-2-has-some-serious-privacy-issues-c64ffd3aef76) with the Occulus Quest 2 (I’m not personally).

With this accessibility and overall smooth platform experience, suddenly a lot of functional things become possible. From the Gartner perspective, VR and AR were both well on their way towards productivity as experience platforms a few years ago, and we’re seeing how that manifests today.

![](/assets/74732a3e1fa94a9ea806f677ff2e632a78f4a83c-850x575.png)

For example, most VR headsets today have pretty decent passthru capabilities — meaning that you can leverage the camera sensor at the front to get an image of where you are in real space vs. virtual space.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Tried the new <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OculusQuest2?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#OculusQuest2</a> passthrough API in Gravity Lab<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/VR?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#VR</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AR?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#AR</a> <a href="https://t.co/rrONObVubC">pic.twitter.com/rrONObVubC</a></p>&mdash; Mark Schramm 🕹️ #VR #AR (@MarkSchrammVR) <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkSchrammVR/status/1426813781624066057?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 15, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

[https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkSchrammVR/status/1426813781624066057](https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkSchrammVR/status/1426813781624066057)

This means that we get a bit closer to that mixed reality or augmented reality world that we keep seeing visualized in science fiction — think Ghost in the Shell or the [more recent BladeRunner movie](https://youtu.be/iblP_m4zd3s) through holograms. It’s the kind of world that Malcolm McCullough describes in [Digital Ground](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-ground) — pervasive, invasive data spaces.

Where this comes together with VR is in the social and work spaces that we end up occupying as creators. Ultimately, the thing that I find most compelling about VR is that it gets us closer to a particular model of creativity through computation that just hasn’t reallllly existed before. I can mess with as many peripherals as I want, but I’m still just manipulating the control system for some digital space — I’m not occupying it in that way that real functional immersion might allow me to. And while I can get closer to occupying that space through an air-cooled brick on my face — good luck trying to interact with others through that medium. Facebook’s recent remote collaboration demo highlights how weird the experience is (I will say: Zoom is also a nightmare. But this isn’t a real change IMO).

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lgj50IxRrKQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[YouTube](https://youtu.be/lgj50IxRrKQ)

What’s MORE interesting for me is a demo like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FnDgry7xBo0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnDgry7xBo0&t=3s)

In this case, Metalnwood showed an example of using a phone as a “button box”, situating an interactive object in both physical and digital space relative to their position in this driving simulator. One could easily imagine doing the same with an Elgato stream deck (which I use literally all day long) — mirroring the geometry and logic of the Streamdeck display inside a virtual environment.

![](/assets/db1ed5f54c125975eec967ef14da4c6d1a840d91-1202x672.png)

While VR is finding a lot of its purchase in the gaming space (and this demo doesn’t deviate from that mold), we start to see some interesting possibilities when passthru cameras and virtual mirrors to real objects become more tangible. The Facebook demo situates the user at their desk with a laptop in front of them, and so provides a certain amount of analog between your situated and virtual experience. It does this via that passthru functionality mentioned before ([good explainer here](https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-index-passthrough-camera-room-view-3d/)).

In principle, I do think this is the right direction and a good overall approach, even if we’re just recreating a generally dysfunctional mechanism for collaboration in a virtual realm. The question is then, why do we need the keyboard except for a certain amount of muscle memory and path dependence?

What if we had peripherals meant to be interacted with in both virtual and physical space — with that virtual one layering more information?

![](/assets/28fa888d31310326ce53afaa9cc1dd43bff50d7b-965x555.jpg)

The above colour grading tool by BlackMagic Design is an interesting tool to frame this around. Equipped with three trackballs, it provides the user (a video editor) a variety of axes around which to navigate a colour space and realize the intent of a given scene. It’s physical, intuitive, and immersive.

What else might such an interface provide? There’s some interesting clues out there. The holographic interfaces of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant provide an interesting technology gap between humans and the mysterious Engineers. The former interacting with 3D space mostly through 2D dashboards, while the Engineers’ interfaces project both physically and virtually into the user’s space.

![](/assets/03098166d49681b7f4d21cf36feb0d600fefc804-600x300.jpg)

The puzzles in Half Life Alyx also present an interesting option, encouraging the player to (albeit somewhat clumsily) interact with a spherical space around whose surface you need to navigate a key through certain obstacles.

![](/assets/24a8be6e826f89df0615f98d318a09ea46a294f4-1393x813.jpg)

Other alternatives might be, say, a chording-style key controller like the Razer Tartarus combined with a dimensional controller like the 3D Connexion space mouse. Today’s 3D editors mostly use key combinations to nudge form from 3D primitives anyway — developing a certain amount of skill with such a device would permit.

![](/assets/795a3b401a13cfdbc4ae1cfae0d8450e38f72f83-350x350.jpg)

Or, my personal favourite prototype and something I’m almost too scared to try, is an [Azeron](https://www.azeron.eu/) keypad. Here, the interface elements are situated around the hand, giving a kind of feedback for movement of the hand in 3D space.

![](/assets/495a44502287e35ebdb184cfb6c0141670acb84e-1136x568.png)

It’s pretty easy to imagine such a controller (perhaps merged with a 6dof space mouse-like interface) being used to control something complex that is moving through 3D space.

![](/assets/75d11fc34e633eb40b0b734df0e770c913438aa9-3036x2144.jpg)

In these scenarios, VR becomes the medium around which our interactions are defined and our interfaces are situated. Virtual environments with depth require controllers with greater depth, and a mix of physical and digital interface design to not only situate the user in their virtual environments, but also keep their work grounded in the kind of fine-grained, detailed work required of most functional professions. **A functionally immersive virtual design environment would be pretty seamless between virtual and physical because the immersion isn’t in the virtual world, but rather the construction of the form itself.**

Anyway, there’s more to explore here, but would be curious if you have some other examples of these bridging interfaces like I shared above!


Functional Immersion


One of the pleasures and horrors of modernity is the control of something larger and more powerful for our ends. That you can do so much more, and then hold on for dear life. Motorcycles are like this. Flooring the accelerator on a Tesla is definitely like this. Weirdly bikes aren’t quite the same — maybe because they’re multipliers of one's own power instead of pulling power from another source?

Taking control of these power sources is usually a somewhat extreme learning process. I didn’t learn how to drive until my late 20s (and only did thanks to my extremely patient wife, since I learned on our stick shift VW) — and when I did, the process was literally halting. Developing a feeling for the clutch, understanding when to shift, and learning how to recover from a stall. All of these things stood in the way of me expressing a goal through this object that otherwise was quite powerful but constrained by my own ability to control it.

But that changed. Before long, I’d learned to shift through the audible and haptic feedback that the car was giving me. I figured out that pressing the gas wasn’t just power up/power down, but rather something that was invoking or manipulating an existing process. Stepping on the gas wasn’t linear, but rather a coaxing of resources towards some end. This shift in the mental model around control ended up making the whole experience of driving that much more enjoyable and natural. In the same way that an experienced cyclist orients their bike as an extension of their body, controlling a vehicle that wasn’t powered by me became a matter of orchestrating different signals harmoniously. Strangely though, this experience has left me uncomfortable driving automatic or electric cars.

![](/assets/6f308b89c6a0ed75c188e2668614f12e50e01ceb-2448x2448.jpg)

Writing about peripherals last week, there’s a more specific piece around simulation that I think is worth exploring. The first is **simulation** and to what extent our control interfaces take us in or out of our experiences (and how important is that actually?). The second is **immersive visuals** through VR, and why that type of immersion might not be the immersion that we think it is. And finally the third is how to **feed simulation back into the real world** — basically whether or not we can use simulation effectively to prototype alternative realities. The thing I think I want to talk about today is the first one.

There’s a lot of different kinds of simulation — with “training for real things” level that you see in a defence context, to “We’ve simplified this so you buy in, but it's nowhere near the real thing” type of arcade experiences. In-between, you get an entire gamut. Defense Combat Simulator is on the upper end towards defence level simulation, Ace Combat 7 is on the low end towards arcade simulation. Then (and we won’t dig into this too much, but it’s worth mentioning), you have non-digital simulation experiences that get one “most of the way there.” One might think of astronauts floating in pools:

![](/assets/479f0d5cc511570b98c5e4e6000d8c1bd9b3daa3-2660x2128.png)

Or US Navy pilots going through G-force training ([also wtf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0nbRYIBVDQ)):

![](/assets/79aad6f2856bf8383ef680be5db87fff77eff361-480x360.jpg)

These kinds of simulations are all oriented around real experiences. Air Combat 7 (a weird but fun game) just sticks us in a plane and has us fly different missions — the “realism” is purely around the most basic pitch, yaw, rudder, etc. controls that one sends to the plane itself. DCS puts us in control of a pretty accurately modelled fighter plane, and you need to figure out how to turn on the radio inside the cockpit itself.

On the arcade end of the spectrum, this feels a bit like driving an automatic car. The connection to the object of control is simplified to the point of feeling almost tangential. The plane-shaped avatar in the game continues on fine without us, we just happen to direct it one way or the other — and it figures out the rest. On the “close to real but not quite” end of the spectrum, it’s the opposite: one has to close the cockpit yourself, enable wheel steering, and know enough about the dynamics of flight to land the damn thing at all — much less land it with skill. That 10% difference then becomes the “shortcuts” built in to make things a better “we know this is a game” type of user experience — quick starts, default settings, the ability to respawn.

![](/assets/ec40ea9e3503e7c803d55ff888aed459d3bd1445-978x1050.jpg)

The problem is you can’t really do the “close to real” end of the spectrum with our standard peripherals. A mouse has two axes of control we call X and Y, which we use to control a cursor on a flat plane. Conversely, a plane has multiple axes of control: Pitch (elevator, or the Y axis of the stick ), roll (ailerons, or the X axis of the stick), and yaw (rudder, which needs something like a twist stick or actual pedals to control). Then you get into issues of controlling trust, etc. And then each of those axes isn’t just on or off —but rather needs to be represented across a wide set of numbers between its minimum and maximum extensions.

![](/assets/6db3ad76f2d47323f5eaba94fb9f18852fad6a8a-2508x1558.png)

You can’t do this effectively on a computer without the actual peripherals of control — the joystick, the rudder, the throttle. etc. Far from just breaking the sense of immersion, what you end up simulating if you try to control that is not an experience, but just the flight model itself: what does the plane do given these conditions? We can, in theory anyway, simulate that 99.9999whatever% in the computer. But with a VR headset, a HOTAS (hands-on throttle and stick), and a rudder set up, I suddenly have multiple axes of control: 2 via joystick, 1 via throttle, 1 via rudder, and at least 3 via the VR headset tracking. Which still only takes us 80, 90% of the way there.

I don’t think that’s a problem.

![](/assets/bf8b72f1bdf9226a91605fc02850e332a547d9b3-512x341.jpg)

What’s interesting is that when we start to break these layers of control and experience down, it gives us some interesting insight into what we might design given these increasingly common peripherals. Let’s say I wanted to control a pick-and-place style robot remotely from my computer. I could set up that control via keyboard, and so each press is a binary ON or OFF. I can then map those on and off signals to the robots and say “A means LEFT. When LEFT is ON move gantry LEFT.” This would result in jerking movement that would require incredibly fine timing to get me to a precise point on the robot’s X/Y axis. If you’ve ever controlled a crane machine at the zoo with buttons, this will be a familiar feeling.

![](/assets/9e7a691dbb9dd0e821e9b3a956e073dd266b2c60-1600x1067.jpg)

What if I had a trackball set up? The trackball gives me two axes of control, but those axes of control are determined by velocity. I spin the trackball in different directions and the velocity of that movement is translated into control signals. In this scenario, I might be able to control the gantry incredibly effectively — looping it towards its target quickly before slowing it to a more precise stop. It’s almost like spinning a globe and settling on the spot that you aspire to go.

Or, I could use a mouse: it also gives me two axes of control, but that control is maybe ill-suited to this station. We’re trying to position a gantry at a precise X/Y coordinate, but then, that coordinate is angled away from us. When we use a mouse on a screen, coordinate plane we’re traversing is in a kind of “top-down” position, so it's relatively easy for us to situate it on that plane. Conversely, imagine trying to use a mouse to click on a window if you were looking UP at the monitor. The least reliable thing in Jurassic Park is that Lex found anything on this filesystem using a mouse.

![](/assets/5fac4b50c47eacda15c977b5d1b765d14af6016d-800x416.jpg)

Or, of course, you could use a joystick. Two axes of control with specific “pressure.” So while the trackball exerts “pressure” via the velocity of its spin, the joystick is used to exert pressure via the degree of movement along the axis. A slight forward hold means the gantry might move slowly and precisely, a full push provides crude but quick movement.

Part of the fascination with interfaces like this is where certain dogmas have come into play. Take the car steering wheel: The fact that you TWIST something is an outcome of a mechanical reality like the steering column and the previous lack of tools like power steering. The steering wheel reflects our physical reality as much as the car’s physical reality. It’s also probably why such cars can be more fun to drive than fully automated ones: there is more of a synthesis between our bodies and the machines we control.

But lacking that need, how else might a car be controlled such that it's appropriate to the task and visceral in the experience of that control?

![](/assets/7815b75b53b1c15b54ee8617593606aa168e7b63-640x481.webp)

One of my personal vices and “fandoms” is the Gundam series, which I was introduced to as a kid and have frankly never really grown out of (I tried and relapsed). And one of the things that have always been interesting about it, is how the control surfaces are constantly reinvented over the years as people try to bridge the conceptual gap between “hard” science fiction (i.e. this could actually happen) and the sci-fi fantasy surrounding what are basically anthropomorphized tanks. It’s a non-stop source of inspiration, frankly. [Chris Noessel wrote a very good book on it and runs a blog about it](https://scifiinterfaces.com/), and you’ll find tons of other blogs trying to think through it, [like this one](https://aaltomies.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/your-giant-robots-controls/).

It all comes down to a pretty interesting question though: what’s the interaction design of a fantasy? If a mobile suit from the Gundam series can move like a plane but manipulate like a person, what does that interface between our intentions and such a capability look like?

![](/assets/7c9535bec378053235888c98950d7fb360ccf31d-400x377.jpg)

Anyway, I’m going to just leave that here for now since this is getting a bit long. Next, I’ll be looking at considerations around immersive visuals, and then that topic of feeding simulation (however fanciful) back into the real world and real work.


Visceral Control


I’ve had a long term obsession with peripherals. Peripherals are objects (usually interaction mechanisms) that connect to computers to extend their capability. Today, a usable computer is now the size of our thumb ([or smaller, if you want to be pedantic about it](https://sudonull.com/post/11594-The-smallest-Linux-computers)), and so we’re pretty quickly reaching that point where computation (though maybe not connection) is functionally ubiquitous — in other words, we connect as much to our environment as any given computer. Similarly, peripherals range in form and function from arrays of tiny LCD buttons like the brilliant [Elgato Stream Deck](https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-xl) (I own two and use them manically), to [eye tracking bars](https://gaming.tobii.com/product/eye-tracker-5/) that sits under our monitor, to the six degree of freedom [Space Mouse](https://3dconnexion.com/uk/product/spacemouse-wireless/) that — while initially counterintuitive — facilitates navigation through 3D space that’s incredibly natural. There are countless others — these are just a handful of the ones that I know. For this post’s purposes, we’re interested in peripherals that facilitate interaction with computers. A joystick, not a printer.

I’ve been [writing a lot](https://andrewlb.com/automating-research-recruiting/) [about automation recently](https://andrewlb.com/thinking-through-automation/), and peripherals play a big part in the conceptual universe surrounding automation. Automation facilitates a set of actions that we don’t need to worry about as a user — we provide instructions to the computer, and the computer proceeds to implement those instructions. If we’re using the example from my [Automating Research Recruiting](https://andrewlb.com/automating-research-recruiting/) post, we’re actually providing a wild number of instructions for the computer to execute — building a pyramid of automated tasks by further automating already automated steps with the different services we’ve glued together to get the job done.

Peripherals come into play when automation presents a gap. Perhaps a step is too complex, and requires critical thinking and manipulation. You might need to write something that you [can’t trust to a computer](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0) (yet), or you might explicitly be building a system with the human in the loop. The [disgruntled drone pilots](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/07/air-force-drone-pilot-recruiting-struggling.html) locked in shipping containers outside Las Vegas are the classic example of this phenomenon. We COULD fully automate those things — I’m grateful that we don’t.

![](/assets/49b55134cadaab2e359f22ed05c7cb01ac9cb468-3000x2237.jpg)

Peripherals also play a role in creativity, and this is the part that I’m most drawn to. To take a non-peripheral example, Adobe Lightroom has a pretty competent “Auto Retouch” feature. It can take a washed out or underexposed image from your camera and — by applying some good heuristics and a touch of machine learning — can make a pretty nice photo. Alternatively, you as the editor could jump in and make your own creative decisions. Bringing up the blacks and highlights, adding some localized gradients or colour masking, and an image taken with one tool becomes transformed by another through an interface reacting to the users’ creative intent. The problem is that many of those intentions are arduous to execute through the default peripherals we’re equipped with. Memorizing keyboard shortcuts, clicking through menus, and navigating deeply nested interfaces means that a huge amount of power can be packed into something very generalized, but is also restrictive when it comes to exploration.

The right peripheral can shake us free of that, at least in theory. When I first got into design work, I was blazing fast in Adobe Illustrator and Sketch with my Wacom tablet — much faster than I’ve ever been with a mouse. The focused utility of the peripheral, combined with practice and the right application, made for a workflow that permitted a LOT of experimentation and creativity. But it’s not a panacea. Today, I still have a Wacom tablet (albeit a pretty old one) sitting by my keyboard. Mostly, it’s used as a mouse pad, and gets pulled out from time to time when I need to do things like photo touchups and similar. But I no longer use it very often for interface design. Not that I haven’t tried, but the practice and skill of using it for THAT specific use has gone away.

This is the curse and blessing of peripherals. Peripherals allow us to open different pathways towards more natural interactions with computers. What natural means in my example with the Wacom tablet is:

- Familiar affordances — such as a the form factor of a pen being used to draw
- Learned behaviours — in my case, using the pen as a quicker mouse to navigate interfaces via the Wacom tablet
- Amendable Use Case — Interface layout and design was “just close enough” to drawing that a bridge presented itself

This is why a Wacom tablet is able to transition as a tool for certain interfaces that require the kind of precise interactions that the pen form factor presents, vs. that of the mouse. But then, if we try to use a Wacom tablet and pen in a word processor, we dive headfirst into a slightly more unnatural pairing.

In William Gibson’s sci-fi thriller The Peripheral, the idea of a peripheral is taken a step further to encompass a person’s whole self as the peripheral object to the machine. In the book, a Peripheral is a bio cyborg (I think?) agent that a user controls through a brain-computer interface (BCI). In this case, the BCI becomes a kind of omega peripheral: immediately and directly rendering intent into computation into action on the part of the peripheral agent. In the book’s sequel The Agency, a non-humanoid military robot (I interpreted it as something kin to [Tachikoma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachikoma) from Ghost in the Shell) is controlled via BCI as well, which would have seen the user forced to learn and visualize how this non-humanoid robot moved accurately enough (I can’t help but think of the [GoatMan performance piece](https://www.thomasthwaites.com/a-holiday-from-being-human-goatman/) here) AND rely on a layer of computation to translate human BCI movement intent into military robot movement intent. But, once mastered, that movement might be wonderful, fluid, natural, freeing.

Part of why I’ve been thinking about this recently is my own foray into flight simulation — both as someone making a simulation experience for VR and as someone who has been playing a very, very weird flight simulator called [DCS World](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/). In this game, you often start on the ground, and armed with your 600 page PDF manual, you eventually figure out how to turn on nose steering and taxi your plane down the runway. This video is maybe the single best representation I’ve seen of the DCS experience.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xb1u_hnlliY" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb1u_hnlliY)

This game is fantastic for a variety of reasons (though definitely niche), and part of this is because the whole thing is very carefully physically modelled — [this document goes into it a bit](https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/upload/iblock/dcc/DCS%20FM%20principles%20plus%20MiG-29%20P-47%20F-16.pdf). So when you’re interacting with the game through a joystick and throttle ([HOTAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTAS) controllers), you’re interacting with a physical model of an aircraft interacting with a physical model of space. And what I’ve been fascinated by is _how quickly my intuition for that physical model has developed._

The physical quality of the whole experience makes learning it fascinatingly quick, and somehow the immersion from this model of control and flight becomes that much deeper than a game controller, a keyboard, anything really. In a weird way, it’s what connected me with the Wacom tablet and pen over a mouse for those right interactions.

![](/assets/94a95f029af22becc1e27ad63fd739f720cdb03b-1333x1000.jpg)

The right peripheral frees you to experience computation as creativity. I got into design in the first place because I was building DIY synthesizers and instruments in Max/MSP, and was fortunate enough that a mentor saw a connection between that and design work. While I was never all that competent when it came to music, the idea that you can control something as complex as a waveform and shape it into compelling sounds, let alone music, has always seemed a miracle to me, and is probably where interaction design is at its strongest — or at least its most beautiful. Keyboards and strings; button grids and accelerometers; these kinds of peripherals were all built to facilitate creativity through computers, just as the patchboards and keys of analog synthesizers were created to control and shape something as filled with potential as an electrical signal.

Anyway! This was a somewhat ramble-filled post, but it gives some good cues to what’s on my mind lately. Curious to get thoughts on this — you can always [send me a note on Twitter](https://twitter.com/readywater) or [find a time to chat during office hours!](https://calendly.com/alb/officehours)


Peripherals


This is a continuation of the previous post — [thinking through research automation](https://andrewlb.com/thinking-through-automation/) — which deals more with a framework on how to approach automation tasks. This time, we’re going to dig into a specific example: how to automate a recruiting process.

Let’s say I’m recruiting from an existing and engaged user base, and I want to leverage some of the relationships that my customer support colleagues have in order to increase the likelihood of response. Instead of engaging in a back and forth with customers, I can instead provide the customer support team with some tools that automate intake — meaning that I can focus on preparing the moderator guides and answering any questions that might come up.

To do that, I want to break down the different facets of that recruitment process into steps that might be automated.

It might look something like:

- **Contact**: A CS rep sends a potential participant a mostly form email requesting participation in a user study (including timing, expectation setting, and gratuity amount)
- **Screen**: The potential participant fills out a screener form
- **Schedule and Consent**: If that participant isn’t screened out, then send them a scheduling link and a consent form
- **Remind and Confirm**: If they schedule successfully, then remind then send them a reminder the day before the interview. Also remind them if the consent form hasn’t been filled.
- **Interview Followup**: If they complete the interview, send them a gratuity and a thank you email.

Each of these steps can be automated to a greater or lesser extent, but what actually constitutes a step?

A step might look something like this:

![](/assets/86f749885fb392412fb30ea3a231cdbcc930a5dd-842x595.png)

Basically a point where an input is enters (data, interaction), is processed, and is then moved to another step (exported in some way. That individual process might have different features to it as well:

![](/assets/ff1fa37af2dd2611e56fe2adbec879203297d836-842x595.png)

If we were to break the above list down into a more linear process flow, we might end up with something like this:

![](/assets/7ec3520301ad343faafb4485829f84c7bb361aed-842x595.png)

This flow helps us interrogate a broader system, and figure out what individual steps in the overall task we might seek to automate. But we need the right tools to facilitate that automation/

## **The tools**

There’s many, many different tools out there that range in complexity to setting up small web services (maybe using a scheduler and python) to connecting automation functionality on our desktops (eg. OSX’s Automator or IOS’ Shortcuts), to orchestrating various web services to get the job done. For our purposes, we’re going to start at this “easy” side of web service orchestration to implement this example.

[**Airtable**](https://airtable.com/)

A simple relational spreadsheet tool, Airtable has a useful data structure for facilitating different human and automated “fusion” tasks.

By using its concept of filtered views, you can create different dashboards to react to and respond to data, as well as automate those views. In fact, [this newsletter](https://divergeweekly.com) is substantially automated through Airtable — combining data intake and specific views that give me a “todo list” of curation and creation that I can power through each week.

Additionally, one of the Airtable views is form input, giving us a simple survey tool that we can automate.

(If you want to give Airtable a try, [I would appreciate your using this referral link!](https://airtable.com/invite/r/7cLYgvsO))

[**Calendly**](https://calendly.com)

Calendly is a simple scheduling tool. I use it for my [office hours](https://calendly.com/alb/officehours) as well has research recruiting. It can be set up to send out reminders and combine with other systems. An example of this is that when you sign up for office hours, for example, I receive a new todo item in my Omnifocus todo list.

[**Knowsi**](https://knowsi.com)

Knowsi is a consent management platform for research that I created. To collect consent, you can include your project’s form link directly in the email, and the researcher will be notified when that form has been filled. While knowsi currently it doesn’t integrate with other platforms, but we’ll be adding Zapier and IFTTT integration this year.

[**Tremendous**](https://www.tremendous.com/)

A simple gratuity management platform. You can create projects and budgets, and then feed a list of names and emails in to dispense gratuities. It will normally send a gift card as well, so there is a greater degree of flexibility in terms of who can accept the gratuity.

So far, I just automate this by feeding a CSV of spreadsheets and names into the tool at the conclusion of the study.

[**Zapier**](https://zapier.com)

Zapier is a glue between different tools. It’s an easy way to, for example, connect an RSS feed to Airtable, or automatically check that data exists and update a list, or delay receiving a notification until you’re ready for it. Zapier makes a lot possible that would otherwise require complicated and custom integrations.

## **Bringing it together**

Looking at each of these tools and the role they play in input, storage, processing, and connecting, we can start to create a picture of an orchestrated and automated flow.

![](/assets/6675224de919cc18eef65195007b4f806f6df6f5-842x595.png)

### **Contact**

This is a situation that we can’t really automate because it requires a degree of human connection and problem solving. But we can create information that helps start the process.

Generally, you’d want to create a description of the study, how long the interview will take, timing, gratuity, etc. And then a link to the screener. [I have a good primer on writing these here.](https://andrewlb.com/the-anatomy-of-a-research-recruitment-email/)

For our purposes, we’d list our potential participants in Zapier first, and then automate the introduction email either through Zapier or Airtable. If there’s no response, we’ll generally want to automatically remove them as well using a scheduled task from either of those tools.

### **Screen**

When creating the screener, this can be done easily in airtable. Here, I would create an intake spreadsheet with a form field, and then create two views: a “form” view and an additional grid view that has a filter. Edit the form in the visual editor to fit what you like, and then fill it out.

![](/assets/25b4968e992b5bf1b270b6bb4124b46166e02f91-1684x740.png)

In the second grid view, add a filter (like above) that will only show those respondents that fit the criteria you’re looking for.

From here, we want to create a new spreadsheet which will be filled in as our screened and ready participants filter in. We do this by creating an empty table, then reflecting the data that we want in that new table through an automation. It’ll look something like this.

![](/assets/f8227c912deebd4557a2b9c7eb0a1b4105786303-1684x1190.png)

Finally, from where, we can set up a new email to send out when records are “Created” in this participant table. This allows us to divide the records between consenting participants in the study, and our list of potential participants.

### **Schedule**

Scheduling can be both incredibly easy and incredibly hard. I’d suggest using an automated scheduler like Calendly whenever possible — but provide an option to reach out with different times if none of the Calendly times work.

![](/assets/e0e99173acf97a189bc70ccefc4fb9a96b6ee88e-842x595.png)

You can then integrate Calendly with Airtable through Zapier, and update the participant records directly with the time and place of the interview, and a flag saying they’ve moved onto the next step.

### **Consent**

Consent forms, like scheduling, should be automated wherever possible using tools like [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com) and Zapier. Privacy regimes like the GDPR in the EU and PIPEDA in Canada mandate progressive informed consent practices.

![](/assets/3854b1dafe86f742480b54d278036c5b4d5f6c42-842x595.png)

This step can be pretty simple — just send the consent form via the initial email or when the participant has completed scheduling, and the researcher will get a notification on when the participant has signed the form.

### **Remind**

Content-specific reminders can be sent out to participants who have stalled anywhere in the process.

![](/assets/a858dfae43d9dd4e54e595c55073dd8975670eda-842x595.png)

In zapier, you can set up zaps to do multiple checks on things — though I personally prefer to set up unique views in Airtable so that I can both visualize and automate that reminder process.

One example might be passing a screener but failing to schedule. Zapier and Airtable can be used to send a reminder once or twice before removing that person from the list of screened participants.

### **Followup**

Finally, upon completion of the study, the gratuity can be (mostly) automated as well by creating an automated export of participants and their emails for upload into a gratuity management platform like Tremendous.

![](/assets/7b8de2f67abb1266ad23c21668edfa6c90d41501-842x595.png)

Tremendous doesn’t have great automation tools, but you can bulk upload a CSV to their platform. So you can set an automation up to send you a weekly CSV of participants who have completed the study, and simply drop that CSV into the Tremendous platform. This is still a little bit of a manual process, but it turns what might be a half hour or hours worth of work into a three minute task.

## **Many Small Experiments**

Ultimately, working with these tools takes time — both in learning how to use the tools in question and in setting up the automation. While I’ve used a couple of examples here that I’m familiar with, I’d encourage you to set these up with whatever format you feel most comfortable.

Generally though, get started with what you know, and try to do small but structured automation experiments to build up to a larger automation workflow. **Automate one step first**, and then look before and after that step to see what you might do next.

In the end, Automation frees up time and energy better research and can turn the frustrating time-sinks into interesting problems to solve

Also, Automation — when it fails — can reveal the real points of complexity and value in our process that can become things we double down on.

So. This is a concrete example of something that you can automate and how you might go about doing it. Last week we looked at [some tools or ways of thinking about automation as a concept](https://andrewlb.com/thinking-through-automation/). Next, we'll take a look at judging what should and shouldn't be automated.


Automating Research Recruiting


_(This is part 1 of several posts describing research automation. The following posts will describe specific case studies, tools, and mechanisms for automation relavent to researchers)_

Doing research is pretty hard and gruelling work. Because many of us love the sense of discovery that accompanies the research process, it can be easy to gloss over these aspects of the process as just the necessary pain of getting things done. And they are. But we don’t necessarily need to feel that pain.

We’re in a Cambrian era of software services spawning to address our different needs. We have software services that do jobs like collect signatures between parties, that check if websites are up or have changed, that share your calendar for others to schedule, or — in the case of my own product — manage consent forms for you.

This is all well and good, but so what? With so many different tools to use, it can be a bit difficult to string them all together — and orchestrating those different services into something that gets anything more than the most rudimentary task finished, can be more frustrating than just doing the work yourself. This is doubly true for those who don’t have strong technical and engineering backgrounds, which lend a degree of familiarity to the way that software works (and doesn’t work) to simplify or automate tasks.

My goal with this post isn’t to teach you everything you need to know, but I am going to try and share some strategies that you can use to make this automation thinking a little easier. There are two metaphors that have served me well in automating a lot of my own tasks: thinking in jobs, and thinking in “signals”.

## **Thinking in Jobs**

![](/assets/9f31f74b809d15f288fbe8f00bb96672769424ef-1080x1080.png)

Most of us have a job to do which is — in reality — an amalgam of many smaller jobs, instincts, and competencies. As a designer, my jobs include **problem discovery** (facilitation, visualization, communication, stakeholder management), **simplifying problems** (project management, resourcing, scoping), **user research** (research design, survey design, recruiting, research admin, interviewing, transcription, synthesizing, communication, visualization, etc), and this is all before we get into the weeds of designing the thing through **concept development**, **iterative prototyping**, **refinement**, **validation**, **documentation**, and **stewardship**. Design is a particularly nebulous discipline, but I bet your work looks something similar. With so many jobs to do, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all. But then, we can always hire others to do some of that work.

In design and product management, the “Jobs to be done” framework has been a powerful way of thinking about value and investment relative to work that needs to be accomplished. Let’s say you have a camera. A camera captures moments from a particular perspective. From a mechanical perspective, you might say the camera’s job is to capture light onto a medium that stores that light. But if that’s the job to be done, how do you decide between a phone camera, a vintage TLR camera, a high end Leica, or an Olympus point and shoot?

Ultimately, the person wielding the camera isn’t thinking in terms of capturing light onto a medium — that’s the mechanic. They’re thinking in terms of what they need to accomplish themselves. This is why a wedding photographer's needs are different (though overlapping) from those of a social media influencer, whose needs also differ from that of a field researcher. A wedding photographer hires their camera to be reliable, durable, and discrete. To have redundancies, while also being manually adjustable to capture different scenes. To take a variety of different lenses to accommodate different needs. Conversely, a social media influencer might need a camera to be easily integrated into other systems; to be light and easily mounted to portable equipment; to have features like a shot timer and remote control.

When thinking in terms of a product, we can focus the design decisions on what the job is and for who the product is being hired? This lens helps us create a realistic and focused product. It also helps us when thinking about automation.

Automating aspects of our work involves being disciplined about the jobs that we need to accomplish. I can’t automate the synthesis process. It’s too complex, and I wouldn’t know where to begin. Hell, I have trouble teaching it sometimes.

But I can automate scheduling. Scheduling might include steps like: deciding on a date range, deciding on available times, creating a public calendar, sharing that public calendar, checking participant availability against my own availability, blocking time on my calendar, blocking time on the participant calendar, providing information about where and when we will discuss, following up, and providing for options to reschedule. Looking at the landscape of scheduling tools, I might just choose something like Calendly to “hire” for that job of scheduling. It doesn’t do everything for me: I still need to decide on date ranges and available times, and manage communication with my participant, but for the low cost of $5-10 a month, I’ve suddenly hired a service that otherwise might have taken me 4-8 hours. That seems like a pretty good return.

When thinking about your own jobs, think about the work that you do every day, and just list out the tasks. Everything from email to scheduling to transcribing to admin. Then take some time thinking about complexity (is this time consuming but mindless?), pleasure (how much do I enjoy this task?), time consumption (how much time a week do I spend on this task), and criticality (how important is this task to my work?). From here, you can get a pretty good sense of what might be a good candidate for automation. Highly complex and critical tasks (interviewing research participants) shouldn’t or can’t be automated, generally. Low complexity but critical tasks might be too vital NOT to automate in some way, to simply make sure they always happen (like paying bills). Low and medium complexity jobs that are time consuming (scheduling, gratuity payment, admin, etc) is usually where we need to make judgement calls on what is worth “hiring” a service to do the work for us. To make that decision, we need to understand how complex that hiring — that automation — process is going to be.

## **Signals and the Orchestra**

![](/assets/422a97e11126cd33df2d8635a1f64288ba28350b-1024x681.png)

Sometimes we want to hire one thing to do multiple jobs — but sometimes that one thing doesn’t exist. Whereas we might have hired Calendly previously to manage our scheduling for us, but Calendly can’t manage our recruiting pipeline for us. Maybe we hired Loomly to manage our social media scheduling, but Loomly can’t create or validate our social media content for us. Coordinating between multiple services to accomplish a sophisticated job can be really difficult — not unlike coordinating multiple employees working towards a common task.

Unfortunately, unlike working with people, you can’t expect any level of initiative or problem solving from the software services you hire. They’re there to do a job and know of nothing else. **This is where I think many automation aspirants get mixed up.**

By framing software services as employees performing a job, we end up quite quickly hitting roadblocks where we might have expected an employee or contractor to “fill in” that gap with their own creativity and experience. When hiring software services to “do a job”, we then end up falling back on contacting customer support — a path that rarely leads to satisfactory outcomes.

Instead, the metaphor I find myself returning to is that of digital signal processing for synthesizers — which is complex, but hear me out.

There’s a lot of different forms of audio synthesis, but we’ll use subtractive synthesis as the most basic. When you’re listening to an interesting electronic or pop song and hear a unique sound, that sound is shaped through manipulating its waveform over time. It might be a recorded sample (crumpling a paper bag), a synthesized waveform (a sine or sawtooth waveform), or whatever. These inputs form what we call the **oscillator**: the initial part of the signal chain that GENERATES a signal for other components to manipulate. These other components are what we might refer to as modifiers — they shape that raw signal into the form that we want. We might add a **low pass filter** to the signal chain — filtering out the higher frequencies to create a bass sound. We’d probably want to add an **envelope** as well, so that we have control over the temporal dimension of the audio, similar to how a piano key press creates an initial loud sound with the ability to sustain a slowly diminishing sound over time. Other qualities can be added as well: a filter might be controlled by a low frequency oscillator (LFO), adding movement and dimension to the effect that the filter has. A compressor might be added at the end to normalize and control the final sound, etc.

The important piece to take from this is that each step of the signal chain performs a discrete and focused task as part of automating a complex workflow.

## Examples

Next week, I’ll share a walk through of _how to automate a recruiting process_ when collaborating with a customer service team. I’m guessing this might be a couple of post, so will make sure to update these with s links as we go.


Thinking through Research Automation


_This is a republish of an article written with Dahna Goldstein for [the Chronicle of Philanthropy.](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/charities-and-their-founders-need-more-exit-ramps/)_

# A Taxonomy of Zombie Non-profits

It’s a hundred days since patient zero started biting people at a Grimes concert, and it didn’t take long for the world to descend into chaos. Now, the shambling dead –many bites removed from those first zombies – hold a majority stake in the world’s population, and you’re stuck trying to get by and help as many folk as you can.

There’s food and water to think about, not to mention shelter. Maybe some tools to keep you and your team safe, and an unknown future facing you as you try to keep those resources coming. If you run low on any other these, you run the risk of becoming one of those shamblers: with little intent or direction, simply walking towards whatever they see or hear in search of brains.

But you’re okay. This isn’t the first time. After all, you ran a successful technology non-profit before the zombie outbreak. While there is (gracefully) no more Twitter, you and your team have a few tricks up your sleeves from surviving the nonprofit tech apocalypse of 2020 (when no one was able to make their strategic 2020 goals and the funding dried up).

In the United States (we’re back in pre-zombie days), there are over 1.5 million nonprofits, but only 10% have budgets over $500,000. While $500,000 can sound like a lot, think of that in terms of staff, resources, rent, travel, server costs, security, insurance, inventory, and overheard. Even a half million doesn’t go as far as one might think.

## The Apocalypse

People survive and thrive in incredible situations. Social Entrepreneurs more so than most, and social tech entrepreneurs (i.e. those working to create technology that serves a social good/public interest) even more so.

Tech nonprofits are particularly prone to being resource constrained. Building, launching, and maintaining a software platform is a multi-stage, multi-stakeholder effort that extends far beyond the confines of the computer. It involves the users, the customers, and those whose lives are impacted by the users of the software and their experience. It involves the donors and the grantmakers, and their understanding of a software program’s lifecycle and needs. It impacts the team building the software, as it cycles through their temperaments and expertise, creating room for growth and opportunities to fail. It also involves adjacent tools created by organizations who are also non-profits, but also who might be for-profits: all scrambling for a similar pool of resources.

Software can be easy to get a “cheap” start on, and deceptive in its completeness. A social tech entrepreneur without a strong technology background might have a (legitimately) great idea, sketch it out, share the ideas, and get it built through contracts for a tiny amount of money. But then what? The software will have bugs. It will require improvements. Assumptions about user needs and revenue models were wrong and need adjustment. Quickly, a social entrepreneur might see their funding dry up.

Once those resources run out, or that critical error is made, it becomes all too easy to hang on to something that is effectively dead. It might still move, it might still even function in a limited way. But it no longer thrives.

But social entrepreneurs somehow manage to not only survive swift zombi-fication, but even thrive in these environments. So what makes for a good survivor?

## Brains

In 2016, the nonprofit sector saw contributions totalling about $390.05B. While that number seems huge, an average nonprofit only raised $246,641 from a combination of individuals, foundations, and corporations. And when the largest nonprofits, like hospitals and universities, can have budgets upwards of $1B, it becomes easier to see how the flow of capital - the lifeblood of any organization - can be restricted for so many organizations with major actors capturing the majority of the philanthropic capital available..

For many of these smaller organizations, when the financial oxygen is squeezed out of the room, they don’t simply die and disappear: their resources unlocked to be reclaimed by the ecosystem. But rather, they face a kind of undeath. There’s still a bit of capital running through their veins. They display simple functions, perhaps serving a constituency or shambling towards a program that might justify new funding. But they’re not alive, not vibrant, and not doing much good.

When a non-profit becomes a zombie, it is trapped in an incentive paradox that the philanthropic sector creates (and [that we wrote about in another article](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/opinion-charitiestheir/242690) in the Chronicle of Philanthropy). There might still be staff and funds in the coffer, but the capacity to meaningfully engage with the mission is gone. Most options being exhausted, there is no way of coming back. And yet, there is no incentive to shut down: after all, if there is a structure in place to engage with funders, then many non-profit actors will find themselves unwittingly giving lip service to a mission that can’t be executed on. They might also still be doing some good, but not nearly at the level they should be able to. And so the non-profit entity persists in a diminished form – perhaps trapping skilled non-profit workers who care about the mission or are bound to the organization along with it.

Technology nonprofits are uniquely susceptible to this because of the structural arc of a tech product’s development. Early prototyping and even an alpha product development might be quick and feel incredibly promising, but then the hard work starts. Validating with users and stakeholders, getting things wrong, and so on. The hard work is then managing technical debt, setting product priorities, experimenting with business models, and fundamentally getting things wrong so you can surface a better way forward.

Unfortunately, as the tech nonprofit figures this out, the zombies are closing in.

## A Zombie for Every Season

Out here in the wasteland, there’s all sorts of zombies you’ll encounter. There’s a lesson to be learned from each, with trucks and clues that point to your own survival.

### Wrong Place Zombie

#### Right Team, Wrong Time

First, they run the risk of being bitten by the **Right Team Wrong Time Zombie**. This is a nasty fellow that sneaks up on you, perhaps lying dormant in the abandoned gas station you were sure was safe. Having the right team at the wrong time is heartbreaking, because you are working on something great together, but perhaps the skills don’t quite align. Perhaps your team is incredible at early research, problem definition, design, and prototyping, but isn’t any good at the long-term maintenance and architecture of the platform (Disclosure: your humble author is one of these early types). This means that while your team is great in the early days of the apocalypse, they might also be the first to resort to cannibalism or going AWOL. Instead, you want the right combination of people at the right time, and flexible ways to onboard and offboard new members (including yourself, if perhaps the organization needs a new lead for a different phase of its life). Remember, a founder is not always the best CEO.

### Long Jump Zombie

#### Premature depleted runway

Tragically, this particular entity was zombified when it attempted to make a cinematic leap to safety, and didn't quite make it. Crumpled and broken, it nonetheless scoots along waiting for survivors who spent too much time looking ahead, and not enough time checking the ground and resources they have right now. Unfortunately, falling short on your runway is one of the easiest ways to get zombified in these trying times, partially because the transitions from a terminated runway to undead shambling is so natural. Sometimes so much so that you barely notice, as you and your founders don’t take pay, you let staff go, and you insist that everything is okay. Always take time to look before you leap.

### Empty Backpack Zombie

#### Under resourced

And sometimes it simply wasn’t meant to be. You might have a great idea for realizing social impact, but you can’t get the funding, or you can’t hire the right skillset, or maybe you just didn’t realize that launching a software startup with a social mission involves more than packing a lunch and a sleeping bag.

The empty backpack is, to me, the least excusable of the undead fates. The decision to start something should be taken with EXTREME care, especially because you’re going to be working on that thing for months and years of your life. If that time isn’t worth building a system of support around, then perhaps it really wasn’t meant to be. Learn what you need to succeed, and pack appropriately. It might not be as much as you fear, but it is likely more than you have right now.

### Gone Glamping Zombie

#### Over resourced, under skilled/architectured

The Gone Glamping zombie is infuriating, but sometimes inevitable. Being over resourced can often be worse than being under resourced. There is an instinct to go big, to push too fast and too aggressively, without considering a more risk-responsible plan. So instead of setting up your walled refuge and living your best post-apocalyptic self, spending lavishly on growth strategies and exploratory projects, perhaps it’s worth thinking about what it is you’re trying to accomplish here. Unfortunately, this ex-Glamper who is currently shambling towards the fjords was weighted down by their resources, and is now merely a threat to others: unable to accomplish its own survival but preventing others from accessing the lavish resources it once so hubristically collected. If investors and grant making orgs were once burned by this undead fool, I’m sorry. But you can do a lot with a little, just make sure you don’t get bitten.

For each of these zombies, they were once a team working towards the same thing you are: a sustaining technology venture/nonprofit that was trying to do good in the world. It might be easy to dehumanize their work and sacrifice by looking at what they’ve become, but as we trudge on and survive, we need to remember to be thankful for what they once contributed.

Surviving in the nonprofit wasteland isn’t easy. Resources are constrained, wealth holders have heard it all before, and on any given day it is easy to lose hope. But the work done in the nonprofit sector is worthwhile, even vital. Even when the reward is just scraping by day-to-day, perhaps it is worth it when you find that person in need, and you have all that you need to help them.


Zombie Nonprofits


_As a forewarning, this is one of those “I’m working through something” posts and trying to wrangle my own thinking. I might come back and add to it as my thinking evolves._

About a decade go (oh man), I led a “walk shop” (a walking workshop) through Toronto that was focused on the exposed digital infrastructure of the city. Cell towers perched on the sides of buildings, early camera-based access control for cars, retracting bollards, and glitching digital ads. Toronto was a haven for this kind of stuff — something that Sidewalk Labs noticed and unfortunately squandered in its own exploration of the smart city. But reflecting on that workshop this week, I feel like I was missing a more fundamental network that made that city vibrant: that convening a group of interested urbanists and technologists to take time out of their days to explore was easy. That Toronto, a city of five million at the time, was a place where the creative, frustrated and aspirational flocked from around the world.

The fact that cities are frequently loci for a certain emergent quality is nothing new. In her book The Dot-Com City, Alexandra Lange explores how many of the leaders of the current Silicon Valley rise are looking to these emergent qualities of urbanism to fuel their own growth — going so far as to replicate ideas of the agora in cafeterias and meeting spaces, and organizing similar work units into neighbourhoods, both to keep workers focused, but also make these spaces legible to other units. Of course, this often ends up backfiring, as imposed order — even if its mimicking emergent qualities — rarely behaves as we might like. Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous commentator on this quality — speaking of the spontaneity of gathering and solution discovery in diverse urban environments that withers when overly organized. Much of this was [in opposition to figures like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses](https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/jane-jacobs-le-corbusier-new-york-city/), whose vision of New York as something ordered and elevated flew in the face of Jacobs’ view that the emergent New York WAS elevated. Ultimately, we got a little of both — a “perfectly ordered” New York would never be New York, and so it continues to draw the creative, frustrated, and aspirational.

I left Toronto in 2013 to move to San Francisco, after having a move to New York change somewhat last minute about eighteen months earlier. I reflect on this periodically since I have a deep love for New York and a more conflicted view of San Francisco, but I think of them as almost different countries. And this is sort of where I’m beginning to rethink my own identity as a migrant.

![](/assets/47deba4eedcd6604ec99770825b99786723542d4-800x600.png)

Currently, I live in Copenhagen with my wife, son, and two pets. We’ve pretty regularly moved cities every 2-3 years since 2013. Our dog, a greyhound, joined us in Washington DC. Our son joined us here in Copenhagen. I don’t know if this city hopping will continue (pretty sure it will tbh), but as I’ve been thinking about it, that idea that migration in my (admittedly hyper privileged) context is city-focused, instead of nation-focused, is pretty interesting to me. I still always say “I’m from Toronto” before catching myself.

Migration means a LOT of things to a lot of people. Forced migration can happen because of conflict, threat of violence, intolerable living situations. Seeing your children go without, when there’s an opportunity elsewhere, is often an imperative to migrate. With climate change, we’re going to see a LOT more of this. For others, it's a threat — those who don’t look to move outside their own environments fear those moving into their existing bubbles. Denmark is very much like this — engaging in a somewhat painful calculus with pulling in talent and investment from abroad, while being reticent to provide that talent with the tools they need to thrive. America has a vision of itself that does the same — an immigrant nation looking to stem the flows of immigration.

For others (like myself), I’m still trying to decide what’s going on. Unlike the “digital nomad” who hops from visa-to-visa, immigration becomes a part of the experience of working and living in a tightly interconnected economic and cultural system. Working in technology (at this point in time, anyway) is kind of a perfect example of this. Technology workers tend to be highly educated, highly mobile, generally younger, and have relatively high incomes. In a geopolitical context where many countries encourage or force English language education (and when English language media is so dominant that even if they didn’t, it would have a role), technology workers are uniquely advantaged to be mobile. But it’s not mobile in the nomadic sense — rather mobile in the “options” sense.

When I was living in Toronto, the idea of moving to another city felt somehow crazy. When I was living in San Francisco, the idea of living outside of the US or Canada felt crazy (having dual citizenship between Canada and the US). But when I moved to DC, something about the nature of that city and the people I was surrounded by made the idea of living internationally seem somehow obvious. Some of that was wrapped up in people’s economic and educational backgrounds; or folks who served in the military, or in diplomatic contexts; but broadly hearing people’s stories and lives outside of the comfort of “being a citizen” made for an expansion of my own view on this. But the way everyone spoke of those experiences differed considerably.

![](/assets/7c00bd2d458012c68a9c5e3e86afc403effa93bd-800x600.png)

I spoke with someone recently who described having _Lived in Japan_, but then also having _Lived in Rome_. Where in Japan? But then, for that matter, where in Rome? Why did they say Japan instead of Tokyo? Kyoto? Osaka? For that matter, why do I constantly change my frame of reference when talking about social policies and dispositions within Denmark and within Copenhagen? I know an American who moved to the suburbs of Copenhagen recently with his family — not speaking any Danish. When we spoke recently, his sense of isolation was visceral, and yet he hadn’t felt the same in the city. Copenhagen is effusive, social, and vibrant; but maybe Denmark is protective, insular, and just a little bit suspicious. Or maybe there’s a bit of both? I love Copenhagen — and I think I love Denmark. Many Danish policies I found reprehensible, like [its poor treatment of Syrian refugees](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57156835) or the recent [narrowing of English language education opportunities](https://cphpost.dk/?p=125909), but the city I love couldn’t exist without the national context shaping it. But then, would Denmark be the same country without Copenhagen as its hub?

Reflecting on the walk shop I hosted, the thing that came to me was the collection of people around me. Only a few were actually native to Toronto. Most had come from other parts of Canada, the US, and Europe on their own journeys, and I was lucky to have them join me to explore the city together.

We’re seeing some interesting stressors on the idea of the nation state right now. Some are progressive experiments like the European Union and the Schengen Agreement, which has facilitated so much of the richness that is European cities today, peoples, cultures, and languages intermingle freely on a continent that is barely a lifetime away from being one of the more blood-soaked places on the planet. Others are maybe more destructive, from the United States dealing with increasingly polarized theories of America; or in the Ukraine as post-Soviet ethnic identities come into conflict. Elsewhere, the legacies of western colonialism are being both challenged and reinforced by shifting norms around identity and enfranchisement (the Middle East and Africa being key spaces to watch here, of course, but frankly also Canada).

What I’m curious to see is how the city continues to serve as the focal point for this change, or whether the city might not be powerful enough? And then what happens to identifying with ones city when the country fails you? Those from Beirut always seem to speak of the beauty of their city, and never of the state. Canada might not have the most architecturally beautiful cities, but natural beauty is only a short drive or bike ride away. But always from (and back to) the city.

Anyway. I’m finding myself thinking about the city vs state dynamic a lot. Part of this is the fiction I’ve read — the crumbling America depicted in _Snow Crash_ and _the Parable of the Sower_; or the dealing urbanisms of _The City and The City_ or _Embassy Town_; or N.K. Jemisin’s _Killing Moon_ series of books, or for that matter her book _The City We Become,_ which I have yet to read and sounds fascinating. _Ministry of the Future_ also had a distinctly non-national quality to it as the nation state as a unit seemed to be dissolved into other structures: urban, intergovernmental, subnational-yet-international. I am actually inclined to believe the nation state as an entity type still has a lot going for it. Part of my privilege has been being born to parents of two countries that carry flexible passports and the opportunity to travel, and that’s before even discussing the dual citizen part of it.

![](/assets/b0bfd57ffeae1fa2a9dba06878308521b6bf5025-2000x1000.png)

Still not quite sure what to do about this, but it has helped my thinking on the “What’s Next” question. Still not sure what that is, but this framing has helped shift the discussion around where, how, and why we move for my family and I. And if that’s our disposition, then understanding that is at least helpful.

Also, as a side note, I’m very, very curious to talk about this stuff and get your perspective on it. Please send me a note.


Migration and Circumstance


What does it mean to design for the propagation of security? In a way, this is one of the grand questions of international relations and its sub field, security studies. Exploring what contexts (events, regimes, situations, etc) create or compromise our understanding of security, how security is constructed through foresight and hindsight on these contexts, and who experiences — or sees a loss of — security given those contexts (and whether it’s equitable, uneven, or even mutually exclusive).

I’ve been slowly working my way through a masters program in security studies, prompted by my earlier experience working as a product and service designer in the Pentagon. The experience there left me with some great experiences, and some humbling realizations. Some of this came from the pretty early realization that even before stepping foot in a defence facility, part of my own understanding of strategic design had actually emerged from a military context. The thinking of [John Boyd](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780316796880) — best known for his role as the designer of the F-16 fighter plane and the originator of the OODA loop construct — has had a pretty distinct influence on my thinking; not just for the OODA loop as a way to think about cognition and competition, but also for Boyd’s writing on the ideas of grand strategy and tactics in situating ones work and design. Other theorists — from [Clausewitz](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1997-03-01/clausewitzian-friction-and-future-war) (I really recommend the book reviewed here, actually) to [McCrystal](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/apr/29/mcchrystal-afghanistan-powerpoint-slide), [Jomini](https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/special-series/great-strategists/scientific-approach-to-war-jomini/) to [Naveh](https://www.publicspace.org/multimedia/-/post/walking-through-walls-soldiers-as-architects-in-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict) — have also served to decorate the language that I use to transition the ambiguous into the impactful, and the intangible into the real.

![](/assets/7548e0f3e8f5abcedd12a7f7d1a00820b20f38dd-850x558.png)

While I was drawing inspiration from the military strategy and theory realm to inform my thinking about design, however, there were a broad swath of military planners, strategists, and thinkers who were doing the same from my chosen discipline. A year or so ago, I attended a seminar at the University of Copenhagen on [design thinking and the military](https://cms.polsci.ku.dk/events/regaining-the-advantage-the-promises-of-design-and-innovation-methodologies-for-civil--military-organisations/), after being hilariously targeted by Instagram ads for the same. There, I met a professor at the Canadian Forces College, Dr. Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard, who turned out to be my neighbour, and we got to chatting. He then served to introduce me and graciously welcome me into a [community of military and design practitioners](https://aodnetwork.ca/) he was forming around this question of using design as a lever for reflexivity and foresight within the defence community.

I spent the past week participating in one of the key outcomes of Philippe’s time in Copenhagen, [a design and security workshop](https://aodnetwork.ca/the-albatross-playbook/) looking at how a well established pillar of the military planning community — games and game design — could be used as a wedge into teaching design skills to security practitioners. Fully vaccinated and frankly somewhat starved for in-person collaboration after emerging from our most recent lock down, it was an opportune space to doff my usual facilitator or speaker’s cap and join as a participant. I’m incredibly glad I did.

![](/assets/52169f0fb36c1cd9f165f23f312adfb584cb8503-1360x1070.png)

The participants came from academic and defence institutions from across NATO and NATO strategic partners, and most of whom had some existing connection to — or at least disposition for — military design thinking. But only a handful of us were design practitioners in the traditional sense of using design to create objects and experiences — a game designer, a hacker/maker, and myself as a service designer and prototyper. I had some trepidation around this, since in general I tend to believe that without the making part, you’re not actually doing design. What I was dismissing with that criticism was that while most of the participants weren’t engaged in design in their day-to-day, they were perfectly willing to make things tangible with whatever they had access to.

Given the constraints of Covid, only a limited number of folk were able to make it to the workshop in Copenhagen. In the two weeks preceding the event, a few online workshops were hosted to help seed initial thinking and also “soften” the participants to co-creative and iterative processes. These ranged from small lectures with breakout sessions, wherein teams would quickly run through a series of concepts and filter down to ideas that fit the scope (or at least tried to fit the scope) of the in person workshop.

For the main body of the workshop, our goal was to create a functional game mechanic that could serve to “teach” a facet of the design process. We were guided through a pretty standard cycle of activities that reflected the [double-diamond framework](https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond), lightly but effectively moderated by Philippe and Ilan. In the background, other members of the University of Copenhagen Center for Military Studies were hustling around making sure things ran smoothly — wrangling resources and testing schedules via Discord, pushing for documentation of processes, and facilitating connections with remote participants.

Unfortunately, that latter point is likely one big failing — and I think is more a quality of remote collaboration than it is the design of this workshop. Event inclusivity when potential participants can’t travel (either because of economic means or for the Covid of it all) is the right idea in principle, but I’ve yet to see an event actually pull it off. Whereas established conferences have all been going the learning archive route, until they can host in person events again — most newcomers have been struggling with flagging attention, poorer learning results, and a generally less engaged community with fewer meaningful connections formed.

![](/assets/cc15457ae67a826be6f11e2c45d2ad3d85401992-1304x836.png)

We saw that result with some of the remote participants in the workshop on two levels — those who were paired as remote contributors to in-person teams, and an entirely remote team. For the mixed remote/in-person teams, the on-off cadence of participation made it difficult for those participants to get the whole picture, and as a result, ended up primarily adding value through “on-demand crits.” In the best scenarios, they helped us speed up our iterative cycles and get to results that we wouldn’t have seen without that on-demand external eye. In the worst cases, it actually served to disrupt the relatively tightly packed working sessions as we struggled with Discord and connections. But ultimately for each of the in-person teams (who, I’ll remind you, were packed full of senior NATO officers, academics, and strategists), we got to a prototype that one could understand, if not directly play.

For the entirely remote team, they struggled a bit more to get to something tangible. Instead of drilling down to something that was playable, they mostly stayed at the theory and principle levels. Though it didn’t get us to the goal of the workshop, as an outsider I found this part to be pretty useful as a frame on the way that design-curious strategists and theorists frame the work of design. Put somewhat pessimistically, **design thinking is one of the best sales tools available to the practicing designer.** If you can access a “design thinker” who is bought into the value of a design process, then the process of selling through and executing on good design work becomes infinitely easier — and often more impactful.

After experiencing the work and collaborations that emerged during this workshop, it’s hard not to see a lot of value in these types of challenges to the fundamentals of design practice and strategic thinking in the military. First, **the scope that defence practitioners are working within is substantially broader than that which most designers find themselves** **working in** as defined by our job titles — but we SHOULD be working at these more strategic levels to properly consider the equities at play in assessing and implementing design decisions. Understanding the skills that senior defence practitioners bring to bear in managing stakeholders and their equities is a skill that can dramatically improve the outcomes and impact of any design work. We have a few of these already — mapping tools, facilitation, immersive research — but I think there’s a lot more to learn there.

Second, **defence practitioners are rarely empowered to make and break like designers — but they find other effective ways to critically iterate on problems.** I think part of the appeal that design practice presents to defence practitioners is the dogmatic belief in critically failing your way to success by way of a foam core strewn trail of discarded prototypes. Those practices just don’t appear in the military context as frequently as tools for ideation (though it does for sales and persuasion, as demonstrated by the movie Pentagon Wars). But things like drills, war games, red teaming, quantitative and action-based simulation, and similar things DO exist in a military context, and these are tools that frankly the design community could learn a bit more from. Especially red teaming.

Finally, **Security is more than bombs and war.** Defence practitioners aren’t just dealing with the core material of conflict — which is a reasonable thing to object to and ultimately ones politics are ones own. When I worked DOD, we were quite careful not to work on weapons systems as part of the US Digital Service, BUT we also worked on systems that were just that, given a different lens and context. A more efficient and better designed recruiting system in peace time can be a tool of social mobility, and in war time can be a ticket to the front for the most vulnerable. But “security” encompasses topics of migration, international institutions, climate, economics, ecological, logistic, epidemiological 🦠, and all sorts of different challenges that make for a wildly interesting problem space for designers. Today’s defence practitioners are working actively and energetically in these domains because they are vital and affect all of us. Security never becomes so pressing as when it disappears, so designing for a security context is — by its nature — designing for better human outcomes. Now, I’ll also say that we need to take a critical eye to all of that since you’re also designing within the context of a state existing in an anarchic system if you listen to some folk, but I’d suggest finding the topic that interests you, and then engaging in the theoretical literature that helps you engage that topic critically.

So. This workshop was great, and huge congrats to Philippe and his team at the Archipelago of Design for pulling off a meaningful convening under great stress and logistic challenges. I can’t wait for more.

I’d definitely recommend subscribing to the [Archipelago of Design’s newsletter](https://aodnetwork.ca/) for future such events, and can’t wait to see what comes next.


Designers in the Military


## “You are not connected to a network.”

When flashed across a screen on any range of devices, these words often describe a bottleneck to the work we were trying to get done. For thousands of New Yorkers in 2012, this barrier came with the torrential rain and devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. For millions of victims and first responders of natural disasters since, it represents a barrier to contacting loved ones, discovering safe zones, tracking relief efforts, and simply staying updated.

From their volunteer relief efforts with Occupy Sandy, [Chris Guess](https://medium.com/@cguess) and [Matt Grasser](https://medium.com/@msgrasser) felt like they could see some better options for at least part of this puzzle. Chris had watched a friend of his move from distribution point to distribution point recording inventory surpluses and deficits, and then spend long hours filling those into an excel spreadsheet that had to be uploaded over satellite phone only to become a bottleneck for getting resources where they needed to go.

## Making Something Good

Chris and Matt had started playing with an idea around networking for a month months, and came together for a disaster relief hackathon for Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. They used this as the opportunity to build a small team with co-founders Nick and Emily around the project idea, and the nascent form of LDLN came into the world.

LDLN is an open source software and pseudo-mesh networking framework for ad-hoc networking between consumer devices in austere situations. If there’s no internet or cell service, LDLN and its suite of tools provide high quality data collection and synchronization across devices via low-cost base stations. These base stations are often Raspberry Pis: small sub-$25 computers that can run sophisticated server and networking software, as well as host databases and similar. If this base station is connected to a broader internet via satellite or hard wired connection, then it can be synchronized further up the chain.

First responders and logistics teams engage with the software by configuring the systems to the needs of that responds scenarios: gathering appropriate mapping and tabular data. Individual responders run the software on their devices to collect data offline, and when they come within range of a base station, this data is automatically synchronized with the other responders findings and work.

## Making Something Last

LDLN has been around in a slowly iterating form since 2013. Instead of being a non-profit or a strictly a for-profit entity, Matt and Chris chose to incorporate under a Washington Benefit Corporation, or “Social Purpose Corporation” (SPC). Washington SPCs are structured such that they provide protections to company executives in pursuing social goals that might be counter to the fiduciary duties of the corporation. While a traditional C corporation’s officers are bound to pursue better fiduciary outcomes as a responsibility to their shareholders, an SPC may consider the broader social outcome pursuant to their mission.

Matt and Chris took the perspective that investment was a potential threat to the intent behind their work as a social good. A strictly for-profit entity might make their technology and more attractive to traditional venture capital investment, but comes with it a necessary shift in mission as investors might drive them towards more profitable markets tangential to their primary goals. Non-profit structures come with their own needs: for grant application, for compliance, and similar. Additionally, grant seeking in the non-profit space (especially at the time of LDLN’s inception) is often insufficient in both capital and flexibility for the scope of activities around which LDLN was being built.

In the software and product work, **Bootstrapping** is a business and product development approach where founders invest their own time and resources in building up a product. Their investment of time in exchange for “sweat equity” (often actually represented as shares in a company, but really it can be any number of things) builds something that –hopefully– starts creating value on its own, thereby -hopefully- bypassing the need for external investment. Bootstrapped companies are often slower in their growth than venture-backed businesses however, so in many cases the slow growth curve of a product can be a risk as they compete with others for adoption and market share.

The LDLN team made a conscious decision to apply the bootstrapping model in the social good space. They stuck to the value-first lens with which the organization had been started, and chose to slowly incubate the product over time as they built the product up over evenings, weekends, and between contracts in their independent work.

While professing that Bootstrapping has provided them incredible freedom as an organization, it comes with its costs. Matt and Chris shared stories of hopping on a plane to give a demo for public sector providers or humanitarian organizations, only to not see any effective follow up. Substantial interest in the tool itself was not matched by technical capacity in public and civil sector organizations, and so the open source promise of the tool fell short when confronted by internal inability to implement the freely given technology. Similarly, because of the procurement processes that have metastasized within many public sector organizations, LDLN’s team was ill equipped to deal with the multi year or even decade long cycles that might be be involved in selling to governments.

Unfortunately, this economic uncertainty around a high-value tool caused some attrition in the team. Some members had to take on full time roles and reduce their involvement in the tool itself, or other financial stressors (in some cases positive, such as two of the team members getting married) affected the product’s develop. But Matt and Chris have both continued building the tool, and with that continued bootstrapping, they have managed to connect with some important communities, including a FEMA-funded Field Innovation Lab, Geeks Without Borders, and NextDayBetter.

## Lessons for the Bootstrapping Social Entrepreneur

Here are three things that all social entrepreneurs should take from LDLN’s example as they set out on their own enterprises.

## 1) Every enterprise is a balance of forces that influence the product vision

The LDLN team recognized this from day one, and made a series of thoughtful decisions that managed their growth and scope to protect that the vision they held for the product and its sphere of influence. While this decision limited options and growth from a business lens, it led to a coherent and valuable product for users and those the LDLN team hoped to positively impact.

## 2) Sometimes a side-gig is sufficient or even preferable

Sometimes, a product does not need to have a full-time team around. When a team decides to go full-time on product development, the product must somehow support that time. That is often where venture capital or grant funding comes into play as a product grows to encompass the needs of the team around it. By bootstrapping their product, the LDLN team allowed the product to grow according to the demand and need for the product in the market, as opposed to forcing the product to grow to meet the growth needs of the business.

## 3) Bootstrapping unlocks the right time, place, and partners

LDLN is a tool that is used and tested in situations of austerity and often profound distress. And one of the challenges of disaster resilience is that preparation is necessary both in the tool and in the community around the tool. By bootstrapping and encouraging resilience in their own practice, LDLN built a tool that can be deployed anywhere, can be deployed quickly, and importantly has the right network of partners in the form of local agencies, open source contributors, and former project members to jump into action when it’s needed.

## Slow Burn Social Innovation

In the disaster resiliency space, sometimes the right tool is the one that is around when you needed it, but spends most of its time on the shelf. I’ve kept in touch with Chris since the interview, and learned about some of the work that he did building [technical infrastructure in relief work in Rockport, Texas](https://medium.com/@cguess/spreading-the-word-9dcfe92c958b). LDLN is a standing example of the “slow burn” social innovation tool. Perhaps there isn’t a business model now, and perhaps its time isn’t even now. But the work is worth doing and worth pushing until such time as it can be applied in service to others, and in times like that, dedication to the mission and a thoughtful application of a bootstrapping model comes into its own.

_Originally published on [**Medium**](https://medium.com/@andrewlb/bootstrapping-infrastructure-in-the-public-interest-8b74b00f953)._


Bootstrapping Infrastructure in the Public Interest


I have terrible taste in film. I once suggested Zardoz to a first date, am a huge fan of the Conan movies and am a sucker for any given action film that happens to flit across my radar with at least somewhat recognizable tropes.

So when Army of the Dead popped up on Netflix as a two-and-a-half hour collection of metastasized genre tropes, I was pretty obviously going to watch it. And it was everything I could have hoped for.


On Dumb Pleasures


There are professional Cassandras out there and their curse isn't coming from Apollo this time — but from the institutions they serve under.

Warning intelligence is a function of the intelligence community that manifests in different ways, but at its best tends to come about as a small and senior team filled with experienced professionals with the ears of decision makers. The problem is, that while this structure emerges with some frequency (the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for Warning, or NIO/W is an example of this), these offices tend to pretty quickly get a reputation for crying wolf.

9/11 tends to be the most widely known failure in warning intelligence that many think of — a coordinated strike on American domestic targets, both civilian and military, by a well established terrorist network, whose rhetoric and actions forwarding a religiously-framed war against the United States were known to the American IC. But actually, you could argue this wasn't a failure in warning intelligence — whose purview fits the six month to several year timeline according to one of its great practitioners and thinkers, Cynthia Grabo — but rather a failure in tactical intelligence and interagency coordination (which is one of the arguments put forward in the [9/11 commission report)](https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf). Warning intelligence had actually done its job. In the chapter "The System was Blinking Red," the commission outlines how many of the warning functions were operating well — sharing indications that major attacks were in the works — but the different security functions of state were not. In many ways, Cassandra was being ignored.

![](/assets/6e4ca21ef97fa44cdd5ecda5d3626fe9f8ca8525-667x673.png)

Most of us operate less in the present, and more as a kind of smear between past and future — with our present moments coalescing like a Gerhard Richter painting. Strategic thinking at its best orders this natural chaos: providing the structure and tools to look ahead, look behind, and actually make decisions in the moment that support futures. Ladder that up to decision making for not just oneself but others' time, resources, etc. and you get some pretty clear examples of strategic decision making. Taken up even further — with thousands and millions (the American Department of Defense has about 1.4 million employees when considering both civilian and uniformed personnel) people relying on different tiers of strategic decision making — and the impulse is to embed those sensory and analytical functions within specific teams and career paths. This is what makes it possible for an elected official with a four to eight year mandate to move into the chief executive role and actually do anything coherently.

Warning intelligence is one such analytical organ within the outsourced and institutionalized cognition of a chief executive. But like the weird pain or feeling of apprehension that we might easily ignore, warning intelligence isn't the thing driving the ship. Rather, it might try to influence at best — but often gets ignored.

During his presidency, Bill Clinton didn't have a great relationship with the security establishment. This was during a period when the somewhat bloated American military was being reduced following the close of the Cold War, and American engagement in overseas adventurism was manifesting in some weird ways. Amongst these was a loss of the "great enemy" of the Cold War, around which national security interests in America had swirled — which in turn shifted how the American public saw foreign wars. America's engagement in the UN mission in Somalia during the Somalian civil war, for example, was initially seen as a natural extension of American hegemony, but the Battle of Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down) in 1993 put a pretty stark end to that with the resulting death of 19 servicemen.

These events led to a kind of souring on intelligence and foreign engagements by the Clinton administration, who felt like they were being pulled into these engagements, less because America should be involved, but rather because it had the strongest capabilities — part of what drove the multilateralism that was dominant during his presidency. But this view also served to block out the warnings that the Clinton admin was receiving about other regional conflicts. Following the Battle of Mogadishu, Clinton was said to have an explicitly pessimistic view on further military engagements in Africa. He didn't want to know. But the point of warning intelligence is that things happen ANYWAY, irrespective of whether or not you want it to or not. So despite warning intelligence indicating that stockpiling and ethnic tension were occurring in Rwanda, the Clinton government [didn't do a thing](https://qz.com/384228/the-clinton-foundation-is-atoning-for-bills-failure-on-rwanda/) as a million Rwandans of Tutsi ethnicity were massacred by fellow Rwandans of the majority Hutu ethnic group.

![](/assets/92dab1148723517d9db36cbd335a95e08c582386-1534x979.png)

Warning intelligence doesn't make the decision, but rather serves as a function in intelligence with two primary roles: **to track uncertainty and threats, and communicate effectively to decision makers when those threats manifest into risk**. When driving, our eyes move constantly: flicking across our vehicle's status indicators, the road (and its external status indicators, like dividing lines and shoulder), other cars and their trajectory and the mirror, to alert us about things from behind. If we see something that's a threat (like a big truck pulling up alongside, or one that we're trying to pass), we're a lot less anxious if we see it coming. The risk is small and we have contingencies (maybe pulling onto the shoulder, maybe deciding not to drive between two trucks, etc). But if we're reeling from a near miss moments earlier, or are caught unaware by its speed, then the potential risk we're taking in responding to this new threat is substantially greater.

Later, the Clinton admin had acknowledged that many, many Rwandans could had been saved with a relatively small American deployment of just a single division (around 10,000 soldiers). But the proximity to the Battle of Mogadishu meant that even though warning intelligence was serving its function with its analytic output, it had been systematically locked out from its communication function. Apollo's curse manifested in cancelled meetings, edited documents, and shifted priorities.

These days, there's more of a structure that John Gentry calls "Every Analyst a Warning Analyst" in his book [Strategic Warning Intelligence](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9781626166554), which basically tries to diffuse this warning function across many different analysts. The problem is that perceiving threats from the miasma of risks and uncertainties out there requires a particular disposition and is frankly a job. Thinking about something really, really hard — worrying about it until something emerges and then validating that what emerged isn't just in your head — that's a full time thing.

In a lot of orgs, designers and researchers can play this kind of role by serving in a kind of foresight and prototyping function. While not attuned to decision making per se, the designer and researcher surfaces the right context for product decision makers to move effectively. In others, product owners do this type of work, looking ahead to where something needs to be and gaming out the risks to the product and the business surrounding it. These risks are surfaced incrementally in roadmaps and are responded to and acted upon by decisions makers.

I'm personally curious to learn a lot more about these kinds of institutionalized foresight functions within organizations (though I'll say that I think warning is different from foresight in specific ways — both in lens and communication), so expect some more writing like this.

However, if you're interested in warning specifically, take a look at some of the links spread throughout, as well as some of these resources below. Cynthia Grabo's book is free and was recently declassified after decades of service as a key resource in strategic warning training. I also wrote about Gentry's Strategic Warning Intelligence book, which is fascinating and very much worth your time.

## Some further reading

[National Intelligence Warning: The Alert Memorandum (U)](https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-spectrum/national_intell_warning.pdf)

[Cynthia Grabo's Anticipating Surprise](https://www.ni-u.edu/ni_press/pdf/Anticipating_Surprise_Analysis.pdf)

[Strategic Warning Intelligence](https://andrewlb.com/reading/strategic-warning-intelligence/)


Professional Warning People


Like our bodies need oxygen, our businesses need a constant supply of knowledge and understanding to fuel our work. But accessing that knowledge isn’t always as intuitive as breathing.

Understanding the* why* of your research is the difference between wasted time (and budget), and absorbing previously untapped knowledge and opportunity. You want to be in the latter camp: taking a deep breath to fuel your next move. To do that, you need to be able to articulate your research objective and have some sense of what it is you want to uncover.

## **But Why?**

Great research starts with a question. An itch that needs to be scratched. Sometimes, this question actually comes from an assertion that something is the case, and we need to validate that assertion to really invest in it. Other times, it comes from an anxiety: that the knowledge we have is insufficient, and there is something over the horizon.

The nature of the knowledge sought dictates the nature of the research itself.

Let’s take the example of a hypothetical TODO App, **“Nudge Nudge TODO Calculator,”** to frame the problem.

Nudge Nudge has big growth opportunities:

1. Seeing if its existing solution might have some crossover in a different market **(diverging, exploring)**

2. adding to its existing TODO application for small teams **(converging, validating)**

These are two very different research questions.

## **Diverge**

If we’re stepping into the unknown, then we want to take a **GENERATIVE** research approach. For Nudge Nudge, if we were to ask “How do people structure their time at home?” we would be starting a broad exploration into areas that may or may not overlap with Nudge Nudge’s existing offering. And that is the point.

![](/assets/0208934790e4c3af50b5de001d08077dfddd2b5b-1000x667.jpg)

We don’t yet have a solution, but rather the idea that there might be an opportunity for our expertise in an adjacent space. A question like **‘How do people structure their time”** opens up the opportunity to stumble upon new knowledge.

For Nudge Nudge, we might interview an engineer who is juggling her responsibilities as a mom with her need to keep up to date in her field. We’d talk to a policy analyst, whose real passion lies in outdoor rock climbing, requiring considerable organization to get out to the rock frequently. Or we might chat with that junior account manager, who is 23, trying to impress at a new job, and just wants to figure out dating in a new city.

Each might discuss their own strategies for dealing with the complexity of their day-to-day. The engineer might have learned from her experience leading agile teams and use Trello to manage her home life. From her, we’d learn how she translated those skills from her work to her home life and adapted to her changing experience. We might also learn where her work toolkit falls short in helping her keep up at home.

The policy analyst might be a lot less structured: simply booking it to the mountains on Friday at 5, and bringing along everything they need to read for the next week. We might learn something about estimation and priorities here, as well as the borders between work and personal time that are seen as sacred.

The account manager might not have any strategies whatsoever, but he runs a constant sleep and attention deficit. Here, we might learn about the customer needs and what we’d do if we DID have all the time in the world. We might also notice budding strategies and shifts in priority that might help us understand how someone comes to understand a need for greater structure.

By tapping the abstract frame of “structured time” from the more specific functionality that Nudge Nudge uses to direct its research, they’ve unlocked a set of directions for future product exploration and just maybe, a future for the Nudge Nudge Team.

## **Converge**

But what if we think we know something but need to make sure? This is where **EVALUATIVE** research comes into play. An engineer at Nudge Nudge might have developed a proof of concept that automatically prioritizes and estimates tasks for design teams. The engineer is quite certain this belongs in the future of the product, but needs to convince his colleagues that this is the way forward.

![](/assets/20d7d1e881ccd5b29c7100a5a27534e1233cf2d8-4000x2671.jpg)

Here, the research question becomes much more specific, but still broad enough for new knowledge to emerge. Instead of asking overly broad “How might we prioritize tasks?” type of questions, the prudent research-minded engineer instead asks **“How do you prioritize and estimate your design tasks today?”** Followed by “Can I show you an idea I had?” later on in the interview.

These types of validation-focused activities help us narrow down the scope and needs of our creations, and address the nuances of creation that keep a good idea from gaining traction. But they also present a risk.

In interviewing a designer friend from another company, the engineer poses the question “What do you think of this automatic scheduler I made?” The engineer is posing a leading question, one that would likely be answered with “Oh wow, that’s great” and not lead to a satisfactory outcome.

Instead, the engineer could ask “Okay, so let’s say you have four days worth of work to do in two days. Tell me how you’d deal with that, starting from the second you sit down at your desk. Was there a time like this recently? Tell me about it.” After the designer had explained their experience, only then would the engineer introduce their solution, exploring where that solution fits into the experience the designer had just described.

Most likely, the engineer will be off. They might come to understand that the act of prioritizing a design is actually part of the design process itself, leading to better outcomes for the product. Or that the act of estimation is more complicated than the engineer had initially thought, and requires a revisit in how it was implemented.

However, the engineer will also come away with some great validating insights: quotes that can be used to reinforce his argument for including it in the product, a roadmap derived from a potential customer’s experience, and photos of real people interacting with the prototype.

## **Bringing it Together**

These two forms of research can be used together almost like breathing in and out. **Generative** research is a process of absorbing information broadly, breathing in deep from a world of knowledge. **Evaluative** research takes that new knowledge, and filters it down: directing it in a focused way to where it is needed most to accomplish an objective like the vascular system directs oxygen, and expelling the waste in the process.

The trick is always to know what phase you’re in, and never starve your work of knowledge.

## **Do better research with the right admin tools**

Of course, when it comes to research, there’s some important administration. Before, I always found this to be a chore. [Which is is why I built Knowsi.](https://www.knowsi.com/)

Collecting the right consent from participants, scheduling, and organizing the media afterwards, in a GDPR compliant and responsible way, becomes easy. Plus, participants know you value their privacy because they get their own receipt of the consent form with the ability to reach out afterwards.

[Give Knowsi a try with a 1 week trial today](https://www.knowsi.com/join), and [sign up for our mailing list](https://www.knowsi.com/?mail=true) for a discount code and more articles like this every few weeks.

![](/assets/214e7ca97916f7c7673fc14b493a9a8e024746cb-1400x847.png)

_This article was originally published on [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/breathing-in-and-out-or-two-approaches-to-design-research-f26e05b0b4a7)._


Breathing In and Out, or Two Approaches to Design Research


It’s really hard to understand the value of expertise in a discipline from the outside. Or put another way, the language of disciplines can make identifying expertise difficult.

First, we don’t always get strong external signals about the complexity of a discipline (like a designer, a software engineer, a pattern maker, a plumber — basically a named set of skills/actions with some kind of self-organizing characteristic between practitioners). Second, the discipline’s skillset (welding, planning, troubleshooting, triaging — i.e. the base capabilities required to participate in that discipline) itself might obfuscate the relative complexity (or lack thereof) of the discipline. Finally, the complexity might not lie in the skillset being marketed (I can make you a logo), but rather some catalyst to that skill (I can learn enough about your business, your market, your product, to create a visual identity that ‘just works somehow’). Ultimately, it’s those two in conjunction that creates value.

![](/assets/7c161786916626ee7cb21cec2f59ce990cf61a6c-550x382.png)

But, speaking of value, **markets rarely reflect the value of a discipline and its skillsets accurately**, yet we rely on the market as a proxy for value in discipline selection. Graphic design is still a woefully underpaid discipline even for extremely talented designers, for example. Pattern makers in the fashion industry make on average $20 an hour, despite it requiring years of training and nuanced technical expertise to get right. Librarians and archivists wrangle incredible informational complexity into legible systems for consumers, while being barely awarded a subsistence living for this skill. Yet user experience design — an admittedly ill-defined discipline that you can take a short evening class to gain entry to — can get you a six-figure job quite quickly (if you’re in the right city). Some of those salaries are definitely warranted. Others less so. We can’t trust markets as a barometer for expertise and complexity here.

And yet we also can’t trust internal signals within a discipline as a good barometer of this either. Not to harp on user experience design (a domain I work within), but a good starting point for the dictionary definition of “Vacuous” is the [user experience tag on Medium](https://medium.com/tag/user-experience). While engineering disciplines can go quite deep into technique and mechanisms for problem-solving — so much of the professional writing in the UX space (apart from some notable exceptions, like [A List Apart](https://alistapart.com/), [O’Reilly](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/org-design-for/9781491938393/), and a few of the [Rosenfeld Media](https://rosenfeldmedia.com/) books) amounts to a weird merger of lifehacks-for-wireframers and [listicles](https://backlinko.com/hub/content/listicles). This, unfortunately, leads to homogeneity in the way that many UX designers approach craft — without criticality to the discipline, but rather frantically trying to keep pace within the self-organizing hype machine that is UX design. A person could get a job as a UX designer by just deep diving into these posts and their language, but would they be a designer? Or, by the same token, is a designer who fails to maintain their skillset relative to the discipline’s trends (in the case of a decentralized discipline like UX design) still a member of that discipline?

![](/assets/b7af3d7d642835e635c1db6c71959296512612eb-4000x2666.png)

Part of the problem is that the true complexity of a discipline is not the skillset per se — but rather what that skillset can unlock. I’ve met a ton of folk who entered into user experience design as their early field — only to have a deep curiosity in security, accessibility, privacy, and social justice EMERGE from their immersion in that craft. In these cases, their core skills within that discipline may vary, but the expertise that discipline served to unlock is unique and potentially highly valued. This gets to the question of who determines what expertise means relative to a given discipline — and who gets to determine when someone gets access?

The domain of Intelligence is an interesting example of accessible skills made inaccessible through obfuscation. Intelligence work — the stuff of spies and surveillance — is treated as rarified and often inaccessible. Yet the reality is, that any state or non-state entity that’s survived past a few years, has evolved at least a marginally sophisticated intelligence apparatus. The skillset of the spy is something many are taught and many simply learn through experience — the skillset is actually incredibly common. One can pick up a textbook on open-source intelligence (OSINT) and learn a vital set of skills good analysts need, for example. But the complexity lies in how that ladders up to awareness, foresight, and decision making (either in how foresight is communicated or in actual policy/business decisions). And that escalation of complexity emerges from collaboration within and across expertise within a discipline.

Design requires a similar co-creative approach to really ladder up its value. Many access design through a craft-based domain: a passion for building things, the creation and cultivation of a craft, and the situating of that craft in the market. But the competitive value of design doesn’t really get unlocked until that craft-based skill helps unlock a deeper kind of systems awareness — and capacity to navigate ambiguity and complexity through the cycles of that craft AND the crafts of others. That usually involves collaboration across skills within one's own discipline, and with other disciplines with their own legibility.

The problem lies in how that is accessed. Designers interpret designers through the portfolio review — observing the outcome of a design process, while interrogating the process itself, and exploring the non-determinative, yet strangely repeatable path that leads a designer through complex terrain to meaningful outcomes. But it’s a lot harder for one discipline to interrogate another discipline for that collaborative opportunity. As I was told by a user recently — it’s a hell of a lot easier to solve a problem across disciplines if there’s a common language.

This gets us to a question that I’ll leave open: what is the value of a discipline where skillsets are loosely shared, but not completely overlapping? Designers spend a lot of time stressing about Venn diagrams between service, interaction, UX and other design disciplines — when perhaps the real issue that we need a shared mechanism to engage different skill-based expertise around a shared vocabulary? Does a writer become a designer because the discipline of design needs a writer’s skill to maintain its place? Or does a writer become a designer because the discipline of design is a sufficiently vague enough tent that a new core skillset can slip in unnoticed? And at what point does such a discipline’s boundaries lose focus, meaning, and eventually, value.

![](/assets/028a9071808dedb07e2d9013bf16ce7e819d44dc-600x402.png)

For my part, I’d rather see more skills in design than less, because there is a natural limiting mechanism. After all, the “gate” to being a designer is being able to make a thing — the craft component to it. The systems orientation is something that is either emergent from that craft, or dispositional to the practitioner. As for accessing other disciplines — ultimately this comes in a co-creative way too. The trust you build with colleagues in other disciplines becomes the groundwork for interpreting the skills of others down the road. Good experience with one type of person in another discipline leads to an affinity for that same type of person for future collaboration. This can lead to homogeneity in hiring ([the classic “cultural fit” problem](https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-to-hire)), and ultimately work that lacks relevance or does harm. But engaging with your own discipline critically — and applying that same critical lens to the skills of others — can maybe mitigate the worst of that.

Either way, next time someone is touted as an expert in their field (or claims it), don’t just look at the skills on parade. Rather, look at the negative space, the people behind them, the language around the craft, and the moments where craft meets their catalyst.


Craft, Catalyst, and Expertise


_(Originally written March 23, 2020)_

Why is it that we can see something coming and still not prepare? I’ve been asking myself this question over the past 10 days that we’ve been on lock-down here in Denmark. While we set ourselves up pretty well (how is besides the point here), we set ourselves up in a very general way. We have some medical supplies and training, we have food, we can keep ourselves and our son protected… we think. But what if we could be more specific?

It was this question that spurred my wife [Ayla](http://www.aylanewhousedesign.com/) (a design director at Fjord) and I (design all-arounder and co-design consultant) to do what we have consistently done in our relationship: turn to goddamn post-it notes.

We realized that we needed a different tool to deal with this complexity, and so we created a game. It’s not — strictly speaking — a particularly fun game. It’s not dealing with a particularly fun topic. But it follows that structure and it was (and is) useful to us. **This is a long post: if you want to jump to the rules and the tools we created, just head to the end.**

## Anxiety, Collected

Our first task was to enumerate our anxieties. That was fun.

![](/assets/6572a232ac59347bbf3be5253919fce03de6e803-2048x1365.jpg)

We started off just listing everything we could think of

Sickness and death in our family (all on another continent), our son Emil getting sick, losing our job(s), overwhelmed public health systems, closed borders, and economic bailouts failing were the obvious near-term concerns. Greater extremes came quickly after: governments focusing on their citizens above foreigners (we’re foreign workers in Denmark), seized assets. Even broader: what of a European Union unable to fulfill its “union” mandate? What of existing fragility and its fallout, such as armed conflict between Turkey and Russia?

These anxieties are overwhelming when taken together, and can quickly spiral. I’d argue they are effectively the same as reaching out frantically in the dark from one's current position. What we needed is a way to tackle these anxieties in sequence.

In the past, we’ve often used a tool like [backcasting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backcasting): looking at a future or point in time that we WANTED to get to, and figuring out the steps required to get there. But we aren’t in that kind of situation. **We aren’t defining a strategy so much as developing a posture from which to engage whatever the world is throwing at us in a time of extreme uncertainty.**

We want to build our resilience. We know (insomuch as one can) where we are right now: so what does it mean to scout forwards in time?

## Anxiety, Organized

Our next step was to simply cluster the anxieties where they seem to make sense. A few obvious ones emerged:

![](/assets/30b87b85e4267912061d5e400b1fdcab42753aec-3024x4032.jpg)

Some very initial clustering

### Environment

These were things like “One of us gets sick”, “Emil gets sick”, or “One of us loses our job.” Events that we are living with, in a time of change or decision making. Something that is probably traumatic, but also something that frankly most of us will be experiencing in some way over the coming months.

### Resources

These started as inflection points, things like “Hospitals get filled to capacity”, “No testing means no idea of actual risk”, and “Internet rationing or curfews.” But these clusters could be simplified down to “Public Health”, “Risk Appetite”, and “Community and Connection” respectively. Either private or public resources that shape outcomes. There’s a cluster of other ones as well, including Cash, Consumables and Food, Sanity, etc. Ultimately, anything that is a resource in balance.

### Inflection Point

Inflection Points are specifically in tension with the Environment category and have a lot of overlap. These are mostly framed as a CHANGE that we will have to make a decision around. An example we listed is that “Denmark starts emphasizing Danish citizens over foreigners for medical care” (unlikely but possible), “Indefinite lockdown is announced”, and “No one is hiring.” In each of these cases, it requires a non-obvious response given the reality we find ourselves in.

### Catastrophe

Finally, we have a “Catastrophe” category, which is something that throws an already vulnerable situation into complete chaos. This might be the death of a parent or partner, assets being frozen (for whatever reason), a national or international crisis, or — most likely — a full recession. Significantly, these are things that might actually be quite probable: but their likelihood doesn’t dilute the extreme emotional, financial, physical, and psychological impact of the event.

## Anxieties, Iterated

![](/assets/69f1711ead24889aa6c20fe083b60f5fd43e3971-3024x4032.jpg)

This is the part where things started to come together. Ayla and I were trying to figure out how to actually approach the forecasting part. We landed on a grid that looked a bit like this:

The initial canvas

![](/assets/aca63a7cf2e27d78aaf4b9150907299a2185cdf3-1440x1024.png)

First, one axis became time extending from now, +3mo, +6mo, +12mo, + 18mo, and +36 months. Then the other axis became the “order” of decision: environment to resources, resources to inflection point, inflection to catastrophe, with the two assessments beside it.

### Setting the Scene

First, **Environment** cards were chosen based on what we were facing right now. (We started with one of us being sick, though hopefully, we aren’t). Then looked at the **resources** that we had access to and what we were lacking. In the above scenario, we’re well set up for supplies and consumables, but honestly, don’t feel well covered by the public health system. This is an entirely subjective judgement: we might actually be well covered, but it’s just the feel there.

Next, we move on to the **Inflection Point**, which in this case is the made-up “Denmark explicitly emphasises Danish citizen wellbeing over foreign residents.” This being purely speculative, we wanted to explore what would happen.

![](/assets/c15ca7dc85e6a737f710947ea2cd14ec2b3fcbfc-2048x1365.jpg)

Looking at the first scenario

### The First Assessment

![](/assets/68d3bd5aabfaf43d6eeee82ed84a8da40bb72078-1440x244.png)

The first assessment canvas

After we laid out these four cards, along the “Now” time, we asked ourselves: “Okay, what would we do?” And at this first assessment, there actually wasn’t much. Even in a scenario where we were sick and our health as foreign workers was being devalued, we’re healthy, have resources, and have a community. So we decided that we’d simply stay home, and try to weather this sickness as best we can.

### The Second Assessment

![](/assets/31517ea3b13e68abca2a2df0855db9bab4b93531-1440x244.png)

The second assessment canvas

Then we rolled a dice. We had each of our catastrophy cards labeled with a number, since for this initial exercise we only had a few. And it rolled a 4: “A Death In the Family.” **This was the moment where the game hit home and we both said “Fuck” in unison.**

In a scenario where our own health was at risk and we had made the decision to shelter in place, suddenly our sibling or our parent calls us with crushing news. We’re between an 8 and 12-hour flight back — itself a multiple of risks to ourselves, our loved ones, and those whose paths are simply coincident with our own.

This is where the second assessment took place. We listed what would likely have to happen: hunker in place. Look after our physical health. Look after our mental health. Find a grief councillor who can work with us remotely. Redouble our efforts to stay connected with family. Take on the responsibility of planning and estate considerations, or support the family member who does.

### The Next Turn

Exhausted by this, we drew the next card: 3 months from now, in June. Suddenly, one of us is unemployed. We select our resources: we have good savings, but in such a situation our risk tolerance is going to drop (meaning we might not be able to jump on opportunities like we had in the past). Then a corresponding inflection point: “No one is hiring.”

We laid out our first assessment, which actually did not look too different from what we would do outside of a pandemic and looming recession. But the catastrophe card threw this into stark relief: the borders were fully locked down. Suddenly, even though we had not been planning a move, the scope of potential forward actions dramatically shrunk. Maybe the embassy? What do we do?

## Anxieties, Acknowledged

We played several rounds of this, seeing another family member pass, seeing cabin fever set in, and finally seeing both of us face unemployment. Each of these turns as they marched forward in time prompted stark decision making and discussions on what might come.

Ultimately, we looked at our decisions and took stock — what comes next? If these things might happen, what can we do now to offset the risk? If joblessness is a likelihood (or at least a distinct possibility), can we plan our capital and budget accordingly now as though we anticipate that? If the death of a family member is possible in the near term instead of the indeterminate future, what needs to happen?

**This wasn’t a fun game.** It was upsetting, painful, and anxiety-inducing. But though crudely simulating what might come, it helped map out many of the blindspots and fragilities we’ve had all along. And maybe, if we run through a few more times, it’ll mean we’re in a better posture when the time to act comes.

![](/assets/a3ed73356f37bc0044786aac36a91d8dba9b4271-2048x1365.jpg)

Dealing with the first game required a beer and serious decompression

## Rules of Play

Okay. The above was a long diatribe about why we made this. Here’s the TL;DR on the rules and how to play.

### Setup the Board

1. List out everything you’re thinking about on post-its or small squares of paper.
2.

Organize into:

- Environment (something ongoing, like sickness or unemployment)
- Resources (cash, community, etc)
- Inflection (an event that forces a decision)
- Catastrophe (something big and unexpected)
- Wildcard (Something possible but very unlikely, like a shooting war between Russia and Turkey or the EU collapsing)

1.

Create two axis:

- one of time starting from now,
- one with environment, positive resource, negative resource, inflection, catastrophe, wildcard. Then two more columns: Assessment 1, Assessment 2

[You can download the canvas here](undefined). We didn’t play with the wildcards initially, so didn’t include that on the canvas.

### First Round

1. Select an “Environment,” either what you’re most worried about now or what is already the case. Put that on “Now” and “Environment”. Then select two resource cards for what you have access to (positive) and what you are missing (negative). Then select a random inflection card.
2. Think about what you would do in this scenario and discuss. What do you hope you’d have? What kind of decision would you make? Write it down on a post-it and put it in assessment #1.
3. Then roll a dice or select a catastrophe card at random. Put it in the catastrophe slot.
4. Reflect on and discuss the new scenario given your previous decision. What changes? What can you do? How bad are things? What opportunities might exist? Write down your reflection and put it in assessment 2.
5. Normally the round is over, but if you want to add something, add an additional wildcard and an assessment #3.

### Subsequent Rounds

Each round builds on the last, so if your next time slot is three months from now, then it is following the decisions you made in the “Now” timeslot. Simply follow the same steps as the first round and see where it takes you.

### Reflection

Play until you feel like you have an idea of what might come. Before wrapping up, look at your assessments. What can you learn in terms of preparing for some of these worst cases now? Is there anything you need? Decisions you need to make? Processes to put in place?

And then if you like, play another round with a different starting point. Who knows what different decisions you might make, and what you might discover you’ll need on the other side.

### Resources

- [List of topics to help get started.](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kxSbkwnDXJZfGT_-6vx8Yu8Xa4zb8taRV3CGYYlHy5E/edit?usp=sharing)
- [Template canvas to print out](https://andrewlb.com/f87d372c75f53c5a605f786953391152/canvas.pdf)


Covid Anxiety: A Foresight Game


Design is a weird drug, and at least in the software world, we’re collectively high. Since I got started in this world, there’s been a huge amount of work done to democratize design — and I’m an outcome of that. Educated in political science, my gateway drug to design was the building of hardware and software instruments and installation art in my non-academic time. The thing that made me a good designer (whatever that means) was the systems thinking and research rigour that I learned in political science. However, the thing that’s kept me interested in design — apart from the hedonistic joy of making — is the process.

This idea for this post actually came while writing the Reconstructive Design Process essay two weeks ago and reading this quote from Rick Owens:

_“I’m always looking at the arc of my work and thinking about the next logical step. The fabric comes first: I usually start with 50 fabrics and edit them down to a dozen. Then I’ll work with black-and-white copies of archive looks, cutting up and manipulating them, or redrawing lines with a marker. I can plan a whole collection that way. I’ll ask my factory in Bologna to make toiles and, over one weekend, when there’s nobody else around, I’ll be in there working on them.” ([Interview w/ Rick Owens](https://www.matchesfashion.com/intl/mens/the-style-report/2017/01/the-paris-fashion-week-issue/my-desk-rick-owens-designer-interview))_

First, on process, this statement reflects a comfort in their own skin that is not seen frequently outside of independent design practice. It reflects an honesty of getting from **Here** to **There** that tends to frustrate those, who believe they are paying more for the process than they are paying for the end result. A consulting designer — or more generally, any designer working within a non-design institution — ends up wasting a certain amount of energy in the dramatization of process with the goal of trust-building. You end up with a three-body problem type of unpredictability in this scenario: the **process**, the **communication**, and the (imagined and then realized) **outcome** are in unpredictable tension with each other.

![](/assets/575f5db03bc9c32ac7cff457b31a03533b71652b-1002x539.png)

Often, this is communicated like this: _“Our design process is chaotic, but over time we narrow into something concise, legible, and ordered.”_ But the act of communicating this process externally, for the purposes of trust-building, narrows the scope of the possible process. The imperative of communication whips the process away from the outcome, changing both as a result. Since the act of communication serves as a forcing function for creating prototypes and concepts, this is sometimes for the better, but never what it might have been if process and outcome had greater freedom.

That design process is in one moment foreseen and unpredictable in the next, is the joy of being a designer. When I’m trying to explain my design process — and my confidence in the outcomes we’ll see at the end of it — I’m not telling you anything with certainty. I’m communicating that I’ve been down a path before, have seen the outcomes on the other end, and have a wall of elegantly [knolled](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs#Knolling) tools to get me out of dead ends. Because fundamentally, **design is about doing the work to explore those dead ends.** Getting something right initially is fundamentally not what design does. Design isn’t a prescription for a pattern, but it's an interrogation of patterns to generate a form.

![](/assets/9550669d74424dda1f8bcc10ede4664dca55174c-920x1156.webp)

[Hans Eijkelboom’s book People of the 21st Century](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/23/hans-eijkelboom-street-photography-tribes-people-twenty-first-century) is one of my favourite examples of this frame on design. Each individual expresses their style, tastes, constraints through dress, and Eijkelboom takes the time to organize those into likes — which in turn says something about the essence of the thing being observed. When we get to the essence of multiple “dead ends”, then we’re equipping ourselves with the tools to select within a domain of probability — one containing dozens, hundreds, even thousands of options — the specifics that make it into our tangible outputs as a designer.

Whereas Eijkelboom might engage in this task as a photographer observing the world and its patterns, designers have the additional benefit of observing their creations and iterating on those. A dozen prototypes might emerge one next step — an outcome of those different fragments. A dozen photos might not create the photo one wants, but it informs the photographer what to look for. The legibility one finds in design isn’t that outcomes are scrutable, but rather that the road becomes more legible through the interrogations a designer does on their own path.

Ultimately, this is also where the democratization of design practice through design thinking has done a bit of a disservice to design as a form-based, legible process. Understanding a process is not the same as experiencing it, and the experience of a design process ends up emerging naturally in any field where new things are arrived at through iteration. The Wright Brothers aren’t called “designers” often, but theirs was a quintessential design process — observation, insight, prototyping, failure, iteration. The [Netflix show Self-Made](https://www.netflix.com/title/80202462) about C.J. Walker reflects this too — a designer and businesswoman who designed a product to meet demand, and then designed her business and experiences as her scope expanded.

**The design is ultimately only legible from the outside when the work is done, and the process can be reflected upon.** Until then, it’s simply process — and process is not a monolith. The role of process is to provide us shortcuts to move quickly and to be redesigned completely if it doesn’t serve its purpose. If you’re seeking legibility in design before an outcome, then ask about what one has done in the past. If the journey is treated with the same iteration and reflection that the outcome is, then you’re talking to a designer.


Legibility in Design


The zombie genre is a compelling lens on the world despite its bleak premise. The dead rise and mindlessly go about adding to their numbers. Faced with what’s basically an environmental force, individuals and society proceed to break down, come together, reform, or get overwhelmed — ultimately becoming zombies themselves and adding to the threat to others. It’s such a simple and shallow premise — of course, it would become a vector for something more.

With its roots in slavery and colonialism, the idea of the zombie is nothing new. Crassly TL’DRing this [excellent explainer from Vox](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/31/13440402/zombie-political-history), the image of the zombie that we’ve come to know, originates in Haitian religious and slavery practices, toxically intermingled with white American fears of punishment for systemic practices of racial injustice and dehumanization of Americans not coded as white. This cascaded into projections of fear overtop of the zombie — the Cold War, invasion, contagion, capitalism. The zombie became a manifestation of our fears that was both deeply critical, and also permissive of an incredible **lack** of criticality.

![](/assets/388c3ec3ad1b92481e33dae86e3bdbd4bf89eb9b-885x560.jpg)

This idea that a genre can be so near-the-surface on both sides of the coin when it comes to criticism (shallow, let’s say) is worth consideration. The Dead Don’t Die is notable in that way. It’s a cheesy, entertaining zombie flick situated in the sleepiest town, with the sleepiest people, as the world ends. Imagine the Japanese zombie film [Wild Zero](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_D9OjDoQ0) set to the [opening theme of Twin Peaks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2lkvrMa27c), and you get the overall vibe of The Dead Don’t Die.

The film plays with the shallowness of the zombie genre by both taking it incredibly literally — “We the consumers are zombies to consumption” and atmospherically — demonstrating how the lurch and moans of the undead remarkably follow the same patterns and predilections of life. That the quotidian is its own kind of death, maybe.

There’s other genres of media like this. Fashion is an interesting one — it goes deep into reference, message, and structure at times. Elsewhere, it’s really just about the body at its most material, or most carnal, or whatever. Sometimes, it’s both incredibly horny and incredibly thoughtful. Alexander McQueen’s stuff often had that air to it — Rick Owens definitely does. To quote him [speaking of the Ramones](https://www.gq.com/story/rick-owens-aggression-fall-2021): “LOUD AND DUMB CAN ALSO BE CONCISE AND ELEGANT.” (He apparently only writes emails in caps lock because — of course he does)

![](/assets/f2d357c764d0e604fdc2bb8d1469c4cddf41a192-800x434.jpg)

Rei Kawakubo’s [Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body](https://www.vogue.com/fashion-shows/spring-1997-ready-to-wear/comme-des-garcons) (everyone calls it the Lumps and Bumps collection) is an example of this. At its surface, it's accessible and entertaining — drawing you in with the unfamiliar visually, but also setting the observer as somehow expecting such a thing from Commes des Garçon’s founder, as a rebellious and reclusive designer. But that accessible and uncritical interpretation serves to mask a critical intent lying just below the surface — that the forms that fashion takes, are dictated by the interface of the body, and interrogating the supposed uniformity of that interface frees both, body and dress, to explore new horizons.

![](/assets/c4c1981fe09bf96aa8926d1702068ae8d0400e2c-1600x900.jpg)

At its best, the zombie genre is like that. Entertaining, exciting, and quietly stalking our subconscious just below that surface. A message does not need to be overt and loud to be meaningful. Nor does it need to be quiet and muddy to be poignant. I still count Cillian Murphy’s rising anxiety and desperation in an emptied London — overlaid with the cascading guitar of Godspeed! You Black Emperor — as one of the most impactful scenes I’ve encountered in film. There wasn’t a zombie in sight, but the desolation was visceral. And during the peak of Denmark’s lockdown this winter, I’ve reflected on this scene from 28 Days Later pretty often.

I’m curious to see what they’ll become in our post-pandemic world. Maybe claustrophobia will be evoked by shuffling feet (maybe already in Dawn of the Dead though), or the injustice and helplessness of wealth inequality (okay, the less interesting Land of the Dead), or our societal inability to grapple with impending threats like climate change (wait, Max Brooks’ World War Z).

With so many of our existential fears exemplified by a shambling fantasy threat, zombies will keep getting reinvented to meet the fears of today. They’re such efficient vessels for stories around the ambient and the abstract, why not spice up a story of desertification with the undead? To quote an antagonist in World War Z — “Fear sells.” And it seems easy to make a sale lately.


Hidden in the Shallows


I love Rick Owens’ runway shows. They’re a consistent (and he is remarkably consistent) source of visual inspiration that I find bleeds into a few different sources of cultural and creative output. And as a designer consuming design work from a different material context, it’s almost inevitable that I get drawn into investigating process.

![](/assets/637d3398841e314a3ab3d013dcb18e0f9a19fca7-1600x2400.jpg)

Across a few interviews that I’ve been reading, one of the things that stood out was the way Owens engages with the trajectory of his work.

_“I’m always looking at the arc of my work and thinking about the next logical step. The fabric comes first: I usually start with 50 fabrics and edit them down to a dozen. Then I’ll work with black-and-white copies of archive looks, cutting up and manipulating them, or redrawing lines with a marker. I can plan a whole collection that way. I’ll ask my factory in Bologna to make toiles and, over one weekend, when there’s nobody else around, I’ll be in there working on them.” ([Interview w/ Rick Owens](https://www.matchesfashion.com/intl/mens/the-style-report/2017/01/the-paris-fashion-week-issue/my-desk-rick-owens-designer-interview))_

A toile is a mockup of a garment made in cheap cotton fabrics, called muslin or calico. It’s a way to test the construction, drape, and fit of a garment in a fabric similar to the weight of the end garment, without taking on the costs of finer fabrics — which can get incredibly expensive. In the earliest stages of designing a garment, draping muslin on a dress form means cutting, pinning, and manipulating that fabric into the forms that map onto the vision that the designer is bringing to their work. He’s taking his previous refined works as prototypes to interrogate and remake in a new collection.

![](/assets/44f9dfd5f1c61659602eb723cfd555795075edbd-2360x1428.png)

By working in this way (and Rick isn’t unique here), he is actively weaving the trajectory of his previous work into the demand for something new, with an upcoming collection. A silhouette might become accentuated or diminished through paneling; or a shoulder made more extreme or muted when unpicked on a toile — all incrementally moving towards the output that is ultimately communicated through polished forms and the communication medium of runways and lookbooks.

At its simplest, design is a perfusion of inputs into a process that results in an output. The work of design is the discipline of structuring and metabolizing those inputs into a form that — broadly — reflects those inputs. Perhaps more than most, designers are what they eat. But neither are designers distinct in this.

![](/assets/12c704a82eff6f81d5040c9986de11b7ba181351-850x461.png)

The OODA loop — articulated by the F16 designer and military strategist John Boyd — is a good example of how these actions are actually fairly banal. The OODA loop represents an observation, orientation, decision, and action loop that everyone is going through all the time, as we consume new information and decide on what it is that we’re going to engage with. Boyd’s idea was, that by shortening a pilot’s OODA loop, it would make them more competitive in a combat situation. For most of the rest of us, the OODA loop serves to frame how many of our actions are defined by rote response (jumping from orientation to action without engaging with it critically), analysis (jumping from orientation, to decision, back to observation without acting), instead of the full loop — conscious engagement with our influences as we move from decision to action.

Boyd’s model does an interesting job of balancing between the introspective and critical lens when engaging with decision making, as well as the more animalistic and reflexive lens — the action that bypasses critical consideration. In Boyd’s model, this bypass lends speed to action, by short-circuiting the decision step with instinct and directly leaping into action. What we maybe don’t discuss enough, is how that same tension exists in the quotidian grind of design work.

![](/assets/1a2384c4fb04c3f8ab1fc05f28187c36351e43bc-1600x2400.jpg)

Rick Owens' work is incredibly emotional and physical. It’s intuitively and perhaps natively evocative of fantasy, sensuality, violence, and a kind of fragile calm that initially belies the intellectual underpinning of his approach. But that only makes sense as a tension, if we believe that the reflexive and intuitive is in contrast to a more intellectual stance, instead of complementary to it.

One of the things that Rick Owens’ work has taught me so far, is that the critical and the intuitive flow from the same source. But frequently, we’re so wrapped up in suppressing one or elevating the other that we don’t make space for the two to intermingle effectively. My sense is that Rick’s process of catabolizing his own work is at the core of this creative process — and a key to focusing on his instincts. His process critically engages with the more intuitive and emotional aspects of his identity and process — using that short circuit as a tool of predictable creativity that others might dismiss as irrational or undesirable.

![](/assets/1c6a9101363d618fb84f9cb192c68e0cbe1a2e66-1800x1800.jpg)

The metaphor of metabolism is really at the centre of a reconstructive design process — old material is broken down for energy through catabolism, and new work emerges from its predecessors through an anabolic process. Repeated over and over, and the form that emerges is new, yet not. Structured, yet emergent. Consistent, but novel. A reconstructive design process emerges over a lifetime and, properly fuelled, creates a legacy.


Reconstructive Design Process


Sometime earlier this year, I think I had reached a personal threshold for managing information consumption where things just broke down.

Broadly, I had

- Things I **wanted** to read and consume (hobbies like sewing and topics related to my thesis)
- Things that I **had** to read and consume (work-related — e.g. Innovation literature, and class-specific, which I might or might not be interested in)
- Things that I **habitually** consumed (podcasts, news, feeds)
- Things that I **serendipitously** consumed (internet, news, Twitter)
- Things that I **spuriously** consumed (mostly random audiobooks I was willing to listen to passively, or a recommendation that sparked my interest — like Weep, Shudder, Die)

I’m expecting this to calm down a bit, once I've finished my masters this summer, but for now, wrangling so many disparate inputs, with such disparate needs defining those inputs, is making for a slightly hellish time.

So I’ve spent the past few weeks experimenting with trying to get things organized… better. Maybe. I’m not actually sure yet, but I figured I’d share what I’m doing. This is very much a "thinking out loud" write-up, so I'm grateful for your patience on this.

## **Capture**

I use two digital tools for this: [Workflowy](https://workflowy.com/), which is a kind of infinite bullet list with some decent search tools,

![](/assets/dd6797246a93ad3296c9c02a16c273e5124f9fdd-1450x1022.png)

and a [remarkable](https://remarkable.com/) tablet for writing.

They are kind of unbridled “capture” tools, helping me to ensure that info lives somewhere. Unfortunately, both have their disadvantages.

Workflowy suits the way that I think about information — especially when doing qualitative research. I have areas that I want to explore, and I dig into them. Unfortunately it makes reflecting back on what I’ve recently captured pretty difficult. Tools like Notion are better suited for taking disparate information and organizing them as dashboards, but Notion definitely isn’t as blazingly fast as Workflowy is. So when I need a firehose of information capture, Workflowy is it for me.

![](/assets/52328807b8a5b6b39557882dabb5d99bd235eb18-2500x1873.png)

The Remarkable was a somewhat impulse purchase that has proven to be a huge boon. I really loathe reading on screens, and given the quantity of journal articles I was reading for school, I decided to try and make a change. Unfortunately, the Remarkable tablet doesn’t have a good method for highlighting at this point in time, so it ended up not being nearly as useful for consumption as I had hoped. It HAS been excellent for note taking though. I don’t necessarily reference back to all my notes, but having consistent, tagged, and even OCRed handwritten notes has helped me to keep track of conversations, whilst not distracting me, as computer-based note-taking might do.

So. Two ways to capture.

## **Prune**

Once I’ve captured something, I need to somehow filter and cull that into something useful. Unfortunately, this has become a bit of a weak link. I used to do this in an app called [Bear](https://bear.app/), which is just a simple Markdown editor. I’m actually writing this in Bear now, which I’ll get to.

![](/assets/fbff04e3ab6d31c954f140e38c79def0abd6ada1-1248x684.png)

Unfortunately, Bear became a bit unwieldy for me to wrangle all the different notes I had coming in. I’d have a few things at the top pinned as “ongoing” work, such as my thesis, a list of people I want to connect with, different project and product ideas (both [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com) and [Stupid Fits](https://stupidfits.com) got started in that list).

![](/assets/fca1d063b23284d79cd8df18167d77b08edd5d10-1200x800.png)

This is the weak link. Currently, this goes into Things for TODO items, and then I HAD been using Bear to capture secondary notes, but it hasn’t ended up working as well as I’d like. In theory, it’s easy to create cross-linked and similar notes, as well as coherent tags, categories, etc. But it never quite worked for me as a tool to prune AND connect information.

So currently, I’m doing two things. First, if there’s something I need to do, I put it in [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/), which I’ve tried to quit about ten times now and keep returning to. It’s not great, but it’s useful as a personal to-do list. Quick in, quick out. The only other thing that seems to work for me to-do list wise is a Hobonichi style notebook.

![](/assets/63c2da1d868cf0a180045cad41671d84bb253a4d-1600x1198.png)

But that doesn’t solve the issue of connecting. It gives me a good basis for turning what I’m learning into something to do, but not for making longer connections for structured reflection.

## **Store (and recall)**

There’s one more piece to the pruning side worth thinking about though, which is collecting references. I’ve been through a bunch of different tools for this, and actually, [part of my newsletter](https://divergeweekly.com) is based on the idea of just sharing what I find to be inspiring. But partially, I’m hoarding information a bit. Using tools like [Pinboard.in](http://Pinboard.in) or Pocket, I have these really quick ways to capture stuff to read later — but then I don’t always read it later with enough attention to really capture and prune it.

![](/assets/89e4cf7766e310cf44e0ec00fbbcc9ef82e01e86-2880x1800.png)

This is where I ended up investing in [DevonThink](https://devontechnologies.com/), which I’m not yet sure was the right idea. DevonThink is basically a giant database and search interface that you pump information into, and it gives you a good basis for search and recovery. With thousands of PDFs, RSS feeds, and even podcasts ([thanks to a clever script by Alex Chan I was able to modify](https://twitter.com/Readywater/status/1382817963863080960?s=20)), DevonThink becomes a kind of “starting off point” for when I have something in mind and but can’t quite remember where it lived. Unfortunately, DevonThink is also a monstrosity of complexity — presuming knowledge of file systems, scripting, and similar to navigate effectively. I know a lot of that stuff and am still struggling.

That said, I used it to get a start on a new essay last week and it got me started faster than I could have anticipated. So my hope is by investing some time in getting the DevonThink thing right, I’ll end up with an absolutely invaluable tool going forward.

![](/assets/896fa6152d5812cc932fde10ab3fb26b366fa707-1934x996.png)

The other most recent attempt at this is [Readwise](https://readwise.io/i/andrew6628), which I just discovered and absolutely love. It basically syncs your highlights in Kindle and other services, and then serves them back to you following the [spaced repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition) principle you find in most language learning software. I don’t know why I find this so charming and useful, but it’s been providing some great fodder for thought recently.

## Synthesize

Bear does end up redeeming itself. I do almost all of my long-form writing in the app because I find it to be just blazingly fast for that. It’s intuitive, fast, and it’s the spot where I’ve written almost every article for this blog.

I don’t think it’s better than anything else, but if you’re like me and find Markdown the most intuitive way of writing, then it’s probably the best out there. I’ve tried a few others recently like Roam Research and Obsidian, but nothing really comes close. There’s a tactile quality to software sometimes that, despite more powerful options, somehow this one tool “feels right.”

## **What now?**

This is a snapshot of something that has been consuming some of my thinking recently. I’m a bit over a month into a new research job, am continuing to write this newsletter, and am also working on a master's thesis. Efficiency in time and staying focused around knowledge is basically survival right now.

The biggest long-term gap for me is the tagging/pruning step after capturing things, and I suspect there’s a process in Workflowy that I can go through that might get me there. You can add hashtags and dates, for example, so a note might look like

- April 19, 2021 @Emil Status Update #followup
  - Note 1
  - Note 2

And that note could then show up in a search with: **_This week #followup_** if I wanted to create a saved search with a specific criteria. So ultimately what I don’t have with this is a good way to approach tagging.

Unfortunately, Workflowy is not well integrated with other things, so it becomes a struggle to get what’s in Workflowy OUT.

Ultimately though, there’s a set of tools that I’m discovering that is actually working pretty well, which is what prompted this post. I’m very accustomed to the tools for team collaboration, but to take the same care around tooling to manage myself instead of my team is a bit new.

So, stay tuned. I don’t write about this kind of thing too frequently, but I’ll share some updates in a few months about how things are going with this setup.


Memory Toolkits


We adorn ourselves in technology. Whether it's the shrunken screens of today's smartwatches or the latest in lightweight, high resistance fabrics, the fact that we're wearing technology is indisputable. In the past decade though, two terms have emerged with considerable sticking power: tech wear and wearable tech. Those familiar can quickly distinguish, but to the uninitiated, it might seem like synonyms or a grammatical mixup. I'm wondering if the uninitiated — as is often the case — might be better equipped to judge the value of the technology we wrap ourselves in.

## **Wearable Tech**

![](/assets/0ad3deeafd52a72710da4b9543f0eed05fcb15a1-610x457.png)

Computation manifests in many ways — as infrastructure ranging from the room-sized mainframes of the cold war to the distributed cloud of Amazon Web Service; as the personal computer sitting on a desk or in a backpack, which serves as a kind of appliance (or platform for appliances); and as the carryable, as manifest by the ubiquity of smartphones knocking about our persons. And then there's the wearable. **Wearable tech** tends to be shortened as a "wearable," and references those units of computation and sensing that we might deploy on our bodies.

Wearables arguably start with the worn watch. Tied to a necklace or strapped to the wrist, this early manifestation of mechanical engineering and automation placed its wearer in constant contact with a technology imparting information and privilege on the wearer.

Jump forward to the modern computational era, and the site of the watch as attached to the body has become something that entangles its wearer with capacity beyond themselves. Garmin Watches and the Apple Watch are perfect examples of this — using the culturally standardized site of placement (on the wrist) as a particular locus for sensing and awareness about the wearer's body as a whole, it connects this information with a broader network that relays its awareness back to its wearer. It's a space where information about health, location, anxiety, and peace exit and enter.

## **Tech Wear**

![](/assets/f149442cb961114ac67459857e3e6560d4a34a63-640x480.png)

(Acronym FW2012)

**Techwear** or tech wear, is something I've written about before — but broadly it's a style of dress focused on the urban environment that prioritizes materials and design complimenting physical activity and which protect from the environment. Goretex shells and sneaker culture is a shortcut to imagining it. Techwear is — as a cultural phenomenon — pretty new, despite technical apparel being unbelievably old. As Eva, a co-contributor to the Tchwr blog has pointed out, [wool is in so many ways an original technical material](https://www.tchwr.com/2021/02/24/naturally-supermodern-the-powerful-properties-of-wool/). Leather — also ancient in its use as a fit-for-purpose technical material —[has a place in the "tech wear" world](https://shellzine.net/cyberpunk-and-the-leather-jacket/), though it doesn't make its appearance as frequently.

In many ways, Tech Wear as a genre has been captured by a handful of distinct brands with their own aesthetic vision, and so the language of technical apparel becomes confused with the popularity of these brands. Acronym is probably the most prominent — Errolson Hughs has spent some twenty years developing his distinct style influenced by outdoor apparel, ergonomic sensibilities, military functionality, and an appreciation for meme culture. We've seen mimicry brands like Enfin Leve pop up as well, sensing a market that has space beyond that one brand. And in its wake plenty of worthy contributors to the technical apparel for the urban environment market — from Arcteryx Veilance to Lululemon to Nike.

But as tech wear has become grounded in popular culture as a "style", it begs the question — what makes apparel technical if Techwear™℠®© suddenly has a distinct meaning.

## **Complications**

Clothing has always been technical. It protects us from the weather, facilitates movement and ritual, signals tribe, and facilitates safety. So when we talk about techwear, we're talking about something distinct from just technical fabrics.

Similarly, we've always used the technical advantage of certain materials upon the body. [One of the earliest wearables is likely the tampon](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/history-of-the-tampon/394334/) — with suggestions that simultaneous innovation took place around the world as women sought agency over their bodies' cycles. The application of optic technology to improve sight and combat aging, the application of gypsum and cotton to create casts that immobilize and heal broken bones — these are all in their own way examples of the wearable.

From a more contemporary standpoint, the smartwatch presents a problem to this, because it manifests as something only a step or two removed from the phones — our carryables. Returning to our original definition — if a wearable is something that augments and senses the body at a particular site, then a phone might not be so different given the standard of pockets being where they are. Anyone who wears their phone in a chest pocket or knee-height cargo pocket knows that its data collection around movement is less efficient at those sites.

![](/assets/ac517f3b26e1ae5f16c27d7dc4b022b62f17b628-1024x583.png)

The Oura ring is the wearable that I think presents an interesting challenge to this. The Oura doesn't display any information — save for on the phone once connected. It's a ring that is passively worn and sized to a particular finger. It comes in a variety of finishes to match one's style, is a bit oversized, and is usually forgotten until your phone pops up a reminder that charging is required.

What the Oura ring senses is sleep and what it augments is decision making — and is otherwise invisible. For me, it's been the first utterly passive wearable I've owned, and I think the only piece of real techwear I have.

It's somehow the most futuristic and the most banal object on my person. If I wear an Acronym jacket, I'm wearing a few layers of goretex. A complicated membrane that repels water externally yet permits moisture to escape during activity. The fabric is an incredible technology itself, and then to have it rendered by Acronym into a vision of a technically augmented (and arguably dystopian) future makes it that style "tech wear." But when I wear an Oura ring, I can be wearing a suit, my pajamas, a full Hamcus wastelander outfit, or nothing at all save the Oura ring — and I'm augmented and participating in a modality of networked technology that didn't exist before the 1970s.

This is all to say that, in its own way, I think using the language of "techwear" to describe a particular vision of apparel is unnecessarily reductive. I love Acronym outfits and style, but it's a particular vision that came about in a particular time with a particular vision of the future — influenced by the writing of William Gibson, the advent of technical fabrics, and during its critical years, the post-9/11 malaise that's come to shape conflict and culture globally (Acronym's Techsys being a key example).

![](/assets/9fa3ef93aed404b2582d8ed1bed9adf0a037d573-2870x1292.png)

Rather, I think we're more likely to see a kind of freer formal style (I'm very specifically thinking of [Virgil Abloh's FW2021 Louis Vuitton show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV_QoQD_nrA) with this, to be honest) emerge — comfortable and classy, and filled with a cultural substance that is accessible and inclusive. And I think there will be technology there, but the enduring tech wear (or wearable tech) will look more like the Oura ring than either the Acronym jacket or the Apple Watch. An Apple Watch — for all that its face and band can be changed — is a specifically reductive, specifically closed system. The techwear jacket is the same — hard lines and factory-spec goretex black that homogenizes the wearer to a particular tribe and a particular set of aesthetic constraints (though constraints which can loose some great creativity, [as folk like Bethany Heck consistently demonstrate](https://www.instagram.com/heckhouse)).

The oscillations of global fashion and style are too quick and too chaotic for these limitations, but the value of technical augmentation is also too powerful. If an Apple Watch can help drive better sleep, help detect Covid infection, or warn of health concerns, then those with means will wear it. But if an Oura Ring can do the same and facilitate a certain style — maybe one where the site of our wrists is augmented by a sentimental timepiece or bracelet, instead of an Apple peripheral, or nothing at all — then perhaps that future will be a bit less homogenous than we currently imagine.


Wearing Technology


With a reflective approach to narrative storytelling, Hamcus builds familiar yet foreign worlds through unique construction, distinctive dyeing techniques, and a well-considered design language. [I wrote an intro to Hamcus earlier this year](https://andrewlb.com/full-hamcus/) that should serve as a deeper introduction, but suffice it to say that the first of six drops in the Spring/Summer season of Hamcus continues the iterative refinement that I’ve come to admire in Tuff Leung’s work.

![](/assets/21162d898ea677a9f16586972c36be02ed689094-1536x2048.png)

In this first instalment of SS21, we seem to be taking some time to consider **power** as a theme, more **technical materials** as a material evolution, and a **preview of what’s to come**. This final point is worth considering as well, as the Hamcus team has invested in updates to their site and marketing, to make an otherwise wild brand just that little bit more accessible.

## **Power and Fantasy**

2020 was a year, where global narratives surrounding power and privilege came to the fore through a corona-tinted lens. America saw mass death and civil unrest — culminating in an attempted insurrection in the first days of 2021. China saw an intensive lockdown following the spread of the coronavirus and months of unrest in Hong Kong in 2019 — with much of 2020 seeing China’s control over Hong Kong solidify through retribution against opposition members and legislative action.

So against this backdrop, a brand based in China with an eye to American markets sets out to tell a story about bonded survivalists and corporate power brokers.

![](/assets/72d50520e3fadd48d161b1d4c8cb04213139a6d8-1312x584.png)

Here’s what the Hamcus team shared to set the scene for this season:

> Over sixteen hundred years before the great exile took place, the High Council of Primus Corporation came to the realization that irresponsible exploitation of V-19, their home planet, had caused irreversible damage, spurring its stellar core’s collapsing cycle. Primus’ High Council then activated a project of unforeseen dimensions: the construction of an interstellar ark engine capable of consuming alien stars, with the alleged purpose of taking the fire of civilization further than ever before. Behind these righteous words was veiled a rather sinister intention: that of expanding the corporation’s profits and exploitation to new and never-ending horizons. This star-devouring goliath was named GAEA.

> Even though Primus Corporation possessed tremendously advanced technology for the time period, this dantesque project still required over four hundred years before GAEA was wholly completed and ready to explore the nearby star systems. Once the migration from V-19 to GAEA was finished, it set a course for the stars, devouring them to quench the interstellar engine’s bottomless hunger for energy and resources. Some were left behind to die on the collapsing native planet, though, and speaking of their demise is a taboo very few dare break. The years after the great departure from V-19 are collectively known as the post-exile era.

> The lower planetary, which orbits at the bottom of GAEA, is arguably the most vital part of the entire ark engine. It is used for interstellar energy mining, loading, and extraction; but most importantly, it generates the enormous thrust required to move civilization through space. Most of the lower planetary’s residents are descendants of the first teams of voluntary engineers who built the engine city of GAEA. They’re the bottom of the spacefaring society, and they do most of the hard - not to mention dangerous - work under a lifetime contract for Primus. All in all, they’re expendable cogs in the interstellar ark engine’s daunting machinery. Those were the conditions their forefathers had to accept to avoid being left behind on V-19.

> This engine city is where our journey takes place. JEJE, an orphan born in the post-exile era, lives a harsh life consisting of daily work routines assigned by ANTARES, an interstellar energy company subordinated to Primus Corporation. Like many other migratory descendants in the engine city, JEJE was raised by the Lower Planetary Union since her early childhood. She cruises through this hard-knock life with her robotic partner Dungee, a gravitational reaper built to salvage stardust from the edge city region, and transport it over the orbital mountain to the engine city’s refinery core.

In a vein similar to the epochal writing of Liu Cixin in his [Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780765382030), Tuff and his team compose technical, organizational, and environmental constraints around the narrative arc their creations both follow and construct. Harsh conditions, reused and recaptured materials, and corporate factionalism become the nodes around which garments, styles, and characters accrete.

![](/assets/54ddfc76ad8e21b5f1724df43f50e8c050f91c08-1536x2048.png)

[This particular blazer](https://hamc.us/collections/21_01_ss/products/copy-of-fm01421-1-mb) (almost sold out) is an interesting example of this. In the way that it’s styled, described and photographed, there’s an air of the private military contractor and corporate anonymity. Like most of Hamcus’ premiere pieces, it is able to transform in distinct ways — suggesting some hidden agency or power behind an otherwise familiar cut.

## **Hamcus Explores Techwear**

A few months ago, I wrote that Hamcus is not techwear. We might see some taped seams and technical fabrics here and there, but to wear a Hamcus garment in extreme ways (and I wear my Hamcus when I take my toddler to the playground) is to be prepared for fairly frequent and small-scale repairs — the same thing you’d expect wearing a pair of jeans or really any designer garment. Whereas Acronym outfits you for an MMA match in the alley outside Berghain, Hamcus is slightly more oriented towards a pensive and well-posed dolly-zoom shot.

That’s not to say Hamcus isn’t well constructed — it is, and it's incredibly unique in its construction. But so far, it’s not been what I’d call tech. This new season seems to be pushing that frame a bit by introducing a variety of new materials that are explicitly and thoughtfully waterproofed, breathable, and designed for — one would assume — life as an Antares indentured labourer.

In some ways, I think this is the right way to approach this. Style itself doesn’t just tell the story, but the materials, cut, and treatment, each have their own tale to tell. The bleach dye of the [Edge Vagrant](https://hamc.us/collections/21_01_ss/products/copy-of-fm09321-4-os) is an interesting example of this — rough material and rough people on the edge, wearing what they have while character and garment transform together. Similarly, the [Corpo Metallic Nylon Blazer](https://hamc.us/collections/21_01_ss/products/copy-of-fm00821-1-mb) tells its own story — a more refined cut that nonetheless privileges the wearer with some protection from the elements.

So, all of this is to say, I still don’t think Hamcus is techwear, but that’s great. Techwear can be kind of boringly uniform anyway. But at least now you can wear Hamcus in Seattle or London comfortably.

## **Previews of what’s to come**

Hamcus has done a lot in the past few months to not just evolve their product (and the story that drives it), but also the accessibility of the business side of things. [I’d written before](https://www.tchwr.com/2021/01/03/full-hamcus-finding-the-spark-in-scifi-workwear/) that a chunk of Hamcus’ unique ability was their manufacturing connection and fashion industry experience.

They aren’t actually alone in this. Rick Owens, for example, is known to order muslin copies of his previous seasons’ pieces to be ripped up, chopped, and recut to actively iterate on the Rick Owens DNA in the most literal way possible — mutating and multiplying on past products. We’ve seen a bit of this with Hamcus, where particular blocks return across seasons and iterations, but the sub-assemblies (pockets, accessories, dyes) vary dramatically.

![](/assets/f27e355c1f719cfbe9030e8943839dc5fe719403-1286x594.png)

For SS21 though, they’ve taken some very smart steps in showing the appeal of Hamcus that previously had required a small leap of faith. By shooting more descriptive product photography _and_ videos demonstrating the transformative qualities of their garments, it’s become much more obvious how some of the more unusual garments might fit into a daily wardrobe. They’ve also revamped their site navigation to be a bit more accessible and navigable. These all might seem like obvious evolutions, but accessing the Hamcus universe isn’t just about buying into the story — it’s also about understanding how particular garments might fit into your own day-to-day and your world creation.

Finally, Hamcus as always hints at upcoming drops in this first round of product photography.

One can see examples of the just-released bucket hat previewing a short-sleeved sweater

![](/assets/b962bb02242bc6c41487b1882ff2dc5a84e88c30-1536x2048.png)

The commuter shirt previewing this pretty awesome fidlock ball cap and Hamcus shorts

![](/assets/ebe2dbfbe1ee7396055e96448a6cc9cde6a1aaa9-1536x2048.png)

And a pretty wild cargo vest previewed with the vented sun visor.

![](/assets/8e4fa8183a156aa59f18e27e508d341d6f9830cf-1536x2048.png)

## **Stories of Primus**

I’m excited for this next iteration of Hamcus’ journey. Tuff Leung and his team are building something interesting and worth participating in — and that participatory quality is something core to how they’re approaching it. There’s plenty of brands making wild clothes — Demobaza, Guerrilla Group, etc. But the continued “bet” on Hamcus (and why I follow them with interest) is that the narrative approach to their work will keep this brand and its designer’s vision focused and cumulative over the coming years.


Power and Fantasy — Hamcus SS21


The practice of design has fragmented and spread in so many different directions that it can be hard to keep up. But fundamental to the identity of “a designer” is **critical thinking **and** enthusiastic creating.** Whatever one's medium of expression — be it interface, typography, physical object, or service — this is a common trait of the successful designer.

## **The problem with staying in one place**

![](/assets/020ec1cdb611beedc97880417caa9886b61384ff-421x457.jpg)

But what happens when we aren’t empowered to think critically? What happens when our enthusiasm for creation wanes?

Great designers are inspiration-vores: constantly seeking new inputs, experiences, knowledge, and insight. I believe that a big part of the democratization and popularization of design as a field of practice (like many others), is our access to the internet and the world of knowledge it presents us. And then we are also shaped by our friends, our family, where we work, and what we make.

Sadly, that comfort and repetition can also serve to undermine us. At what point does iteration — the steady and sometimes painful process towards a better outcome — simply become repetition? At what point do we begin to see diminishing returns? Cities can serve as incredible sources of inspiration and growth for a curious designer, but that same designer might find herself locked into the same social circle, influenced by the same people, speaking the same language. Suddenly, the complexity of the city becomes safer, slower, simpler.

## **Seeing Stagnation**

![](/assets/e10be1b8bc7030359b64859df2489c6e1b48c463-953x493.gif)

I spent most of my early adult life in Toronto, Canada. I grew up outside of Toronto, went to school in Toronto, was a design intern in Toronto, and started my first business in Toronto. I knew my people, I knew the city, and I was able to shape my own practice and my own little niche there. I had no thoughts of leaving.

But I was also starting to get restless. Not that there weren’t interesting people, cool challenges, and great work worth doing. Quite the opposite — it was everywhere, and friends still in Toronto have continuously proven that fact. But in my own practice, and in the ferment that was my own identity as a designer, something quite fundamental was missing. I didn’t really have the language to identify what at that time. Then I got lucky.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for something. And it came and found me. I got a call from IDEO in Palo Alto asking if I’d be interested in interviewing for a role there. A few months later, my whole life changed.

Having the opportunity to work at IDEO changed everything for me. Foremost, it gave me a glimpse of how much I had to learn. It taught me about the journeys of other designers in my community, and how that came to shape their practice. One colleague found his early calling as a Buddhist monk, another her path from computer science to design, another shared his upbringing in rural Scandinavia, and still another the drive to get a masters in economics — simply because he needed to understand more.

What I saw in that community was a constant, unending, and deeply individual war against stagnation. It’s part of why people cycle through IDEO as well: two to three years is plenty of time to have a complete existential crisis.

And so I got lucky: I didn’t realize I was stagnating (or maybe plateaued) before, but through my community at IDEO, I was given an education in how to recognize it.

## **Fighting Stagnation**

Last year, I started the Diverge Weekly newsletter with the idea that I wanted to build something for what I was calling “The Global Designer.” I got blindsided by work, school, and a toddler a few months in and delayed the project, but part of what I’m trying to do with this reboot is revitalize that, with less of a geo-politics focus.

A global designer is:

**Professionally Empathetic** by listening, absorbing, and synthesizing in a structured and repeatable manner,

**Systemic By Default** when observing the patterns inherent in human needs across cultures (organizational and social) and turning them into designed artefacts,

**Strategically Detailed** in identifying the levers of influence within societies and cultures to ensure those artefacts are the right ones,

and finally, **Functionally Fluid** in their work, being able to move into what role fits the skill, the mission, and the need in order to get the job done.

In other words, **a global designer is a systems-oriented chameleon with a deep bias towards valuing people.** That global designer might have the title of product manager, user researcher, communications director, consultant, strategic advisor, or — in one awesome case — Lt. Colonel.

The global designer does not design **for** others. Rather, the global designer **designs with and is patinaed by** the local and regional cultures of wherever they find themselves. They observe this influence and transformation and curate the outcome of their work — and of their own evolution — with the faith that something (hopefully good) will come out the other side.

[Diverge Weekly](https://divergeweekly.com) is a newsletter that aspires to be the push (or perhaps the luck) for aspiring global designers. It’s an attempt to share my own writing and influences, as I use the above framing on designing my own career. In the past few years, I’ve been a user researcher, an indie developer to [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com), a product manager with IKEA, and a consulting interaction designer more broadly. Though I’ve not always succeeded in the above definition, it's the heuristic that I’m judging opportunities and my own growth by — and it is keeping things fun.

Anyway, I’ll be writing more about this, but as a general theme for Diverge Weekly, I think this is a good way to consider and filter this work.


War against Stagnation


A new research project has come along and you need to recruit some research participants.

Castiron Coffee is exploring how to use their waste coffee grinds in low-cost dumbbells for CrossFit gyms. They think there’s a market, since the weights will be physically larger and will make it look like people are lifting a lot more than they are, but they’ve hired you to explore whether this is actually something people want and need. You’ve got a plan and you have a sense of who you want to talk to: **so time to find some recruits for your study.**

![](/assets/a6cd56b07dae944e544c72acc3c5238105a7c72b-1400x934.jpg)

There are two main types of research recruiting emails that you might send out. The first is a cold email, and the second comes with an introduction or recommendation. We’ll focus on the first since this requires the most work — the same lessons from the cold email apply, but you have the benefit of including your reference.

In this scenario, let’s say we’ve found someone posting on the local CrossFit gym’s Facebook and we are sending them a cold email with the hope that they’ll respond.

##

## One Goal, Two Emails

Dividing your recruitment email into two steps can help with conversion. First, an initial “low commitment” introduction can introduce the idea, the request, and the parameters for your conversation. If the recruit agrees to speak, then you can follow up with administrative details like scheduling and consent. It might go something like this:

From: andrew@stupidsystems.com  
To: duanne1880@cfmail.com  
Subject: Chatting about fitness equipment re: Vertebreak forum

> _Hi Duanne,  
> Pleasure to meet you and apologies for the cold email. I’m a researcher with Stupid Systems, a product design studio based in Copenhagen. We’re working with a sustainable food company to explore using their waste products in fitness equipment. I was reading your posts on the Vertabreak CrossFit Facebook group about kettlebells and was intrigued!_

> _As a contributor to your CrossFit community, I was hoping we could connect to discuss fitness, how you use equipment, and where you think fitness equipment might improve in the future._

> _We would need between 60 and 90 minutes of your time, and ideally would like to meet in person at Vertabreak Crossfit. There would be two of us coming from the team, and we can provide a small stipend as a thank you following the interview._

> _Is that something you’d like to participate in? Let me know and we’ll schedule a time._

> _Thanks —_

> _Andrew and the Stupid Systems team  
> 415–555–5555 | andrew@stupidsystems.com_

And then, if Duanne agrees to speak with the team, we need to cover the details.

> \_Hi Duanne,

Thanks for agreeing to chat!

If possible, please use this link to schedule a time! We’ve accounted for travel time in the available slots, so whatever works for you.  
[https://calendly.com/alb/knowsi](https://calendly.com/alb/knowsi)

If none of those times work though, just let me know and we can figure something out!

Finally, we’ll be taking notes during the interview, as well as audio recording for note taking purposes. We’d also like to take photos in order to tell the story of what makes a great fitness product to our client. Your name and information would be anonymized before sharing it with the client.

Before we can speak, we’ll need you to sign a consent form, indicating that you agree to these details. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

[Sign our Interview Consent Form](https://www.knowsi.com/sign/remote?id=ckblzkgn8009o0774uu1g5mlc)

Let me know if you have any questions and thank you in advance for the consideration!

Andrew and the Stupid Systems team  
415–555–5555 | andrew@stupidsystems.com\_

![](/assets/d0162317432b517673548a4002138b1ce299c63c-1400x933.png)

Let’s break this down a bit into the core components.

## The Metadata

> From: andrew@stupidsystems.com  
> To: duanne1880@cfmail.com  
> Subject: Chatting about fitness equipment re: Vertebreak forum

This unfortunately can make or break an introduction email, since potential recruits can simply delete your email before they read the content.

People are busy and frequently inundated with email, so **getting something unexpected or unknown can prompt a dismissive response**. Many also have spam filters that might re-route your carefully crafted email to the dustbin.

**Make sure that the subject is personalized and specific**, that you’re using their correct email (check LinkedIn or personal pages, or send via a platform like Facebook or Reddit), and that your email is also personal and not a faceless corporate account.

##

The Introduction

> Hi Duanne,  
> Pleasure to meet you and apologies for the cold email. I’m a researcher with Stupid Systems, a product design studio based in Copenhagen. We’re working with a sustainable food company to explore using their waste products in fitness equipment. I was reading your posts on the Vertabreak Crossfit Facebook group about kettle bells and was intrigued!

The introduction is key, especially in a cold email. You’re setting the initial context for a conversation and this is the second stage where you might be summarily dismissed to the deleted messages category.

Use their name and immediately introduce yourself and the context around your request. I will sometimes bold personalized information or things that will trigger recognition, like Duanne’s posting about kettlebells to draw their eye. **Don’t ask too much, and also don’t be creepy.** Mentioning a post in a public forum is fine; but discussing their visit to Disneyland in a Facebook photo they posted 5 years ago — not cool.

Finally, **be specific and concise while respecting your or your client’s privacy.** You don’t need to reveal your client's name or the specifics of the project, but you do need to provide enough detail both to be honest and to trigger your recruit’s interest.

##

The Ask

> As a contributor to your CrossFit community, I was hoping we could connect to discuss fitness, how you use equipment, and where you think fitness equipment might improve in the future.

First, **contextualize WHY you’re asking this recruit over someone else**. “As a prominent member of the community” or “as an expert in medicine” or “as someone who is no longer part of the community” can all be great foundations to discuss.

**Mention a few specifics** about WHY you want to talk to them. I personally list these out before reaching out to recruit, in order to validate for myself why this person might be interesting. They can be as high level or specific as you need, and this will often be dictated by where you are in the research.

##

## Defining Details

> We would need between 60 and 90 minutes of your time, and ideally would like to meet in person at Vertabreak Crossfit. There would be two of us coming from the team, and we can provide a small stipend as a thank you following the interview.

After you’ve caught the recruit’s interest, include details about what to expect. From my experience, the most important details that you define are:

**Where** will the interview take place (or where you would like it to),  
**Who** will be attending (yourself and a secondary researcher)  
**Timing** how long will the interview take (I aim for a minimum of 60min, but schedule 90min to allow for overage)  
**Compensation** is whether there is some form of compensation for the interview (either a stipend, gift certificate, donation, or similar).

These details can be brief but must be specific. **Deviating from these things can break the recruit’s trust, which is the foundation of getting to great research outcomes.**

##

## Scheduling

> If possible, please use this link to schedule a time to chat! We’ve accounted for travel time in the available slots, so whatever works for you.  
> [https://calendly.com/alb/knowsi](https://calendly.com/alb/knowsi)

If none of those times work though, just let me know and we can figure something out!

This section will usually come in the second email after the recruit has agreed to speak. There are a few ways to manage scheduling. Either providing a few times directly in the email, using a scheduling service like [Calendly](https://calendly.com/), or leaving this to a follow-up email after the user has agreed to the interview. These all require different levels of commitment and responsibility on the team.

Personally, I use Calendly to manage many of my interviews: depending on the number of participants and the nature of the recruiting strategy (at-risk communities, experts, etc). However, Calendly can occasionally be impersonal and presupposes a certain familiarity with contemporary tools to use. Often it’s worth spending the extra time to schedule participants individually and build the foundation of trust and consideration.

##

Requesting Consent

![](/assets/58a8ed4e2d82d4499340914aad56b19430b62850-1400x869.png)

> Finally, we’ll be taking notes during the interview, as well as audio recording for note taking purposes. We’d also like to take photos in order to tell the story of what makes a great fitness product to our client. Your name and information would be anonymized before sharing it with the client.

Before we can speak, we’ll need you to sign a consent form indicating that you agree to these details. You can withdraw your consent at any time.

[Sign our Interview Consent Form](https://www.knowsi.com/sign/remote?id=ckblzkgn8009o0774uu1g5mlc)

**All of this hinges on you getting consent from the participant, and that is a matter of setting expectations.** I like to briefly describe what the recruit should expect, and then let them know that the consent form is mandatory for moving forward.

In general, **you are required to have a record of your participant’s informed consent, and you need to provide an easy mechanism for your participants to withdraw their consent.** You also need to provide evidence that they were informed of those expectations and what media was being collected about them.

[**_Knowsi_**](https://knowsi.com/) **_does all of this for you._** It is free to use for smaller projects and provides a consent management dashboard for participants. All the hard parts of gathering and managing consent are done for you.

[Knowsi](https://knowsi.com/) does have a feature to send out these kinds of emails for you, but **I generally recommend that you write a personalized email and just include a link,** as the response rate is quite a bit higher.

##

Wrapping up

> Let me know if you have any questions and thank you in advance for the consideration!

Andrew and the Stupid Systems team  
415–555–5555 | andrew@stupidsystems.com

Wrap up in a light and open way. Invite questions and be gracious. Also **make sure your contact information is clear.** Almost always a user will simply reply to the email, but some groups may wish to contact you by phone or similar for questions.

##

## Final Thoughts

Sending cold recruitment emails can be really tough. They can often be ignored. Reflecting on a research project I did last year, we reached out “cold” to over a hundred practitioners in the data science and open source communities in Europe, and only got 28 participants. Our response rate was about 50% (which is decent), but only about 60% of those fully converted into completed interviews.

That said, **using friends and family to recruit presents a substantial bias in your study**. For example, a technique that can make this easier is snowball sampling, but the anchoring and non-random nature of that type of recruiting can completely invalidate your research depending on the nature of the project.

Ultimately, **it is part of the research design to decide on what type of recruiting is most likely to get you to the desired results,** but by starting with this structure for an introduction email, by being open and honest about your goals in the study, by being intentional about who you reach out to, and **by using** [**Knowsi**](https://knowsi.com/) **to manage the consent process for that stud**y, you’ll have a strong head start on going to the fun part: the actual interviews and the insights that follow.

Happy recruiting, and **if you have any questions or want a second eye on your recruiting email, drop me a line at andrew@knowsi.com**

Thank you to [Jewel of 33 Sparks](https://www.33sparks.com/) and [Nina Alter](http://bigwheel.net/) for the early review and feedback!

_This article was originally published on [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/research-recruitment-email-b862186ef3ba)._


The Anatomy of a Research Recruitment Email


How much of what I just discovered is my own beliefs reflecting back on me — lightly but insignificantly embellished by the research completed?

This is a concern with any research-driven discovery process — and one that I’ve constantly struggled with in building independent products. An insight might seem novel or part of a meaningful process of synthesis, but there is always considerable risk that you’re simply reflecting your own biases, beliefs, and existing knowledge back onto your problem. You engage in the motions of research, while actually just subconsciously rearranging your findings to fit what you already believe. Independent work suffers from this most because we don’t have the teams that form structural safeguards to prevent that sealing off of our growth.

This is often what we talk about when we talk about validity — the degree to which our research findings map on to reality. But validity isn’t so easily measured in the type of qualitative research in which many designers and applied researchers engage. Thankfully, we have a natural bulwark that can help surface shield us from our worst impulses on this — if we know where to look.

## **The Utility of Theory**

![](/assets/ac9a324f63e6c97dcfea793a2de8d4f9f560f7bd-800x533.png)

Validity. Usually, we hear the words reliability (are the findings consistent and accurate?), generalizability (are the findings generalizable/relevant to the population being studied?) and validity (are the findings reflective of what we intended to measure?) tossed around together, and they can’t really be separated, but we’re going to focus on validity. The usual visual model is that validity is hitting the bull’s eye with a date, and reliability is hitting that same bull’s eye five times.

Research is fundamentally concerned with validity because it’s really at the foundation of what we do — and the value that our work offers. Research with high validity offers a deep and previously inaccessible understanding of the world, whereas low validity research presents as a false understanding of that same world — wrapped in the garb of legitimacy.

The problem is that you can do everything else right and still learn absolutely nothing. Worse yet, others might look to your research process and see that process as legitimating for the invalid research findings — pulling others into the same erroneous understanding. Thankfully, this tends to be where theory can come to the rescue.

There’s a number of philosophical traditions in qualitative research, but the starting point for validity’s dominance sits in the **positivist** tradition, which (oversimplified) suggests that there is a single truth that can be derived from research — basically that there is a truth waiting to be discovered and mapped by the researcher. Personally, I disagree with this premise in qualitative studies, but it's worth understanding that that foundation in qualitative research did emerge from principles of scientific knowledge and discovery — and that this idea of “truths” (objective realities) has been superimposed overtop of human experience and culture.

**Post-positivism** works to address some of this thinking and is more what we tend to see these days — acknowledging the subjective nature of researcher observation and arguing that truth itself will always be uncertain. This is because the instrument of measurement (the researcher’s observation) can only have a subjective and biased viewpoint. This is useful because it shifts the baselines for validity into the realm of possibility (i.e. something CAN actually be valid since the benchmark for validity isn’t impossible), but still situate the researcher as observing some objective truth imperfectly.

Thankfully, **post-modernism** comes to the rescue at this point (from my point of view, anyway). Post-modernism (and many of the traditions that sit under that umbrella) doesn’t suggest that reality and truth are constants — but rather that the observers of those realities co-equally construct the world around them from the limited positions that they occupy as observers of the world. If two people are standing on opposite ends of a train station at a moment in time as a train arrives, to the person on the far end, the train might appear flattened and short. To the person nearest to the train’s entry point, the train might appear long and loud — stretching far into the distance. One might experience that train from a stance of fear as a huge machine thunders past them; another might experience it relative to hope and opportunity thinking about where it might take them when it pulls into the station. Both observations of the train hold equal value in this case, and so we can derive a certain amount of validity in our research by collecting and recording these observations so that enough of the phenomenon of the train can be recounted with validity — enough that others might partially understand what it is to experience Train.

Post-modernist qualitative research then situates the researcher as observing and co-constructing phenomena with those who observe and experience them. Because there isn’t a single truth, but rather many truths co-constructed by the observers and experiencers of the phenomenon under study, the validity of any given research endeavour is itself subjective in relation to the phenomenon being observed and the construction of validity itself.

## **Why Protection**

![](/assets/d78c0253e78fb0abd7b61c50dee0672d54859ab6-4050x2700.png)

Post-modernist qualitative research can — initially — seem like a bit of a cop-out to the more positivist-leaning disciplines. It can feel a bit like you’re simply ducking the validity question altogether — arguing that because there’s no objective truth, we needn’t even bother. How can someone be confident with the results then?

But what’s missed here is that **while we don’t believe that there is some objective truth about people waiting to be discovered, we do believe that there are shared and common experiences to be understood and communicated. These experiences in turn can service the creation of the new and the maintenance of the old — building for and with those communities who participated in the research**. Because post-modernist research is starting all conversations with the assumption that the **experience of the participant is valid and worthy of consideration**, it empowers the practitioner to more fully engage with the landscape of information and experience surrounding the domain of interest. This naturally — almost inevitably — leads to more exhaustive and (arguably) valid findings.

This gets back to that question of how this frame of research protects us from some of our own biases. Doing qualitative research in the postmodernist vein is necessarily participatory and reflective — situating the observer (you) both within the context of observation, and acknowledging one's own biases and role in transforming the experience of the participants. What naturally tends to emerge is a documented and synthesized reflection on one's own positioning relative to the research that — ideally — can serve as an effective foil to unconscious bias as the study progresses.

If we acknowledge that we can’t naturally observe experiences objectively, and instead include that assumption as part of our research, it forces us to design around the lack of objectivity. When we’re designing around that fallibility, then we’re building natural safeguards against it. But if we don’t take that step — and instead assume an objective stance in lieu of perceived expertise or role — then we’ve left our research unprotected against its greatest threat: the researcher.


The Problem with Validity


We have spent a decade building the consumer Internet of Things with an ethos of “fail fast”. Unfortunately, many of the things we built failed to embrace the withering effect that time has on business, technology, intention, and capital. Consumers have been left holding connected objects that no longer connect, and the question of why investments in the “future” of physical things have resulted in such ephemeral value.

The Decay of Digital Things started as a series of personal essays and prototyping projects exploring this idea that turned into a class taught at the Stanford d.school in 2014. Inspired by my essays and the frustration about connected products with dead services, we asked the students to explore the different aspects of decay that are connected to networked objects. Physical metaphors like rust, patinas, overgrowth, and repair were all central to the students’ construction of a body of work and scenarios that pointed to digital decay. Their work explored everything from the calcified information around our social networking identities, to the fragility inherent in creating a connected object; becoming a vanguard to uncritical enthusiasm for more, which has become a hallmark of Silicon Valley-inspired creation.

In the beginning, this exploration emerged from my suddenly dead Little Printer. A brilliant little object from consultancy-turned-product company Berg, the Little Printer was a small Internet-connected thermal printer that could create all sorts of little artifacts, provided that they were two-dimensional and monochromatic. This could be your to-do list for the day, a list of upcoming meetings to stuff into your wallet, an inspirational image, or your two-factor code. The printer got these messages by connecting wirelessly to a hub (tied to Berg’s plans for future connected things), which in turn connected to a server called Berg Cloud, which managed accounts, apps, and all the bits of software that brought the otherwise charming but simplistic object alive. On March 31st, 2015 though, this server and Berg as a business shut down, and a thoughtfully-designed piece of technology became just dumb plastic and silicon.

Berg’s story is one that has been repeated all over the connected world: ambitious companies create networked objects that bring more functionally than their un-networked kin. But with this functionality comes a compounding liability: infrastructure and the need for enduring business models that can maintain that infrastructure. Sometimes this is fine, but other times the cost becomes too much to bear. Of course, there are many different kinds of businesses in the world, and some of them are better able to support their connected products than others. A publicly-traded company like Garmin has multiple revenue streams and a complex web of telemetry-leveraging products. Many of these are Internet-enabled, and rely on a service called Garmin Connect and, more recently, a development platform called Connect IQ. This connectivity is a valued feature of the product, but not the product itself. The Garmin running watch to track your run, or the cycling computer to track your route and fitness, and the marine GPS that tracks your boat. The fact that its features can be arbitrarily extended through an app store and connectivity is a value add, but ultimately not the product’s core purpose.

Conversely, a company like Pebble, which shuttered its services in December 2016, had a much more challenging time. Pebble often kick-started its product development on a product-by-product basis, as it built a variety of wearable smartwatches. They worked hard on their product, sold almost two million smartwatches, but ultimately weren’t able to make it work. The watches were generally well-made, had a strong application ecosystem, and are still loved by many of their owners. My friend Luke, an Australian postdoc in Copenhagen, still wears his Pebble every day. The watch is something he’s become accustomed to, bugs and all. He can flip through its menus quickly and responds just as quickly to its little quirks: bugs that will ultimately never be fixed now that the platform has shut down.

## Software and Hardware

Objects that require connectivity to deliver their promised value are ultimately just clients connecting to the endpoints of a broader service. It’s easy to argue that one is not buying the object itself, but rather access to the service that the object affords. On one level, this places the physical object on the same plane as any web application or mobile client that pulls data and context from a broader service. And certainly, for every dead Internet of Things startup on the battlefields of platform capitalism, there are dozens of dead software-only businesses. The demise of Rdio Inc. hit hard, as did the obsolescence of the Sparrow mail client as its team was acqui-hired to work on Google Inbox and saw Sparrow wither into uselessness.

The death of a software product leaves a hole in one’s pocketbook and a need to find a functional cognate, but it doesn’t leave behind a corpse. Instead, if you think about our products as things that we hire or fire for their different capabilities, the analogy is closer to a hired feature (let’s say, our email client Sparrow) prematurely quitting, or simply disappearing one day. Certainly a shock, but with relatively little damage, because we can find a substitute (such as the email client, Airmail). Conversely, when an Internet of Things service shutters its doors, the consumer and the environment are left to foot the bill of starting over. If your Internet of Things home security system shuts down because they botched their growth strategy, you have to invest in a new and expensive chunk of hardware for your home. Or, perhaps even worse, this product could be subject to an acquisition that locks the customer into a platform with values and a service model they don’t want, but can’t afford to change.

## Nature, Nurture

I have described a bleak view of connected objects, but fortunately, this is not the only story worth telling. Even in the failed model, there are interesting early stabs at addressing the “long tail” of connected objects. One shockingly consistent example of sustainable product design is the Monome, a hardware platform for open-source music creation that connects into an ecosystem of community-created tools. It’s a simple grid of lights and buttons that send and receive commands from a device. Mine is from 2008. I also recently set it up again to use with a new crop of tools from the Monome community, and its founder helped a community of us debug a problem with old monomes and a new OSX systems.

![](/assets/d8932692cc5475bfb16fe49e80fd15c619b4fc87-1180x1180.png)

The Monome presents a vision of sustainable product maintenance because it is both a company and a community. Brian Crabtree created its first iteration, but countless others have written code for it, built performances around it, and made their own versions of it. It’s an open-source product that creates greater value for its supporting business through the value generated within the community itself. Monome.org also has a vast repository of knowledge related to the monome in its different and evolving products that empowers its customers to continuously adapt it to their evolving needs.

The Monome ethos of product development echoes the “slow company” movement exemplified by 37Signals and LDLN. Their theory is that what you are creating through your business is precious, and it’s very easy to ruin something by moving too fast. So don’t. Don’t take that investment if you’re not absolutely clear on how you’ll use it. Don’t commit yourself to that big Kickstarter campaign, if you’ve only figured out the product, and not the production. The weight of capital can be a massive liability to an enterprise that is still figuring out how to walk unencumbered, let alone thrive under the weight of growth-forcing liabilities.

## Defibrillation

Sometimes though, things do simply fail. As frustrated as I am with Berg Cloud shutting down, it’s difficult to fault the Berg team in pursuing a dream and giving it their all. Sometimes businesses simply fail despite one’s best efforts. There might not be a market, or it might be a pricing strategy that doesn’t work, or you simply run out of runway. A business failure is not (necessarily) a moral failure on the part of the entrepreneurs, but the result is the same. Consumers are left with their dead plastics and silicon pining for a server that will answer back.

The Little Printer is an example of what can be done when a connected technology business does not foresee its own demise, but tries to react responsibly to it. Some simple searching reveals an enthusiastic community (along with the individual help of some former Berg team members), who have brought their now dead printers back to life. The process isn’t simple.

It involves setting up your own server and then flashing the Berg Hub to redirect server requests to the new address. These methods emerged from long GitHub discussions and thoughtful blog posts, but they emerged nonetheless. So why does the Berg device have a pathway to resuscitation while many other devices don’t?

I think the answer lies in the community and in the approach of the product’s creators. The Monome platform and its subsequent creations started from a point of openness and community involvement. This gave the community a greater-than-normal stake in the outcomes of this product. Berg Cloud was a platform that spoke to creators and engaged consumers so that when it closed, it had a larger pool of potential revivers to consider resuscitation. And because the Berg team released their server code and contributed to the discussion, the chance of reviving the Little Printer (at least on a small scale), is starting to become a reality.

In the physical product world, aftermarket and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) accessories emerge around any platform that sees some market success. This can have the effect of dramatically extending the life of these products as their creators disappear, but the demand remains. A few years ago, for example, I created a [3D printable model for a table clamp](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11815) that fit an old 1960s Luxo lamp. It’s since been downloaded close to a thousand times, hopefully extending the use of a wonderful piece of design with otherwise difficult to find parts. We need to encourage a similar economy of repair, modification, and adaptation for our connected things, and I’d like to believe that the story of the Little Printer, initially tragic, might point to a more optimistic future for our decaying digital things.

## Better to Fade Away

Four years after the Decay of Digital Things class, I’ve become a bit inured to this crisis of sustainability for these products. All around us, we’re seeing an accretion of hollowed-out objects calling for servers long since shuttered. The brilliant [Internet of Shit](https://twitter.com/internetofshit) Twitter account provides a near-daily laugh track of poorly considered connected things. My friend Luke wears one on his wrist as a simple watch, shrugging off its lost functionality with the insistence that it had a “good run.” I have another on my shelf as a multifaceted totem to my values as a designer: its brand –a smiling face left after each new print– now barely visible on the sun-weathered thermal paper.

We are creating software-powered things in an environment that often requires businesses to pursue capital-intensive growth models if they want to be considered successful. But this is far from the only path, and we need more diverse definitions of success if we’re going to deflect the distracting, wasteful, anxious, closed, bricked, unfixable, expensive, disenfranchised future that the first decade of the Internet of Things seems to promise.

_This was originally a chapter of the 2018 Kairus book, [The Internet Of Other People's Things](https://ioopt.kairus.org/). _

### References

[http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/03/patina/](http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/03/patina/)

[https://www.wired.com/2016/12/the-inside-story-behind-pebbles-demise/](https://www.wired.com/2016/12/the-inside-story-behind-pebbles-demise/)

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/24/11753878/pebble-2-watch-fitness-tracker-heart-rate-sensor-vide](https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/24/11753878/pebble-2-watch-fitness-tracker-heart-rate-sensor-vide)


The Decay of Digital Things

Two Continents, One Storytime


Building a research practice is intimidating. You’re basically embarking on a path of creating a consistent discipline of seeking, synthesizing, and communicating knowledge that is either unknown or inaccessible by most. Nonetheless, this is something that thousands perform daily across a multitude of fields.

While I loathe suggesting there are shortcuts, I do believe there are tools and techniques to make the journey more efficient. We can figure out the right gearing to make our energy expenditure more efficient, and we can look for opportunities to recapture some of the same.

This is the first in a series of posts applying the reflective tools of design against different parts of the research process. Design has evolved into a somewhat generalized and transdisciplinary field, albeit one which requires considerable depth in craft to perform well. My hope is that this transdisciplinary quality can surface some of the opportunities to do this work better through new tools, methods, and languages, to do what good research does best: seeking, synthesizing, and communicating new knowledge.

## **Cultivating a Starter**

Of course, first, you need to figure out what you want to figure out. Your research questions are usually the starting point for this, and there’s plenty of good literature around this (I personally [quite like this book](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9781119003618)). But if we’re to engage, not with just a single study, but rather constructing the starter for a personal practice of repeatably high-quality research, we need to investigate, why we believe that is the salient question and where those beliefs are grounded.

Let’s say we were investigating how individuals get engaged with retail investing applications like Robinhood, and how they transition from low-to-no knowledge beginners to advanced users. We might pose the question “How do retail investors come to understand the stock market through low-barrier tools like Robinhood?”

This question is problematic for a variety of reasons. First, it presupposes a group defined by the tool of access, instead of knowledge and traits inherent to the individual. It assumes that what people are engaging with from a knowledge perspective is the market itself, vs. the tool or communities situated around the market. It suggests that understanding and expertise is a defining trait of retail investing, vs. other dynamics (such as those we recently witnessed with the WallStreetBets and Gamestop). Ultimately, it’s a pretty poor question, but it exposes some useful ways of improving our inquiry.

We can look at the definition of Retail Investor and expand that dramatically by asking WHO and what types of people engage with retail investing applications. What resources do they have access to? Who is excluded?

We might reframe the market not as something people look to understand, but rather as the medium through which some other goal is sought. Instead of focusing on the market as a monolith, we focus on the act of “investing” or “betting.”

What’s important is that we’re building tools to reflexively reflect on HOW and WHY we believe what we believe when we construct this earliest tool of inquiry. If our first action when structuring a research question is not to look into the logistics of implementing it, but rather deconstruct the components of that question. We may well arrive at the same result after a few interviews, but catching some of these assumptions early can save us plenty of time and resources as we plan our research.

## **A Reflexive Research Process**

![](/assets/f8ebc086022cb1e0e7a0e8748a47058a76f81d28-1228x838.png)

Many people believe — I think erroneously — that reflection is in one’s nature. But this dismisses the rigour that reflective practice often requires. It can manifest as forced periods of isolation and focus (a friend once said she did her best work on planes, and so had come to spend dedicated chunks of time locked in a phone booth sized workspace in our office), or protected chunks of time on a calendar that otherwise has a high billable rate. What sets researchers apart is that the reflective time necessarily emerges in response to the experiences and data we collect in the field.

If our reflection is always something that is triggered and responsive, then what we have to build is a practice that is reflexively reflective — and structure our environment to that end. Ideally, after a rich and eye-opening interview, you have a moment to stop with your team and debrief. You share your own impressions and responsive notes, capture any responses or impressions from the note taker, flag any additions or weak points in the interview guide, and schedule time to start transcribing and synthesizing that data quickly. When planning the research, you were careful to protect that time post interview — limiting the number of interviews per day to both conserve your own energy, but also buy time for reflection.

Ideally, you’ve cultivated a habit somewhere in your life that is quotidian and flow-inducing. That might be running, meditating, lifting, walking alone to a particular coffee shop, commuting to work, or journaling. Whatever that is, it is the unseen and unscripted crucible for your accumulated research experiences and data to alloy into something grander than before.

## **Building a Practice**

Of course, the “ideal” is rarely what manifests. It’s trite, but one simply has to deal with what comes and respond accordingly. The trick that’s worked for me — and that I think is supportive of a reflexively reflective practice — is to build in a degree of automation into the procedural tasks that follow your research. There is a huge amount in a qualitative research process that can’t be automated. But we CAN automate the triggers and procedural actions surrounding a research task.

Let’s say we’ve dropped the ball on planning, and end up with interviews that are too tightly packed and don’t leave enough room for proper reflection. A way to automate some level of reflection and debriefing is to create some tools that force the point.

An example: we might have set up two automations in Airtable and Zapier. One looks at our calendar, and immediately following a calendar event tagged with “Interview”, both researchers are sent a form that asks us to quickly summarize our impression, upload any audio recordings we have taken, and quickly take any feedback notes on the interview guide. We fill this out quickly on the way to the next interview. A further automation looks for an audio recording and, if present, sends it to a service for transcription so that other team members will have quick access and we’ll have a head start for reviewing at the end of a tough day — as well as our notes and impressions that might not have been recorded if we were focused exclusively on prepping for the next interview.

Building a practice is not just about the skills and discipline involved in performing research at a high level, but also taking the time to reflect on those points where you might be a bit weak. These areas of weakness are great opportunities to ask for help: either from others on your team or from the various robots that make up our digital ecosystem.

Our research infrastructure should fit to us like an old and well-worn leather jacket: a second skin that protects us, fits in with everything else, and makes us look and feel good at the end of the day. So I encourage you to look for those opportunities to “wear in” your tools and processes with each new project. If you drop the ball on debriefing, figure out how to fill that gap. If your interviewing is overly formulaic, practice taking non-linear notes and techniques for tracking tangents. If you find yourself overwhelmed by synthesis at the end of your field research, look at scheduling and blocking time differently in the future — or build automation into how information from your interviews is processed as you go.

These types of considerations help us build a reflexively reflective practice that empowers continuous, introspective growth in our journey as design researchers.
rs.


Reflexive Reflective


Designing a research program is a pretty difficult task. It requires a level of introspection and reflection on knowledge and knowledge creation that makes for both considerable rigour in defining the study’s parameters, but also a disposition that is — by default — maximally extractive of data gathering opportunities. So it comes as no surprise that in qualitative studies involving direct engagement with research participants, often the participant experience gets diminished in favour of focusing time and resources on increasing value to the researcher: improving your interview guide, recruiting more participants, wrangling your IRB, and broadly establishing the framework for extracting as much value from a research process as one's resources allow.

Sadly, we miss that participant experience can be the key to great data and great research outcomes. By investing in the trust relationship you have with your research participants, you invest in their willingness to engage openly and comfortably with your research and its objectives. A good participant experience frees participants from the emotional and cognitive toll of being responsible for their own wellbeing and privacy, by providing a tangible demonstration for your care of the same.

I gave a talk last fall on Designing Trust Relationships in Research and proposed a structure for applying the front-stage/back-stage model, articulated in Service Design, to designing the participant experience. Service Design is a practice that mandates designing not just objects and experiences, but looking holistically at the experience that users have around a given service. So in the banking sector, a service designer would consider not just the banking app, but the ATM, the physical bank itself, the training of the customer support staff, the anxiety and concerns of the banking customer, and the different phases an individual might go through while engaging with banking as a holistic experience.

From my own experience, and in interviewing academic and private-sector researchers for Knowsi, a fairly common linear path emerges when designing the operational side of research. There’s plenty of variation within this, but broadly speaking we:

![](/assets/f70d7775d630e2e5f19130bcbe7c8329f62229f7-1562x340.png)

1. Identify who we want to talk to based on the research question, budget, access, and other constraints. Often the recruitment strategy and requirements are established here.

2. Recruit and contact those people, either on the team or through a recruiting firm.

3. Deal with the responses and concerns of the participant. Often this part would involve a screener or some other filtering mechanism.

4. Manage consent and any legal requirements for engaging with the study.

5. Schedule the participants and the team, with any final checks or discussions around incentives.

6. Engage in the interview or experience with the participant. Basically data collection.

7. Process the data from the interview: transcribing, synthesizing, and storing.

Often, some variation on this path is presented as a linear funnel, whereby participants are screened and filtered until a sufficient pool has been recruited, interviewed, and included in the study. But with the advent of the GDPR and a more aggressive focus on protecting the privacy rights and integrity of research participants, we’re coming to need a set of necessary looping loops and continuation of the participant experience, beyond the linear and extractive mode of the past. In a scenario where participants can change their consent, own their data, and ultimately have a legal right to reclaim that which was extracted — the research process becomes less of a funnel and more of a system.

![](/assets/58337a52fa12be534474e4335ffbb30a33f71457-1568x862.png)

## **The Participant Experience**

How does the participant experience map onto the idealized path that researchers have described? Ultimately, we tend to see that participants lack insight into the “what comes next” part of a research program. There is a mutual (albeit asymmetric) understanding of value between the researcher and the participant. At the very least, the participant understands that someone wants to talk to them and potentially pay them for it. But they don’t often have insight into the research, rather, the majority of their experience is around managing contact and anxiety over trust.

![](/assets/f494c62b260d593f728b59756104da8326fa4b12-1596x1116.png)

This management of trust cascades into a fairly substantial amount of effort and energy asked of the participants — a tax of their energy for their involvement in this exchange of data and value. Effectively, at each point of contact with the researcher, something is asked of the participant in terms of comprehension and trust-building towards that point in the process, where maximum trust and information is asked of the participant.

![](/assets/04e413037e1f1710debda9dc086ddb9acfde28a3-1752x1138.png)

By applying a service design and design-thinking approach to the participant experience, we’re empowered to see some of the core concerns that participants might have about each phase of what, to a researcher, appears to be a simple and rote experience — the constituent parts of that tax. These concerns might manifest in any number of ways — from anxiety, evasion, and cancelation on the far end; or even slower response times, self-protective questioning, and a hesitation to explore certain topics too deeply.

## **What Lies Beneath**

Designing a better participant experience is ultimately the road to designing a more effective and less exploitive research relationship. Unfortunately, this is kinda hard. Each research project has its own needs to design for. I’d always recommend spending at least a few hours with your team, carefully considering the participant experience, and addressing those needs with as empathetic a lens as possible. It requires a fair bit of structure and reflection.

![](/assets/2f9b5c988066f828a6702525c311a78ba3b8f965-1784x1192.png)

Using some of the tools for service design can offer deeper insight into your participant’s experience. The metaphor of **front stage/backstage** provides a useful framework — allowing the researcher to identify some of the individual components of a participant experience, such as that first introduction, the type of information included in a scheduling link, or the structure of a consent form. These are touchpoints (artefacts and instances of interaction between your research apparatus and the participant) that can be improved.

By understanding the participant touchpoint into the research experience, you can reflect on how your own operations impact those experiences in positive or negative ways — such as data storage infrastructure impacting one's consent form approach or understaffing impacting the speed of response to individual participants. One example might be the speed at which a researcher responds to participant queries for more information. An intermediary might need to get more information from the principal investigator before they can properly answer a question, but by the same token, a PI might become inundated with requests, if they were also the primary point of contact during recruiting. Balancing these operational realities according to the design of any particular study becomes a powerful tool for improving the participant experience.

Finally, the administration of the research exists within a framework of norms and rules. This might be direct legislation, like the GDPR requiring the withdrawal of participant consent to be an easy process, which requires certain administrative implementations, which in turn affects the participant experience around consent. (Ahem — [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com)).

The unwritten norms are just as striking. An interview may end before it begins, if the gender, linguistic, or group identity is outside of the participant’s expectations, or if the appropriate gatekeepers aren’t engaged with as stakeholders. How one engages with these norms (or whether one even acknowledges them as real, much less legitimate) is defined by the ontological, epistemological, and methodological stance taken by the researcher. These beliefs are the starting point for any research design. So of course it has powerful implications for operations and the participant experiences that follow.

## **Designing the Participant Experience**

Designing for the participant experience is ultimately something that many researchers can’t do because they’re already working under incredible constraints. And more broadly, many will say that adherence to research ethics already accounts for those participant needs sufficiently. However, by designing a better participant experience in your research, the opportunity is created for higher quality, richer, and more valuable data to emerge in a way that is less exploitive to your participants.

What this takes is an iterative process across participants and studies to learn where different aspects of that participant’s experience are working and not working, and doing the work to fix that. One way to approach this is through follow-up questions or surveys with participants — reflecting not just on the subject matter of the study, but on the experience of the study itself. Another is to stagger the field research schedule so that opportunities are made to iterate and improve on operations and participant experience over time. However one approaches it, it won’t be right the first time.

So I hope this is useful. There are so many ways for qualitative research outcomes to be improved, but I hope this frame on participant experiences provides a useful toolkit for thinking about how we do our work.


Designing Participant Experiences


Since I run an app that has its roots in the world of Design Research, I spend a fair bit of time either doing research myself or speaking with researchers. I'm in the process of writing a research skills class (that'll be free for [Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/) subscribers), so I've been a bit underwater on thinking in terms of specifics, instead of more broadly on what skills and dispositions I believe a researcher should bring to the table.

At its core, good applied research is the critical refuelling station in any design process. Whether you're making usable software or figuring out the ergonomics of a soft-goods product (which, side note, is why I suspect brands like Acronym have such appeal to many tech folk), the research phase is where new influences are introduced — then filtered down and synthesized into a coherent map going forward. Without research, you're relying on instinct (which can be valid) and existing biases (which you may or may not be aware of). With research, these qualities still exist but are tempered by other influences and impulses.

Anyway. That part is a broader conversation, but I want to describe some principles that I think make for good interpretive qualitative research (mostly interviews) in an applied environment.

##

![](/assets/7930c35da039b32aa958543794dbc39b6ff49263-2048x1365.jpg)

##

**Celebrate Your Participant's Experience**

You’re interviewing this person because of their lived experience. They may have come from a particular economic background, or have experience with a particular kind of work, or perhaps seek a service that is otherwise rarely available.

Elevating the humanity and experience of your participants is central to doing good research: when people feel respected and acknowledged, they are also more inclined to share the details of their observations. Best case scenario: they become collaborators in creating a better interview than you could have possibly planned.

##

**Your Experiences Can Build Trust And Create Rifts**

Knowing when to share and when to stay opaque, is a vital part of the research process. A shared experience or background can unlock a trust between interviewer and interviewee that had been absent, but the same experience or belief shared with another can close down the whole conversation. Take the time to learn about your participants, before sharing anything personal of your own history, and always do so in the service of the dual goals of great research and maintaining the dignity of your interview participant.

##

**Unlocking Lived Experiences**

When creating products and services, we are automatically inclined towards generalities. We think “How can this solve it in the best way, for the most people?” The reality is that our assumptions and beliefs on a problem often hold hidden nuance, and so we turn to the lived experiences of others to fill in the gaps in our own.

The trick here is to ask for specifics, rather than generalities. Instead of asking research participants “What do you think of _? How does _ work?”, we want to understand their experience with the subject matter as they experienced it. So to unlock those lived experiences, we ask instead “Tell me about a time” or “Okay, so you’ve done \_. What comes next? Can you give me an example for the last week?” to get to specifics. It’s those specifics that let us dig deeper.

##

**Keep It Open**

We’re laser-focused on our work, and so it’s incredibly easy to dive right into the specifics of our problem. Best case, this looks like an interviewer asking narrower questions than necessary, not creating the space for new ideas or experiences to emerge. Worst case: leading questions “How _much_ did you enjoy this experience?” and binary yes-no questions “And did you enjoy the experience?” can give the researcher a false sense of confidence, or outright lead them down the wrong path. So avoid these pitfalls by asking open-ended questions: “Tell me about your experience with ...” and “What about that experience felt good? What felt bad? What could have been improved?”

Asking open-ended questions may unlock fruitful tangents and ideas that you’d never thought of, or surface a customer need that was always present, but never articulated. So keep it open, and always be open to the unexpected.

##

**Have A Backup**

![](/assets/7261e312fcc13c4ce2ee7684090fd3e99a57b37c-2048x1365.jpg)

Sometimes an interview just isn’t going well. It happens. So what do you do? Experienced researchers have a grab bag of techniques, conversations, and prompts that they can draw from, but as you’re getting started, refocusing can seem like an impossible task. Always keep one or two backup activities or lines of questioning in play, so that you can still get something valuable if an interview subject is suddenly silent or perhaps doesn’t have the experience you expected.

This can look like a sorting exercise (such as gesture and word mapping), a sketching activity (warming up with 30 circles, and then focusing on something related to the research goals), or simply a more generalized line of questioning. But always have the backup. And if the backup fails, then you can always end the interview early.

A great resource for these kinds of tools is [the Hyper Island Toolbox](https://toolbox.hyperisland.com/) (assembled by my friend Alex while he was at HI). Give it a look!

##

**Research Is Work**

Having a fun and engaged interview subject is the best. Sometimes, the interview can flow like an easy conversation, and it becomes easy to forget that you’re speaking to this person for a reason and with an objective. Ultimately, research is work, and as much as we can be caught up in the joy of a great conversation, always return to your notes and the goals of the research to guide the conversation back to your research objective.

And then, once the project is done, if you and the interview subject hit it off (and professional ethics permit), grab a coffee or beer down the road and continue the conversation you had to cut short - though to be honest, I've never done this and kind of wouldn't recommend it.

##

**Research Practice Doesn’t Just Happen At Work**

Practicing design research skills doesn’t just happen at work. Great interview techniques like asking open-ended questions, empowering the other party to speak 80% of the time (at least), and asking questions that dig deeper into their lived experience: these are great principles for your personal and professional lives as well.

If you’re just getting started in design research and wondering how to practice, try learning about the experience of your taxi or uber drive. What kind of tools or techniques do they use to manage their finances? What kind of challenges do they face in that style of work? How did they learn to navigate the city and where do they avoid or recommend? You can practice your skills anywhere: just remember to be discrete, respectful, and trustworthy as you would be doing research professionally.

##

**The Interview Is Only The First Step**

You’ve done some planning, you’ve had a great conversation, now what? Well, hopefully, you have some notes or recordings that you can use. If you have a recording, I recommend using a transcription service to turn it into written form.

These notes and quotes become the basis of your synthesis: the process of bringing together multiple points of information into a coherent outcome from the research goal. This process isn’t easy: it can take days to get everything up on a wall and translate it into sketches, user stories, and insights. But that work and the advocacy for user needs that comes from doing the interview: it’s the heart of why design research is effective.

This is also a domain that has its own fairly intensive depth. Learning to code, categorize, and layer different types of analysis over the same data in order to structure an effective synthesis, can "feel" easy sometimes (especially when you have a team supporting you), but a rigorous process is required to make sure you're not simply reading your own biases into the data.

##

**Your Users Do Not Dictate**

![](/assets/4cb4b89b52ce527f9bbe070f42b8b122a4fce70d-2048x1365.jpg)

Your user is not the designer, nor are they your boss. Unfortunately, it’s often the case that new researchers will hear a need articulated that resonates with their own experience of the problem, and will be taken as a demand or requirement for the product or service being created.

Celebrating the lived experiences of users also means acknowledging the limits of their experience. Sometimes, a user might represent an edge case, or their articulated need is not their actual need, or they are speaking for a hypothetical scenario instead of their lived experience. All of these inputs are valuable for research but should be treated as data points to be synthesized into an opinion and direction that comes from the research team, NOT direct from the user's mouth.

##

**Always Do The Paperwork**

This is where I got the idea for [Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/). The paperwork of design research is multifaceted, ranging from great interview guides, to great notes, to great synthesis. But the logistics of research also involve collecting consent across multiple levels, to orchestrate a finished design product. What happens when someone consents to be interviewed, but not to be photographed? Or to be photographed, but not allowing your client to collect or use that media? What happens to the media afterwards, and at what point is it appropriate to delete it?

[Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/) makes it easy to respect your subject’s consents and collect all your permissions in a single place. It also empowers communication with your participants for additional consent, if required (such as in a video), and helps you organize your interview, so you never go into an interview missing a critical form. You’ll have a single place to handle all the consents, requests for deletion, and permissions around media: meaning that your liability in a world with GDPR and improved privacy legislation is less.

## Storing And Evolving Data

Setting up effective research databases is vital for an ongoing research process. This is where taking the time to effectively transcribe, code, categorize, and record the different facets of an interview becomes critical. Not only does going through this process help with your own synthesis of the information, but it becomes an artefact for others to reflect on and learn from the research process.

There's lots of ways to do that. I've used Notion and Github extensively for this, but as I've been digging into Airtable, I'm beginning to think it might be an effective tool. The main thing is, you want to be accessible, backed up, easy for others to access, and resilient to misinterpretation. Usually, you need to be careful about anonymization and effective coding as well, so that if something changes (be it consent or categorization), changes can cascade down across the data set.

Anyway! I hope this was helpful. It's a bit of a personal list to reflect on as I build this course content, but I would love to hear what you think or if you have any feedback. Please send me a note on any of the social networks (or email) listed on the site!

Note: all images here are from the service design workshop I taught at the UNOPS building in Copenhagen and the Future of Food workshop taught at CIID.


Some Design Research Principles


_Constant progress without being certain you’re getting anywhere._ Reflecting on the adrenal dropkick that was 1917, I realized this perpetually delayed sense of resolution was familiar in other aspects of my life too: the parts where plans and action come together.

—

I’m a design generalist — switching hats between product, research, and strategy in my consulting work, and developer and designer for my own products. Depending on what hat I’m wearing — what the tasks are, who the team is, what my role is — the mechanics of tracking where intent turns into action and then outcome, changes dramatically.

As a designer, I rely heavily on the physical and the linear: post-it notes and notebooks to plan, simple to-do lists, and tools like Invision or Figma to communicate feedback.

As a mostly solo developer, I have tried everything under the sun and have recently settled on a tool called Workflowy, which offers dead simple hierarchical and collapsible lists. I use Helpscout and Github Issues for tracking customer issues, but otherwise, I just need a list.

As a product manager, things get more complicated. I’ve used Excel/Google Sheets, Airtable, Github (it’s actually quite good for this), Podio, Notion, Trello, Basecamp, and Asana — all often with Slack or Microsoft Teams, or weirdly even WhatsApp, bringing everything together. Sometimes Zapier, IFTTT, or a Slack bot is lurking in the background somewhere, nominally making the teams’ lives easier.

The problem is that while we might select these tools, they shape reality in unexpected ways.

—

The movie 1917 is a series of long-shot vignettes, telling the story of two soldiers' attempt to warn a British battalion of a German maneuver meant to draw them into a trap. In the travesty of World War 1, such communication was often accomplished by runners, and so these two soldiers named Will and Tom make for the front.

Along the way, they encounter a series of different environments and stories that they must traverse, in what they believe is their route to the endangered battalion. Each of these vignettes presents a different challenge: a calm field, an abandoned German trench line, a shattered city. Within each, small stories and moments of peace, panic, and grief are experienced before the characters move on, unsure of when that forward progress might give way to rest and completion.

## **The Open Field**

![](/assets/b380423cec9e4cd42e6ab146a02e98a37e6bdb5a-1024x429.jpg)

Productivity software can present the same kind of exacerbating and varied landscapes, with each presenting a greater or lesser degree of friction and risk. Tools like Notion and Trello, for example, present a level of flexibility that is unrivaled. But one quickly discovers that this flexibility comes with the cost of discipline. When managing a team, you also have to manage that team’s use of the tools and the natural entropy brought on by different mental models of a problem coming together on a shared canvas.

A wide canvas and a flexible tool has the benefit of responding to a wide variety of needs, but it demands the vision to bring those needs together. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear whether a decision made in the expanse is a considered one or simply a reaction to the lack of direction. I’m guilty of this with Notion: I switched my product team to Notion for documentation and decision-making purposes, but initially simply made a more friction-filled version of Trello and Kanban. It worked, but it wasn’t until we’d spent a month using the tool that its real utility emerged: a way to “zoom” in on strategic imperatives through the lens of user stories with the ability to [create relationships and aggregations on those relationships](https://www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79). This feature ultimately gave me what I needed: transparency for the team, a necessary gut check for me when managing the project complexity, and rapid accountability mechanisms for the project stakeholders.

That said, it’s also a constant battle. These open tools require constant management lest they become overgrown with accumulated information. Slipping up in that management means a team member might misread something, or go down an overgrown path you’d meant to erase ages ago. None of these tools do a good job of managing this because they can’t read your intention: all you can do is set up a point on the landscape and order it as best you can.

## **The City Street**

![](/assets/70cc0e090693c6134a3470ce0b0cf6b7da5a368e-779x447.jpg)

Many tools are seemingly more ordered and perhaps more easily resemble the familiar patterns of streets, parks, apartments, and communal spaces. But any urbanist will tell you that the nominal order of the city belies a deeper emergent quality — nature abhors a straight line and humanity rebels against too much order.

The benefit of more ordered and opinionated tools is that they direct you towards what they think is the right path. When used for project management, Jira, Asana, and Github Issues are all good examples of this. Even when using more open tools like Notion and Trello, it is easy to default to these well-worn paths. Without critical thought, the open field becomes a grid or hub-and-spoke town.

The benefit is that these patterns provide for rapid movement and a consistent mental model. Teams can share a common language when collectively resolving the abstractions of intent into action. But there are always gaps and biases. In a previous experience [using GitHub for project management](https://github.com/features/project-management/), the nuances of design decisions and user feedback often got lost in the drive to “close those issues.” In the relentless drive towards hitting our milestones, the focus on shipping undermined our team’s capacity to engage with alternative solutions over simply polishing or extending what already existed. The way we engaged with the project and the tool locked us into a kind of path dependence that perhaps a more open tool wouldn’t have. Put another way, our bias toward shipping engendered the selection of a tool that served to reinforce that bias.

In other words, these tools impose an order, as do a city’s streets, alleys, and walls. While we can’t walk through walls (or at least we can’t without a [pretty radical reframing of the problem](https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/walking-through-walls)), we can use the city as it was intended to make certain aspects of daily life run more smoothly. And in the margins where friction emerges, perhaps there’s a place to explore and experiment.

## **The Trenchline**

![](/assets/bfc0fe94961d853c0cbcece769207f34bd17d0ab-960x387.png)

The “To-Do” list is where intention becomes some form of action. In 1917, with rows of infantry waiting to go over the relative protection of the trench walls into no-mans land, the strategies of leaders rapidly resolved into action.

Strategies are intentions mediated by scale, beliefs about reality, information, peer influence, bias, fatigue, resource constraints, etc. For all that we laud the brilliant strategic thinking of individuals throughout history, often good vs bad strategy comes down to one’s ability to mediate these factors and not become bogged down by indecision ([Boyd’s OODA loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop) is a good way to frame this).

To-Do lists are an absolutely miserable place to strategize. While a good strategist should be aware of how that list slowly gets crossed off, the immediacy and bias presented by that frontline can easily blind one to decisions and actions needed at a higher level.

I’ve vacillated between different To-Do list approaches over the years. Functionally, they all kind of do the same thing: list out a set of things that need to be done that can be removed when finished. I used a hobonichi religiously for several years, before switching to Things 3, and then switching back to a notebook. Today, I’m using a “Weekly” To-Do list in a notebook (normally takes 1-2 pages). I’ve found that all I need is the ability to record, easily and consistently access, and shift things into the future if need be. A system like [GTD](https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/) or bullet journaling also helps with this.

But what happens when you DO need to strategize at the front line? When a supposedly simple To-Do item becomes more complicated than you thought? I tend to think this is where my dissatisfaction with tools comes from. I might write out a To-Do, discover that it is actually several To-Do’s with a potential for more, and attempt to capture and organize that complexity. Tools like Things 3 do a good job of transitioning single items into multiple, or creating projects, or splitting lists, etc. But ultimately, what helps me is to leave that tool and not try to over-extend it. Shifting to post-its, or to one of the more ordered team-level tools can give you the illusion of abstraction and control, even if you’re steps from the churn of action.

## **No True Respite**

![](/assets/016756fa102efbe5542c249480d8fe091853c302-888x372.jpg)

I’m writing this as a decidedly un-Nordic one week vacation comes to an end. I’m writing this because I’m back to looking at all of these insufficient tools: At Notion with its complexity, at Trello with its beckoning lists, at my notebook with its rows of unchecked boxes, at Workflowy with its unexplored assumptions, and at Help Scout with its suspicious bugs.

I don’t think that consolidating all of these is the right call. But I do think I’ll be eliminating some. In a few weeks, I’ll be completing a year-long consulting project and leaving a well-functioning team with a hopefully well-functioning Notion database. If I check back in six months, what will it look like?

I’m also preparing a big feature push on my app, [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com) — basically with the goal of getting it out of beta and into a new business model. I’m actually reducing the complexity of how I track things immensely here: as a solo, multi-hatted founder, I need the focus of a map, compass, and a moment away from the minutia of writing code — not the complexity of Notion or Asana. After all, I’m only communicating with myself so far.

## **What are we fighting for?**

![](/assets/b6a2e2cedfd4ea3c5aa9f23f50f8f6a690eb1a36-928x523.jpg)

Ultimately, there is no such thing as a productivity hack.

1917 captured the collected stories of horror and heroics that the director Sam Mendes’ grandfather recalled. But the first World War, as the second, was a slaughter brought on by bias, indifference, pride, technical and tactical experimentation, and path dependence.

Bloviating over productivity hacks in an age of capitalist excess, reflects a conceit that driving ourselves into the ground is a universally acknowledged virtue. It’s not. Though these tools are meant to drive efficiency, speed, cohesion, etc; efficiency at any cost leaves one wondering.

Rather, let’s use these tools to **see** differently. As Malcolm McCullough states in his book [Abstracting Craft](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/abstracting-craft):

“When the tools are complex, when the artifacts produced are abstract, or when tools provide the only means of access to the medium (all common conditions in high technology), it can be difficult to say where a tool ends and a medium begins.”

If that act of producing — be it software, hardware, services, organisations, anything — is a craft, then the means by which we organise these crafts must be continuously interrogated, if we are to avoid our creations simply reflecting the limitations of our tools. When these fundamentals of the craft are questioned, then new forms, new paths, and new futures can reveal themselves.


All Quiet on the Productivity Front


We all operate on cycles. Circadian, seasonal, fiscal, and academic — oscillating across frequencies that frame our day-to-day. I was made a lot more self-aware of these cycles when I became mostly remote and mostly independent professionally around 2017 — and had to quickly learn how to either ride out or fight against those rhythms. The thing that I’ve fought most arduously for is the Sponge Cycle.

**Sponge cycles are dedicated periods to absorb and become suffused.** It is the opportunity to collect and mix the fuel for the near term ideas and inspirations — the simple bits of knowledge and skill that congregate and combine into something greater. Most work in technology, design, and operations involves maintaining and building things based on previous knowledge, training, and experience — without frequently affording time to build new types of knowledge in that milieu.

In the best case, you find yourself in a career that requires constant new knowledge to stay competitive — and in these scenarios, directed sponge cycles end up being built into the job. Front end development (managed well) is one such job: with frameworks and technologies changing almost constantly, keeping abreast of those changes has to be integrated into your day-to-day practice. Woe be unto him who opens up code even a year in age, only to find one's “mature” choices entirely deprecated (I’m not bitter).

In the worst case, the value of new knowledge is not understood, and so the weight of that self-maintenance falls on your own shoulders. Your job might be heavily operations focused, or consist of constant implementation or skilled rote tasks. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of designers fall into this trap — not designing so much as implementing patterns again and again and again.

Disconnected from a source to feed it, the “sponge” — a metaphor in this case for knowledge, information, inspiration, and connections — slowly starts to wither, as its store is depleted by the other cycles of planning, implementing, communicating, etc. Instead of something virtuous propelling us into new opportunities and new inspiration, it’s a bit too easy for that upward spiral to just become an otherwise static loop.

Sponge cycles are a bit useless by themselves — in fact, and this might be stretching the metaphor a bit, a sponge left to molder is one of the sadder day-to-day objects we might encounter. There’s an argument that [lacking mechanisms to expel and filter out the nonsense](https://www.vox.com/21558524/conspiracy-theories-2020-qanon-covid-conspiracies-why), this type of information gathering exacerbates the online conspiracy theory-driven extremism we’ve seen in the United States. 100% sponge cycles are unchecked and mostly useless idea people, whereas 0% sponge cycles individuals are inflexible and conservative to an extreme — impeding a team of its capacity to grow towards meaningful solutions. We need sponge cycles but in moderation.

For sponge cycles to be effective, they have to appear at regular intervals, be consistent in their scope and length, and build on themselves.

## **Regular Intervals**

![](/assets/6d29512cdeee8b02362f7b837f3ce7185b6f87ca-1761x1321.png)

Sponge cycles have to happen at regular intervals to be effective. Different people have different tolerances, but my big “sponge cycles” seem to happen every twelve to eighteen months. These are periods when “burn out” sets in, and I start itching for novelty. It took me a while to understand this in myself, and even longer to build systems around it.

For most of my career, I wasn’t self-aware of this cadence. But what I’ve come to realize is that certain activities serve as the regenerative sponge cycle, and that helped me identify that timing.

These include

- researching something deeply before actually making something. This is especially true when I’m learning a new skill around which I have aspirations, but not the capacity to realize what’s in my head. This has also been big design research projects, which is part of why [IDEO](www.ideo.com) was such an incredible place if you have a shorter sponge cycle.
- a period where I’m between two things — for example while I was nervously waiting for security clearance between IDEO and working at the US Digital Service — or when I’ve taken a conscious “break” from work. Without fail, I’ll get bored in about five days and start down some random path.
- when a big life transition occurs, like when my son showed up, during particularly impactful vacations — such as a multi-country hop through Scandinavia on my honeymoon.

Usually, these events have not so much been intentionally timed, as coming just a little bit too late. It might be getting anxious and annoyed, but not have necessarily understood that a sponge cycle was the pressure release.

Of my friends who do this best, Zahra Ebrahim of [Monumental Projects](https://monumentalprojects.ca/) is unquestionably the master. In the decade that I’ve known her, she’s taken regular creative sabbaticals between her busy seasons, where she actively explores creative endeavours, while also disappearing into the backcountry for weeks at a time. She comes out of each cycle with a new eye on things, a new take on problems, and an absurd amount of energy to throw into her work. As in most things, following Zahra’s lead is a good call.

## **Consistent Form**

![](/assets/cef689e4a5118242758e86e95bb3bce96c90db27-1620x1080.png)

Having a process in one's creative and exploratory endeavours is fundamental to actually following through. The best example I’ve seen of controlled sponge cycles is project-based, relatively open-ended design research. You have a budget, a timeline, and a question. You might have some leads, some populations or markets to explore, and based on all of that, an idea of what the outcome might look like. But really nothing else. I love this work, even though it’s often a) the hardest and b) the most anxiety-inducing kind of research project.

The anxiety is there because the space in-between the question and the outcome is mostly unknown. But, thankfully, you’ll usually have a process with which to navigate from A to B. This might include such dull tasks as breaking down the problem into sub-queries that are easier to plan around, interviewing others who know more about the domain in a structured way, setting deadlines and dates by which you need to accomplish certain tasks, etc. [I’ll be writing more about that kind of planning in the weeks to come.](https://divergeweekly.com/)

Part of what makes this whole process so difficult is that you’re trying to wrangle novelty and inspiration as an individual experiencing your own rhythms — rhythms that might be outside of what others experience. Creativity is relatively easy in groups: most people fall into it naturally, and there are plenty of tricks to draw out the brooding and the wallflowers. But wrangling these things as an individual is no easy task, and the people who make it look easy tend to be incredibly disciplined about it. [My friend Simon](https://www.instagram.com/simondesigns/) is a great example of this: he’s a Pharma marketing director who spent the past year building a social media following around his artwork — most of which depicts quarantine life with his boyfriend [Patric](https://open.spotify.com/artist/4FgddnDooFU5FiL3jk2w6L?si=OztKpfF2S528KoZdiuFyng). He’s been remarkably disciplined in his practice, but also introspective and structured about developing it. Every time we talk, he’s thinking about process, artifacts, and equipment that make the act of creating just that little bit more fluid and unavoidable.

A sponge cycle needs to follow that kind of managed regularity for it to see consistent outcomes. I found the Harvard Business Review has some [interesting writing on the productivity outcomes](https://hbr.org/2014/02/when-a-vacation-reduces-stress-and-when-it-doesnt?ab=at_art_art_1x1) around vacations to be inspiring from this angle. Activities like planning the details of a trip ahead of time to reduce unknowns, hiring or delegating planning responsibilities for local arrangements, and going far away, all seem to make for better vacations than the alternatives. I’d argue that the same holds true for sponge cycles. Have a game plan ahead of time so you don’t get bogged down, find ways of offloading certain tasks onto others to keep yourself in that absorbing mindset (though this is not an excuse to offload emotional labour on your partner — I’m saying hire someone if you can, pay for a service, etc. get creative — not abusive — about this part), and consider going broad in your search for knowledge around the itch this sponge cycle looks to scratch.

## **Feedback**

![](/assets/3d7c45f7e79a6fd6f0409b4d694cd1ad8d01627d-661x1000.png)

Everyone gets stuck. Unfortunately, we often misdiagnose this entrapment as something localized — a person, a place, a particular problem. More often, the stagnation is something a bit more systemic. There are countless systemic factors that undermine ones progress (too many of which are exogenous and unjust), but some small fraction of those internal ones are a sponge cycle repeated and wasted.

Every sponge cycle is an opportunity to set up the next one, to take you even further. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the experience of exploring, discovering, trying, failing, learning, and growing — and do it a bit more gracefully the next time around. Maybe it’s how you took what you learned in the last cycle and implemented it afterwards, building the idea that emerged from that confluence of experiences you had in the last sponge cycle. Maybe it's how you communicated that inspiration to your colleagues: when did they understand your excitement, and when did it fall flat? It might even be the decision to stay or go; and whether you have the resources to choose where to direct the energy coming out of your latest sponge cycle.

But often that doesn’t happen. My most recent experience was a sponge cycle mismanaged. I’d spent quite a bit of time gathering resources to dedicate to maintaining and upgrading the [Knowsi platform](https://knowsi.com), but instead found myself spinning my wheels for the first two months of that period, because I’d found myself in a sponge cycle, instead of a maintenance and implementation mindset. I focused the learning on the wrong place and became quite frustrated because of it. The pathway out was actually spinning up a different project that became the site for experimentation and learning, which I have since been feeding back into Knowsi in a more controlled manner.

How did I find myself in that spot? Anxiety. [As I wrote a few weeks ago](https://andrewlb.com/reflecting-on-2020/), I took on too much last year in “maintenance” tasks. While I find building a plane while flying it pretty exhilarating, manually keeping a wing attached to the plane for a transatlantic flight is less appealing. So when my natural sponge cycle came around, I didn’t give myself space for it to do what I probably needed most at that time. It worked out (and I think I learned from it), but it frankly wasn’t fun.

## **Attack Decay Sustain Release**

![](/assets/dc73252f103c5f5d850f8a221602cf543c39e19a-640x640.png)

Every sound has what’s called an [envelope](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envelope_(music)>), a type of modulation to the component parts of that sound that make for the richness interpreted as notes, textures, effects, etc. A piano note has a quick attack, short decay, a long sustain, and a relatively long release following the key being lifted ([and then there are its harmonics](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247693501_Synthesis_of_Acoustic_Timbres_using_Principal_Component_Analysis/figures?lo=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic)[…](undefined)). Each note has its envelope and structure, providing consistency and variation over time, but it’s inevitably the combination of those notes that moves and inspires us.

The thing is that the sponge cycle isn’t the song, but part of the envelope of each note. An attack that’s too quick sounds staccato and off-putting. A release that’s too long muddies chords and undermines the whole edifice. To create something beautiful (or even coherent), we have to discover how to fit our sponge cycles into our lives so that they’re a piece of a bigger story. And that comes from muddling around a bit, and really paying attention to what happens when you do. We’re not always fortunate enough to be able to realize our sponge cycles to their fullest, but we can nurture them for when we might.


Sponge Cycles


Whenever we see modern militaries, we’re witnessing industrialized production and movement of things on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Whether it's the [engineering that goes into feeding deployed troops](https://gastropod.com/marching-on-our-stomachs-the-science-and-history-of-feeding-the-troops/) or [the rollout of new Army Greens to American service members](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/09/03/soldiers-begin-purchase-new-army-greens-program-offers-double-credit-uniforms.html), militaries represent a centralization of logistic and productive capacity that doesn’t exist anywhere else. But centralization isn’t always efficient or timely. Something is always left behind and this inevitable surplus of things must be addressed.

This is an essay that tries to make sense of these martial leftovers, as not just physical artifacts, but also psychological ones. Psychological damage that bounces around as a reminder of conflict, both actual and _in potentia_ — free radicals in our apocalyptic imagination that then feeds into what we create. I call this **Speculative Surplus**, and this is a first attempt to describe it, or rather a start at mapping out which areas to explore.

## **Googling “How to Remove Blood Stains”**

I’ve been wearing mostly military inspired clothes or actual military surplus for years. When I was a student, it was cheap, accessible, and a common thing in Toronto. Later, it was an aesthetic I unconsciously carried on with, not thinking about it too critically. But when I was a civilian specialist working at the Pentagon, I became self-conscious of this quotidian uniform. To put it bluntly, wandering down E ring in a [Buzz Rickson A2](https://www.historypreservation.com/products-page/brands/buzz-ricksons-usaaf-type-a-2-summer-flying-jacket-united-sheeplined-clothing-co/) with the Army Air Force logo painted on the shoulder just didn’t feel right, nor did wearing a thrifted Canadian Navy sweater. But that said, my style was just that: my style. Formed from unconscious influences and explicit designs on thrift, performance, tribe, and reduction; I’d found something that was not uniform, but rather a patchwork of uniforms.

![](/assets/352d2078e86a82bff1751c195c960f52298c5e0e-604x359.jpg)

There’s a risk in dressing in such militarized styles though, or really any homogenized set of clothes: that one’s style will become a costume. Techwear — a style built around technical fabrics and functional apparel — is an example of this, with its merger of special forces and snowboarding. As an [Acronym](https://www.gq.com/story/errolson-hugh-acronym-profile) fan myself, the line between dressing as Mall Ninja Team 6 vs a well-considered streetwear outfit is narrow.

Done well, techwear is an elegant statement on what it means to be a city dweller in an era of increasing extremes. Where climate change pummels megalopolises like Tokyo and New York; ambient surveillance becomes the norm for enforcing both corporate and governmental compliance in those zones — techwear is the synthetic armour with which we engage the collapsing Anthropocene. It also looks good most of the time. Here’s an example of a natural techwear fit: technical details borrowed from military and outdoor influences, softened with sneakers and a cap, and a well considered silhouette.

![](/assets/136be2b0a241451dde96ce1b25c4649477ff92d1-768x960.jpg)

This is not so great. I’d more readily frame this as maximalist cosplay with a fascistic bent.

![](/assets/de4107f17ecba861399ecb29370adbb84bbc6c00-857x1020.jpg)

There’s a character in [William Gibson’s Zero History](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780425259450) that perfectly encapsulates this lack of self-awareness, or maybe a self-awareness metastasized into something dangerous. Nicknamed Foley, for the foliage green colour of his achingly tactical pants, Foley is a somewhat bumbling antagonist whose story reflects his clothes vs. his clothes reflecting the story he came to inhabit. The foliage green wears him. Foley is dismissed by the book’s grand antihero, Hubertus Bigend, as a designer turned equipment fetishist, caught up in a fantasy of holding capabilities that were somehow purchased through gear instead of acquired through training and experience. What the hell are all those pockets for, anyway?

But fantasy has its advantages too, and we can hardly blame the fantasist for wanting their escape. Fleeing the doldrums of office wear, work wear, and the constraints that today’s uniforms place on their wearers is a wonderful feeling. Far from just playing off of [Virgil Abloh’s 3% rule for changing a design](https://hypebeast.com/2018/6/virgil-abloh-interview-hypebeast-magazine), why not escape even further and occupy some alternative world of your own construction?

Such fantasist apparel can often represent a kind of speculation about what different worlds might exist if only X and Y were true. Techwear represents some branch of our timeline where such tactical and technical apparel becomes necessary — a world where both climate and governance has collapsed. An adjacent style is Gorpcore, which is composed of brightly coloured fleeces and insulators, borrowed from alpinist communities, finding their home in the urban milieu. It suggests a more hopeful variety of techwear where to thrive in extremes is to do so in comfort.

![](/assets/0a04ca26c63ff253366ddaf67b80339701f43dd7-2000x1333.jpg)

Each of these timelines carries its own constraints though, which serve to construct and limit those worlds towards recognizable definition. The fact that a [techwear](https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/g31213240/best-techwear-brands/) fit is identifiable from a [gorpcore](https://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/comments/hr0lba/a_guide_to_gorpcore/) fit or a [normcore](https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/what-is-normcore/) fit is frankly incredible, even if that identification takes place within affinity groups familiar enough with the brands that demarcate these stylistic borders. Our capacity to construct taxonomies of style — and for individuals to both consciously and unconsciously adhere to those styles — is a remarkable quality in and of itself, and speaks to some deeper quality of the temporal and tribal core that dressing oneself represents.

We’re literally dressed in our tribes and our timeline, wrapped in the familiar or the aspirational. And for the fantasist — whether bedecked in MOLLE webbing or immaculately armoured in the hedonism of Rick Owns — there’s still often the grounding of their designs in the reality or shared fantasies of today. Gorpcore, after all, finds some of its popularity by borrowing the expansive silhouettes of heavy-duty military wear like the USAF N-3B parka, with the high visibility and comfort of mountaineering apparel; and situating them in the unlikely locales of city streets and galleries — hard clothes in soft situations. Similarly, techwear emerged from the background radiation of a fading cyberpunk scene, only to mutate through the aesthetic and material availability of the special forces culture — itself a direct outcome of the post-9/11 media and material supply chain.

Each of these styles emerges from a historical and material detritus of past conflicts. And where it’s not war, it’s been the utilitarian output of workwear and global industrialization. Many branches of a healthy tree with deep and enduring roots.

## **Speculative Surplus**

[Speculative design](https://speculativeedu.eu/an-overview-of-contemporary-speculative-practice/) was what hooked me on the discipline of design. It’s a coherent set of tools and methods that empower the designer to explore many different alternative scenarios in a disciplined manner through tangible prototyping. Scenarios can be investigated, prodded, turned around, blown up, and reassembled. What’s left in that intentional chaos is often something both deeply foreign and compellingly familiar. Speculative Design felt purpose-built for inquisitive people with a drive to build.

My [intentional wardrobe](https://andrewlb.com/a-more-intentional-wardrobe/) experiment (which turned into [Stupid Fits](https://stupidfits.com)) helped me draw a line between the toolkit of speculative design and the sensibility (or in some cases lack thereof) that has constructed my wardrobe. A thing I quickly realized was that **I felt uncomfortable wearing all of one brand.** Wearing a uniform wasn’t for me, but cobbling together something distinct from many different uniforms felt natural. In the past, I’d build [many small tools](https://github.com/readywater/design-cards) [for simulating](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DZBf9pJohb3O3a8g54oUr-kuzEyLop6Lwnk4f7CBMmA/edit?usp=sharing) [different scenarios](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kxSbkwnDXJZfGT_-6vx8Yu8Xa4zb8taRV3CGYYlHy5E/edit?usp=sharing) — games for getting participants thinking with constraints. Sometimes those constraints are pretty wild, other times they reveal some anxiety-inducing combination.

![](/assets/f6e46b8f39687c8a86a5705305b9eab8d653bca5-2220x666.png)

Functionally, this is how the idea of Speculative Surplus came about — **taking the imagination and engineering embedded in specific fantasist styles and treating the artifacts of those styles as the surplus of a story already played out.** Taking a painfully real example, the war stories of Vietnam can be compelling, but it’s the [reconstructed memories from the experience and stories of healing after](https://andrewlb.com/reading/the-things-they-carried/) that are more so (to me anyway). The counter cultural use of the M65 jacket of Vietnam — maybe worn with wide-whale cords and shaggy hair — meant taking a symbol of unimaginable industrial and military might and making it something new. Not divorced from its past, but recontextualized and intermingled with some fantasy and hope for a present that needed to move on.

Speculative Surplus is the accretion of histories — both real and imagined — and the overstocking of their militarized industries. It doesn’t glorify the violence or functionality for which such apparel was designed, but rather protects oneself as we step into what’s next — knowing that we can’t know what comes next. It doesn’t deny the function for which they were designed, but it doesn’t revel in it either.

## **Criticality of Origin**

Speculative Surplus can’t be nostalgic, because the context where such a surplus was created is horrible. We have to emphatically and critically engage with the history and the speculation that gives rise to this style of dress in the first place.

One of my favourite brands, Hamcus, is worth engaging with in this way. [I’ve written about their design systems before](https://www.tchwr.com/2021/01/03/full-hamcus-finding-the-spark-in-scifi-workwear/), but the core takeaway is that they use specific, character driven narratives for each new season’s releases. And their main story can be interpreted as an industrialized military fighting an insurrection perpetuating a refugee community’s flight. Their clothes are designed to reflect that: clean uniforms with structured lines and technical materials vs frayed edges and acid-dyed mixed-material garments of those in flight.

![](/assets/39711104fdec04cd08559b2b3deff6f9bf3b4391-910x806.jpg)

Understanding that a jacket has a history that can usually be traced backwards to specific models, specific times, and specific sides, has significance. And while we might be constructing our outfits in a combinatorial, remix-like way; those histories are not our own.

## **Functionality in Context**

Surplus emerges from a context where a resource was overproduced for the actual need, and that either a new understanding has been reached — or conditions have fundamentally changed.

In the drawdown to the Vietnam war, the pervasiveness of US Army and marine uniforms in counter culture was notable.

![](/assets/8aa006e29e4cc8c4dbab998af2edb261ec71435b-1592x1250.jpg)

For my generation, the dominant wars have been in the Middle East, albeit in two very different climates, in two very different countries. We’ve seen a flood of industrialized military surplus back into American and coalition countries — from [local police wearing desert Multicam in urban environments](https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2014/02/10/why-do-some-st-louis-county-cops-wear-military-style-camouflage-uniforms) to the [insanity of Mine Resistant Ambush Protector vehicles](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/floyd-protests-renew-debate-about-police-use-armored-vehicles-other-n1231288) being used by police against Black Lives Matter protestors. This reintroduction of militarized apparel changes things — it puts something in the air. It affects the aesthetics of a generation that adopts, rejects, queers, or fetishizes the artifacts of conflict that come home.

![](/assets/cba15c290b72e8b3719e57510c1e6485fbe3bb4e-1024x682.png)

The [costume design by Craig Green in Alien: Covenant](https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/36032/1/craig-green-on-creating-costumes-for-alien-covenant-interview) is a microcosm of this conflict overflow.

Practical and modular, the costumes tell a story of colonizers dressing in a more relaxed, practical way with the militarized garb the had been provided. Across the different characters, there is a uniformity of style by lieu of resources, but not a de facto uniform. Instead, in the bubble of their colonial space ship, each individual takes what makes sense for them through fit, style preference, or climate comfort. What might have entered the spaceship defined by regulation and uniform code emerges on the other side reflecting an evolved set of needs.

![](/assets/bb23971a4ccde4ff5c6a790d4f7e9ffeb9d43898-800x1200.jpg)

The post-collapse, counter-surveillance styles of the Italian brand [GALL clothing](https://www.gallclothing.com/schism-ss21) is another good example of a militarized-aesthetic being coopted. Softening and maddening it. Shifting functionality into farce, while still providing utility and protection. If Gall becomes part of one's speculative surplus wardrobe, how does it co-exist alongside the irreverence of [Online Ceramics](https://online-ceramics.com/) or the domestic-utility, tactical-aesthetics of microbrands like [AMDUS Project](https://www.amdusproject.com/)? I’d rather live in a society where the voluminous pockets of the M65 held blunts, not bullets.

## **A Decisive Moment — Passed**

War is a habit humanity can’t seem to shake. So long as there’s a reason for conflict, militaries and their material secretions will continue to suffuse society and its stylistic sensibilities. The trick is to imagine something better with what we have. Can we think more like [Maharishi’s Hardy Blechman](https://www.endclothing.com/dk/features/the-culture-of-camouflage-with-maharishis-hardy-blechman) — tirelessly reconstructing and reimagining the conflict garments of the past into something softer, more critical, more peaceful?

![](/assets/a626f0ff4c0e82d36046ac5afb7dcc1bf816b5e1-1024x1024.png)

Much beloved by security scholars and military theorists, [Carl von Clausewitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz) has a lot to say about conflict and its relationship to society. He argues that conflict exists within a cyclical relationship between the military, society, and government itself — leading to a decisive moment on the battlefield which defines victory or loss.

Speculative Surplus comprises the artifacts of that interrelation between the grand strategy of governments and their acquisition powers, the demands of society and their appetite for conflict, and the sensibilities and actions of conflict actors themselves. Taken over time and curated by the individual, the reappropriation of an artifact of an industrialized military state to personal style in a time of peace, is perhaps a way that society heals itself — not by forgetting the past, but by refocusing on the individual.

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai exemplifies this refocus on the individual in the countext of history when he wrote “The Tourist”:

> Once I sat on the steps by agate at David’s Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker.

> “You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.”

> “But he’s moving, he’s moving!”

> I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,

> “You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.”

Speculative surplus seeks to imagine the potential conflicts of tomorrow or some alternate timeline, but defang them by coopting and surfacing the individual of today. The sensibility of this person becomes the uniform of one — reflecting the material and aesthetic systems which one inhabits, but actively constructing something more aspiration from those remembered, lived, and imagined histories.

##

_Big thanks to [Chris Arkenberg](https://instagram.com/farmtonavel), [Sam Sundberg](https://ffwd.substack.com/), and [Quantius](https://amdusproject.com) for feedback that made this a slightly more coherent starting point._

This essay was also published on [Tchwr.com](https://www.tchwr.com/2021/02/11/speculative-surplus-a-uniform-of-one/)


Speculative Surplus


This essay was originally published on the** [TCHWR blog](https://www.tchwr.com/2021/01/03/full-hamcus-finding-the-spark-in-scifi-workwear/).**

[Hamcus](http://hamc.us/) is not a techwear brand in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a science fiction workwear clothing brand based out of Guangzhou, China that has embarked on a particular type of world creation. To wear my bias on my ([insanely constructed, multi-paneled, and enormous) sleeve](https://stupidfits.com/group/4/hamcus): I love Hamcus. As a consumer and follower of Hamcus, and as a designer myself, I feel as though I’m seeing the kindling of a fire that’s just starting to catch — at the threshold between spark and cultivation, with a million perils. So this is a short essay about hope.

N.K. Jemisin’s novel [_The Fifth Season_](https://bookshop.org/books/the-fifth-season/9780316229296) begins with two endings: the end of an individual’s story and the end for a continent and its people. This introduction is predicated on a reality for that continent: that every few decades or centuries, the world ends. When the world has ended before, and will end again before too long, society ends up looking quite different.

## World-building

Designer Tuff Leung founded Hamcus in 2015, and as I’m writing this, at the end of 2020, its primary line PRMTVSM is built on a concept similar to Jemisin’s. The story is situated in the universe of Primus, and [Tuff and his team have been exploring their design work through a world-building system called the “Cosmo Character Style System”](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhPYh4jR4KxRinx00q_qDq2HTb1swYS3/view) which grants them two great benefits. It provides a system of constraints to design a faction around with its own rituals, symbolism, and back story. Further, it provides for the creation of a hero character for whom the flagship pieces are designed and around whom the story ticks forward. The recently released [DarkSeer ](https://hamc.us/collections/20_02_aw/products/om01220-1-bk)jumpsuit is an example of this.

![](/assets/5afecc912436fec15cab3d6ef77637381676d8c1-900x1200.jpg)

In _The Fifth Season_, Jemisin tells the story of a world where an environmental apocalypse is always around the corner, and so its societies and traditions are built accordingly. In times of plenty, trade and tolerance flourish, whereas during the fifth season, surviving communities and individuals take to the road, fleeing calamity and surviving as best they can. By way of example, the backpack features prominently in the book as an artefact which so much depends on.

While less complex of a story, Hamcus takes a similar track. They look to the PRMTVSM universe and start to flush out what factions, characters, and lore might exist within it to create tensions and contrast.

Examples include the nominally fascistic Prime Military Unit (PMU) with industrial takes on military uniform;

![](/assets/39711104fdec04cd08559b2b3deff6f9bf3b4391-910x806.jpg)

The nomadic ADAM faction with more radical colours and frayed edges;

![](/assets/28f4ce8d94ced53615d864315c047187d0379b3f-1163x1000.jpg)

The mysterious RVEN and their collaborators;

![](/assets/f31c666aa5c9b1d1231b16772e7749ebf84e53c8-900x1350.jpg)

The Atheist faction;

![](/assets/e3cde72e0754e9d1eccdfd880a9cc6263ee02e69-1141x1000.jpg)

And various other groups along the way, from Arctic Mantas to Space Cowboys.

![](/assets/be77e207ec95f81fac2bef85a78d51fa1715987f-1172x820.jpg)

Each year, Leung and his team expand the universe some more, using the constraints of the existing world to incrementally extend forward. [This most recent season](https://hamc.us/collections/20_02_aw) — just wrapped up with Tier 6 that was released mid-December — proves the point, showing an extension of the Adam universe and a refinement of the PMU characters.

![](/assets/7730c4c2dd5f6f345b099a552062975dd6cbf6e0-900x1200.jpg)

From a design perspective, it’s a refreshingly honest take on an inductive design process. Designers often justify inductive design leaps through a deductive process: claiming that users want X, behave in Y way, and therefore we have created Z. (I am writing this as an interaction designer myself.)

More frequently, design actually works something like this: “Well, we’ve been exposed to X and Y, and I hold prior belief P, and then I happened to be reading A, D, and L but my partner was telling me about T recently. But really, we have to hold to F, G, and Æ constraint, so I created Ø. It felt right.”

Design synthesis occurs through this kind of confluence of influences. It is past experience, managing new influences and inputs, and structuring constraints — with ample iteration in-between — that leads to great design.

When designers talk about process, frequently it is in reference to a system that manages and regulates the inputs and constraints part — and the Cosmo Character Style System feels like just that.

## It’s not techwear

I got introduced to Hamcus through the techwear fashion world (where we use progressive layers of DWR to protect ourselves from the drip), so the somewhat out-there stylings of the PRMTVSM line had an established beachhead with which to invade my closet. But I quickly realized that Hamcus isn’t really techwear — even though it gets conflated with that.

![](/assets/447f2a9f78f66bafd4e1a0e1d4049b68a550a7c9-1869x1400.jpg)

The Hamcus team leverages some technical features in their design work — extensive use of components like fidlocks, windbreaker fabrics and similar — but much of this feels like it is in the spirit of taking the basic Acronym ninja look, and dropping said ninja in the desert some 400 miles (years?) from the nearest city with the contents of their techwear fitpic, a cotton blanket, and a sewing kit. Hamcus looks like a climate catastrophe happened (it’s inevitable at this point) and 200 years later, the descendants of survivors emerged from the Acronym studio in the tattered remains of pieces once identified with Js and Ps — long since delaminated Gore-Tex and faded Stotz.

The real “tech” in Hamcus is their process and the incredible construction of their garments. Two things stick out — their extensive use of dying techniques and their access to manufacturing. The former defines their aesthetic with garments that look like they’ve been through a deep frier or a nomadic decade in the desert, while the latter facilitates their rapid prototyping process and absolutely massive number of items in any given collection. These qualities provide a kind of constraint and opportunity for the brand that ultimately sets it apart from others.

## The Hamcus story arc

Looking at where Hamcus is right now is to have just watched the pilot of a really good show or read the first book in a series, and to be completely hooked. Interesting characters have made their appearances, an aesthetic reference point has metastasized in my world view, and my wife is seriously confused by my sudden collection of garment-dyed apocalypse pants.

But I don’t know whether to be confident or pessimistic about Hamcus’ future going forward. The PRMTVSM line feels like it could either be the first universe for Hamcus, or the only one. Either way, the constraints imposed by that universe’s story will eventually start to seriously challenge the team’s aesthetic sensibility — as well as that of their market.

![](/assets/2540842e4f288d86fb8556c82cf6ae8f0e58bbb8-951x951.jpg)

Already, there have been small signs of that universe fraying, an example being the Neo Geo Akira Riders limited edition jackets. They’re cool jackets, based off of their PMU Field Jacket blocks but pulling in visual references from the _Akira_ movie and Neo Geo games like _Garou: Mark of the Wolves_, but they feel incongruous to the rest of the Hamcus universe. And while I somehow doubt that Hamcus worked with either Neo Geo or Toho to create the jacket, they feel a bit too much like the superficial aspects of collaboration culture elsewhere in the streetwear and fashion universe — marketing gimmicks instead of genuine creative collaboration (although this sometimes results in genius).

The other side of the coin is the frequent use of Hamcus gear in the most recent season of [Star Trek Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery). This is fantastic for a burgeoning brand like Hamcus because it gets their name and aesthetic out there, probably fills some depleted coffers, and frankly works really well for that universe. It can also work really well for existing followers of the brand. I remember being thrilled to see one of my favourite designers (and a fellow Canadian) show up in Hobbs & Shaw, though I spent the rest of the movie stressing out about Statham ripping his J73-WS.

## Cosplay dangers

But Acronym is a 25-year-old brand at this point — and Hamcus is just getting started. Such movie and television placements, especially ones tied to a brand like Star Trek, situate Hamcus _more_ deeply in the realm of costume and cosplay. This can be great for small brands building an audience, but for those looking to expand their market, it can be limiting.

![](/assets/c6b7b60b8c5d6b2d6e68a309fe683a8fb52614b2-861x1107.jpg)

As people like [Quantius](https://www.instagram.com/_quantius/), [Tyler Wood](https://www.instagram.com/tylrwood/), and hopefully [me on my better days](https://www.instagram.com/stupidfits/) demonstrate, Hamcus can fit in brilliantly with day-to-day fits. It’s different, it’s out there and it’s designed for a world other than our own, but it’s also a brand you can make your own. It’s well made, it’s creative like few others out there, and it’s actually wearable. But veer too far into the realm of cosplay, and the desirability for individual pieces — much less the “full Hamcus” — will likely diminish. That in turn would place a stressor on a business that is currently a vehicle for some really brilliant work.

So I’m going to continue to watch that spark. Maybe Hamcus will miss its mark, and I’ll just have a few garments that will inspire me in my own work. Maybe Hamcus will have its interesting edges sanded off to fit a wildly competitive fashion marketplace — one that demands both banality and wild creativity. But maybe Hamcus will keep reinventing itself, deepening and broadening the Hamcus universe through videos like their [Scavengers series](https://vimeo.com/467551197), their [Duszeneration show](https://www.facebook.com/hamcus.official/posts/3709091069109288), and beyond.

Regardless, I’ll be wearing Hamcus and looking for it to catch on. I’d encourage you to bring a bit of the Hamcus spark into your life too.

_  
Head over to [TCHWR](https://www.tchwr.com/2021/01/03/full-hamcus-finding-the-spark-in-scifi-workwear/) for the original essay and more on high-tech, functional, utilitarian fashion._


Full Hamcus: Finding the Spark in Sci-fi Workwear


The past few years have been a conversation about power like I’ve never seen before. When Black Lives Matter activists ask why black men and women lose their lives at the hands of police or have poorer outcomes in countless other entanglements with the state and society — it’s ultimately a question of power. When we look at the racist immigration policies that manifest through the Trump administration, along with all those who envisioned and/or implemented it — it’s a conversation about power. And ultimately, we’re trying to understand the nature of power when we ask how the most densely concentrated police force in the country was overwhelmed by a mob following both, the goading of a democratically defeated leader with autocratic aspirations, and a conspiracy theory that’s metastasized within his electoral base.

Power manifests in numerous ways, but there are a few mechanisms that stand out in recent times. There’s coercive power, as possessed by the state or someone wielding force (liiikkeee a state). There’s legitimate or what Max Weber described as “traditional” power, conveyed through social inertia like religion or social customs (which becomes enshrined in policy implementation). Wealth, now as ever, is a driving source of power. And then there’s charismatic power, which [the American founders nominally were so scared of](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp).

![](/assets/893aa61619841565b6a023760c4871286be74f4b-1100x619.png)

We all know charismatic people. People who draw attention, prestige, and support — but also mold themselves to the constraints that maintaining that attention, prestige, and support demand. It’s a power that manifests in strange ways: oratory can unlock it, beauty can facilitate it, passion can give rise to it. Some people just wield it naturally. But it is distinguished as a capacity to persuade in ways that other sources of power cannot, and can create a kind of internalized consent by those who become persuaded. And Trump is a savant when it comes to this form of power.

The life experience of Donald Trump appears like an animal — singleminded in its appetites — circling power. Just as [the apparatus of one state might “see” its population as taxes levied and land cultivated](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780300246759), Trump has an uncanny capacity to observe and navigate power as someone native to it. For a state, one of the central roles is the consolidation and legitimization of different types of power — the foremost of which has been coercive through monopolies on force, taxation, punishment, and similar. Trump (and certainly many others) flirt with the desire to exert that power, [as Trump did with the Central Park Five](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/nyregion/central-park-five-trump.html). The danger for democratic states has always been that charismatic power has a capacity to subvert, co-opt, or corrupt critical aspects of other power centres — the standing army; the growing economy; the stockpile of wealth, the legal infrastructure. That subversion might be consensual, such as when democratic authority is ceded to a majority elected official (or some coalition forming a majority depending on the system). It might also be coerced by other forces, for example institutions that subvert the will of the majority, such as the “capturing” of the [electoral college through gerrymandering](https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/the-gerrymandering-project/). We ended up seeing both and have been living that for four years: a charismatic and ravenous demagogue who (to an extent) lucked into a system of incredible coercive power that can be wielded against others and against itself. And that autophagic quality that has become particularly troublesome.

There’s a lot going on, but I’d argue there are two complementary systemic failures that help explain the insanity of last week. The **first (and most egregious) systemic failure** is that Trump’s cooption of power enables him to influence individuals and institutions through the PRESENCE of the coercive power of the state in Trump’s control. [The powers of the presidency are massive because they leverage other sources of power, but are at least somewhat constrained in how that power is wielded.](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780374175368) These constraints have actually done a huge amount to protect American democracy over the past few years: [the Muslim ban and Family Separation plan](https://www.lawfareblog.com/travel-ban-family-separations-malevolence-incompetence-carelessness) being central examples of where institutions mostly resisted and corrected for these overreaches.

![](/assets/9565af0848f4496527ad20e8cdec98fab54a07cb-2048x1366.png)

But power doesn’t need to be actively wielded to have a chilling effect. Nuclear deterrence is the most obvious example of this — an apocalyptic status quo that had leaders (and practitioners like [Stanislav Petrov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident)) constantly simulating the rationale of their opponents. The same happens in any power relationship: for those who have power over us, we attempt to game their intent and what might happen to us if we cross it. In the early days of the Trump administration, [acting Attorney General Sally Yates wouldn’t defend an illegal executive order from the President](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/why-sally-yates-stood-up-to-trump) and was fired as a result. Decision-makers internalize these examples, simulating what might happen if they too step out of line. Many find it easier to simply fall in with that simulated safe path.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just civil servants who experienced this. The **second systemic failure** is that many networked platforms have facilitated the consensual cycle of charismatic power, without being willing to test the platform’s resilience to the coercive capacity of their wielder. In the era of social media defined by affinity-clustering algorithms — i.e. I see what I like or react to — this has served as a quickening function to extremist communication. That we are only seeing [Twitter](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html), [Facebook](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/technology/facebook-trump-ban.html), [Google](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55598887), and [Apple](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/apple-threatens-ban-parler) push back against Trump in his final days in office is a damning manifestation of that. By choosing to [play it safe when it came to moderating Trump’s broadcasts](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/technology/twitter-trump-facebook-moderation.html), affinity-clustering platforms ended up fuelling a surge in interest in much of what Trump espoused. Repeated over time, reflected back in one's tailored feed — it’s no wonder people are drawn in.

When supporters of the defeated president stormed the Capitol last Wednesday (I’m writing this on Saturday, Jan 9), they were consenting participants under the sway of their charismatic leader. They had self-organized using the platforms that might have banned them, but for the coercive power held by their leader staying moderating actions against hate speech, incitement of violence, and similar. With this content readily available and interactive, the platforms ended up facilitating the indoctrination and radicalization of many Trump supporters. [The story of Ashli Babbit](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/01/09/ashli-babbitt-capitol-shooting-trump-qanon/), the Trump supporter killed attempting to break into the Speaker’s Lobby, is a stunning example of that: someone looking for meaning, not properly equipped to deal with the content they were being exposed to in their [filter bubbles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble).

![](/assets/fe506b456bc4c5190f06f83d2c903ed968b97b3f-1024x536.jpg)

But social media platforms weren’t the only thing deterred. During the George Floyd protests only six months ago, National Guard units were deployed across numerous cities, including extensively within the District of Columbia. The now iconic comparative photo of a national guard unit standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial vs the chaos that befell the Capitol building two miles and six months later is poignant, not just for what it says about who force is levied against, but also what force-wielding institutions felt empowered to do.

![](/assets/0aec7fd9974395f2f7c35878270fd97d101bbd94-2000x1333.jpg)

The Capitol Police weren’t prepared to defend the Capitol against the insurrectionary urges of the sitting President’s supporters. The skin colour of the majority of the protestors marching on the Capitol undoubtedly had something to do with it, as did structural support for some of the symbology that the rioters carried, including the “Blue Lives Matter” flags. But I’d argue that the most significant Capitol Police leadership was deterred from greater preparedness because these were, ultimately, the President’s people. They were marching to the Capitol after hearing a speech from the sitting president. [It were as though Shay were in the White House, urging his rebellion on instead of marching out to quash it](https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/shays-rebellion/). How might that president have reacted if his supporters were being warily eyed by Multicam clad soldiers? Would he have lashed out? The balance of powers that the United States so carefully enshrined is becoming self-consuming and self-destructive.

We’re seeing the cumulative effects of several different kinds of system failure. But this failure is occurring not because it wasn’t designed for — we know that the American system was designed to combat demagoguery and charismatic leadership. The failure is occurring because the oscillations of charismatic power — thanks to affinity-clustering platforms like Facebook and Twitter driving recommendations and heavily engineered serendipity — can now resonate with such force as to destabilize other sources of power. Put clothing in a washing machine and it will do what it was designed to do in a balanced, predictable way. But add a weight to one side of that same machine and the asymmetric force will wear down its bearings and bring it to a halt with quite a bit of noise in the process.

So, ultimately Ashli Babbit died for nothing — a persuaded protestor in an algorithmically facilitated mob. Officer Sicknick (and possibly Officer Liebengood, who took his own life on Sunday) died because they were structurally prevented from having the support they needed in a predictable moment of crisis. Had the coercive threat of force not hung over the Capitol Police, and had they been empowered to wield coercive force against the protestors to protect the seat of legitimating democratic power in the United States, then things would be quite different now. But they didn’t. Charismatic, demagogic, parasitic power won out in that critical moment where 1/6/21 would have been a date for which none of us really cared.

![](/assets/88d5343e2b9b93301b6f42977eba62e83e7459a0-466x463.png)

And it is nowhere near over. I suspect that this event, and social media platform’s unwillingness to moderate extremist content that falls in line with their home state’s leadership, might mean some serious regulatory changes are coming to these platforms — and I hope that’s a good thing. We still need to square how these platforms are both global and deeply, painfully domestic to America. [WhatsApp caused the emergence of mob violence in India](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misinformation-whatsapp-led-deathly-mob-lynching-india/), [a genocide was facilitated on Facebook](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html), and last Wednesday could have easily become a bloodbath thanks to Twitter and Facebook's inaction.

What I worry about most in the coming years is that the discussion about power will become less critical, because more familiar treatments to that power will return. If anything good has come out of the Trump era, it has been explicit discussions about the nature of power and for whom that power is wielded. Movements like BLM — born out of both immediate tragedy and endemic injustices — have been at the forefront of this. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have worked brilliantly to popularize the language needed to engage with these discussions, and also highlight the imperative to do so. We need these voices as critically in the Biden era as we did while Trump was in office because power is there — oppressive or empowering, productive or destructive — whether it is being discussed or not.


Platform Insurrection


Well, that was a year. My family and I were more fortunate than most, but not as fortunate as some when it came to navigating the weirdness that was 2020. It felt a bit like we rounded a bend in an already turbulent river — only to encounter a flock of black swans and Nassim Taleb chortling on the banks.

I have a weird relationship to risk, and this year forced me to confront that relationship in a way, that I hope benefits me in 2021. But I’m not sure. Regardless, [like last year](https://andrewlb.com/reflecting-on-2019/), I want to look at the four big things in my life. Last year, it was all about change: having a child, starting a product, starting a master's degree, and surviving it all. This year was more about maintenance and sometimes growth. At times that growth meant holding on long enough to see the sun again — a skill I’ve honed in Copenhagen with its short nights giving way to too short days. In some cases, I’m still holding on.

## **Family**

![](/assets/5975444c564028d45a7bb38d00c7a069a5b6a7b9-1200x1600.jpg)

Writing this, my son Emil is almost 21 months old. He talks in a pidgin of English and Danish, is fascinated with motor vehicles of all kinds (“Daddy TRUCK wee woo wee woo” as fire truck passes by), and loves the family greyhound, Moon.

Keeping up with Emil’s growth this year has been a joy and a challenge, amplified by the restrictions that the coronavirus put on travel this year. It’s now been some time since he’s seen his grandparents in person, and while the near-daily video calls this year have done wonders for maintaining and building their relationship — it’s been hard. Going into this, I don’t think I had understood what happens when you don’t have the infrastructure of family near at hand. My father put it best to me, saying “We looked down on those suckers moving to the suburbs until you and your brothers started sprinting.” This whole year has been a slow reveal of perhaps a reverse Rumsfeldian “known-knowns” chart. A kind of “known known unknowing” as the territory I thought I understood became undone.

What I do know is that the Danish government’s prioritization of keeping daycares open, and the thoughtfulness, with which his school worked to nurture and protect their wards this year, made for a 2020 that wasn’t so bad for my little family. My wife was able to start a new job, becoming a Design Director at a major Nordic bank. I was able to extend a consulting contract by a few months, lending an invaluable runway for my own business. We were able to structure a routine and experiment with it during a global catastrophe, specifically because there was the societal infrastructure in place to support families like ours.

Last year I wrote a bit about the idea that parenthood is a craft — but most crafts rely on a supply chain in their propagation. Whether it’s the luthier supporting a guitarist or the sewing machine manufacturer supporting a garment maker. Ultimately, [getting a bit to James Scott’s thinking in Seeing Like a State,](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780300246759) I feel like I’ve been learning how to see the craft of parenthood as something that extends well beyond my small crew — 14 legs total counting the cat and dog — and into a broader network both local and global.

## **Craft and Creations**

![](/assets/0fe2428817061ae42d6bfd499a71582f958b69a4-2418x1172.png)

Work was a weird one this year. In theory, I had a really good year — but it didn’t go as I had planned. I started the year with the intention of wrapping up some consulting work I was doing with IKEA’s co-creation team: a brilliant crew building innovation tools and practices to spread to the 160k-plus employees of the Ingka group. I had initially been brought on to get some things unstuck and ended up leading a small team to launch and grow an internal innovation platform.

In May, I was awarded a [grant by Sage Publishing](https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/tools-and-tech/concept-grant-winner-knowsi-interview) to translate Knowsi into a consent management tool for social science research boards. Knowsi itself was in a weird place — languishing a bit, while I was working full-time on my consulting practice. I had customers and interest, but I was spinning my wheels a bit, not understanding how to sell the tool. The funding from Sage helped boost Knowsi out of that hole, and in the new year we’ll be launching some features to support academic researchers better, and hopefully make data retention overall a lot easier.

New features aside, the Sage team helped me understand a bit more of the marketing and sales picture that I had been missing. I love building. I love making. It’s been the animating force for my career and hobbies. Whether it’s [been large scale installation art like Stoke](https://vimeo.com/80308354) or [hobby-reinforcing technology explorations like Stupid Fits](http://stupidfits.com/), I completely lose myself in the exploration, planning, testing, and iteration of a creative design process.

Where I hadn’t connected the dots (even though I, similar to the reverse Rumsfeld idea before, knew it in theory), was that the sales process was part of that creative cycle…. and I had to learn it in order for Knowsi to succeed. So over the past few months, instead of trying to sell Knowsi to customers with the intention of selling subscriptions, I’ve been working on selling Knowsi to customers with the goal of iterating on its business model and value proposition. Basically stumbling my way down someone else’s decision tree.

For all the business model canvases that I’ve both done and taught to others, nothing has been as visceral and immediate, as working with my customers directly. It’s been deeply humbling, as someone who has taught this stuff, and frankly scary.

Also, I did a lot of sewing.

## **Learning**

##

![](/assets/a1d447198551956f041c49be9dc94041849d8091-2150x1172.png)

Last year, I started a distance master's degree in the UK. I had worked at the [Pentagon](https://dds.mil) for a while as part of the [US Digital Service](https://usds.gov), and that brief glimpse into the defence (though I suppose that should be defense with an S there) establishment left me fascinated and humbled. So… I decided to learn more and pursued a master's in Security Studies and International Relations. However, learning how to study again in a way that facilitates creating a good academic product, has been a real challenge, especially with so many other anxieties flitting around. I’m just starting my thesis now — exploring innovation processes in terror groups — and I’ll admit that after 18 months of study, it feels both accessible and terrifying.

For one thing, I had set myself a goal of submitting an article to a publication before graduating, like [War on the Rocks](https://warontherocks.com/) or [Divergent Options](https://divergentoptions.org/). I haven’t done that yet and in fact, keep wondering what it is that I want to submit on. What I did do, however, is to start writing a weekly newsletter called [Diverge Weekly](https://andrewlb.com/category/diverge/), which was my attempt to fuse what I was learning from an international relations perspective, with my background in design and foresight. I don’t know that it worked, but it took me down a pretty interesting path and has had a direct impact on my thesis direction. It also made me realize how much I enjoyed writing a weekly newsletter, so that’s restarting this year. [You should subscribe.](https://andrewlb.ck.page/bff8b858c5)

## **Holding On**

Last year, a big thing for me was recognizing unfairness in what I thought was some happy equilibrium, and the steps to resolve it. My wife and I have been using an (at this point, heavily modified) toolkit called [Fair Play](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780593231661) to work through a lot of this thinking, and it has proven a good weekly cadence for us to come together to deal with constant change and the often shrouded quotidian.

But there were also bigger cycles to consider, and so [we came up with a foresight game at the beginning of the pandemic that really impacted our decision making](https://andrewlb.com/covid-anxiety/). In some ways, it’s why we’re still in Denmark instead of in Canada.

The game helped us map out some of the potential scenarios that we might face — either directly resulting from the coronavirus or exacerbated by it. We gamed out each of these scenarios and what might compound from them, and then made decisions. Counterfactuals are difficult, but approaching our plan-of-attack for weathering the first year of the pandemic, saved us tens of thousands of dollars, likely reduced our chance of exposure to the virus by quite a bit, and facilitated some pretty significant opportunities.

It’s also not over yet. My wife and I have been fortunate, in that both of our families have not suffered a loss from Covid. Nor have we had to wrestle with the isolation that the dying and their families have felt during the global lockdown. I can’t imagine it. I hope never to imagine it. But I’ve seen colleagues and friends experience it, and I know that the world on the other side of this will be very different.

## **What Worked**

![](/assets/35426ea19e3a6b80734f36e31141d74b2ce4a0ce-2150x1172.png)

So ultimately, the goal of this is to reflect a bit on what worked and what didn’t this year. There are a few significant things that stand out:

- **Asking for help.** I didn’t realize how terrible I was at this. I’ve had a number of really incredible mentors throughout my life, and so I somehow got it into my head that I was good at this. Maybe I was, once. Either way, I started asking for and accepting offers of help more this year. Advice from friends about Knowsi, support and help in my business, babysitting, or running errands with my son. I’m still terrible at it, but … well, I am actively practicing.
- **Being strategic about learning.** This has been a game-changer for me when it came to language learning. I had admittedly started learning Arabic with the conviction that if I just put myself in the way of the language enough, it’ll absorb. This didn’t work. What DID work, was thinking about when and how I absorbed the knowledge most effectively and reorienting my learning around that. My teacher and I experimented with a few different times of the day and homework volumes until we found something that has been working now for most of the year. By thinking of things like alertness, hunger, distraction, and volume of sleep as variables in my language learning outcomes, it’s made the outcome to effort mix feel a lot more immediate.
- **Ergonomic-y investments.** This literally killed me. I made the shift this year to a split keyboard, vertical mouse, ergo chair, and tools like screen raisers and such. It’s all terribly ugly, but I haven’t had wrist pain or unexplained back pain since making the shift.
- **Remote work.** I had this pretty dialed in over the past few years, and it’s continued to work well this year. I have a good set up, a good approach to communication, and [even wrote about it as things started to shut down back in March.](https://andrewlb.com/on-remote-work-and-the-coronavirus/)

## **What Didn’t Work**

![](/assets/6206e3a2686735a1ebdc9ba378898b8775e97e2a-2150x1172.png)

- **Remote work.** This didn’t work for a lot of people, and when it doesn’t work for someone on the team, it can undermine everyone. Forcing remote on people has been a nightmare, and my hope is that moving forward, in-person and remote is built into the teams and tasks from day one.
- **Remote communication.** I think communication during the pandemic lost a level of fidelity that was incredibly important. I won’t elegize the water cooler (because it’s horrible), but rather I might write one for the coffee house or the walk to the station before and after the workday. Conversations in those liminal third spaces are — for me anyway — some of the richest ground for inspiration and excitement. And they’ve been missing in some ways for me this year. WhatsApp groups and even Discord have taken on that role to some extent, but it definitely has not been the same. The experiment on this that I like the most is by Matt Webb, [who has started pulling free-form office hours](http://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/24/unoffice_hours). It was a fun, free form chat. I’ve had a few similar ones since, and I think [I’m going to copy Matt in this regard](https://calendly.com/alb/officehours).
- **Overcommitted to structured learning activities.** This year has been pretty fruitfully busy overall, but I overcommitted to the point where it’s actually quite hard to just be happy about it. I’ve been keeping up with my master's work and generally getting high grades, but each essay still feels like a mad dash to finish. Working full time while pursuing the masters has then made that run-up to a due date a bit of an emotional nightmare — even when managed effectively. Language learning plus maintaining existing certifications (my EMT certification expires in a few months) and studying for new ones (like getting certified as a CIPP for Knowsi) has been a major stressor. I simply didn’t think it through, and it caused me (is causing me) a lot of grief.
- **Taking on the wrong home responsibility.** One big failure this year was taking on the early morning daycare drop-off duties. Totally reasonable responsibility, but it torpedoed my work and sleep rhythms for a month. It took my wife pointing out my level of sleep deprivation was making me a horrible person to be around, for me to admit defeat and trade morning drop-off for another childcare responsibility that she was finding annoying. So not a long-term failure, but it was a good example of me not recognizing when I needed help.
- **Gyms closing** completely torpedoed my fitness routine, and when they reopened in Denmark, the anxiety I felt going made it impossible. I’ve stayed in a semblance of shape during the pandemic, but I haven’t found a home routine yet that works for me. I miss the squat rack dearly.

## **Miscellany**

![](/assets/d70f84df32ebe7e69bbce9cfd1dd7ff22b065111-2048x1365.jpg)

- **Photography became a driver for getting outside.** [I posted a bunch of it on my main ](https://www.instagram.com/lovettbarron)Instagram. A lot of it was used in research and consulting. Got a lot of inspiration from Jane’s [Thoughtless Acts](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/580270.Thoughtless_Acts_) as well as Hans Eijkelboom’s incredible [People of the Twenty-First Century.](https://bookshop.org/a/19778/9780714867151)
- **Lockdown was a terrarium for my wardrobe.** I made a pretty fun prototype in Notion for a digital closet, [which I wrote about here](https://andrewlb.com/a-more-intentional-wardrobe/). This eventually led to [Stupid Fits](http://stupidfits.com/) and [its Instagram account](https://instagram.com/stupidfits). Somehow social isolation made me a lot more open about my fashion habits. [I’m the first to admit that it is a bit out there.](https://stupidfits.com/u/stupidfits)
- **I started working with a business coach** and should have done it a lot sooner. But finding a good coach is very, very tough.
- **I discovered an internet community** for the first time, and really enjoy it. It was initially narrowly around Stupid Fits, but quickly became more — driving writing, sewing projects, and more. It’s also very vehemently inclusive and anti-troll.

## **Going into 2021**

![](/assets/19971e20b2346fe52777b4c02065d5dab3d1cc7d-2150x1172.png)

For me, I’ll continue to work on Knowsi. I’m practicing the requests for help. I’m planning on experimenting with my consulting practice more this year, and have been working through December to restart Diverge Weekly and my mailing list. [You can subscribe here.](https://andrewlb.ck.page/bff8b858c5) I have someone helping me with that as well, to keep it consistent over the year. And most importantly, I’m going to continue to learn with my son. Confidence without understanding isn’t always the best trait (speaking as someone who left Washington DC in 2018), but confidence in exploring understanding is.

In [The Ministry for the Future](https://bookshop.org/books/the-ministry-for-the-future/9780316300131), there’s a line about one of the protagonists — a survivor of a heatwave in India: “He was having panic attacks whenever he got hot, and then the panic attacks made him hotter still. Feedback loop for sure.” I fear that the often low, sometimes high-grade trauma of the past year is going to eat away at us. It might be subtle sometimes — a friendship no longer what it was when you need it most; an anxiety around socializing or speaking where there wasn’t one before; a cushion of wealth absorbed by the economic chaos of 2020. I fear that taking risks and exploring the unknown is going to become a lot harder for a lot of people.


Reflecting on 2020


_Originally published on [**Sage Ocean**](https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/designing-trust-relationships-in-research-with-knowsi) on October 9, 2020._

##

## Webinar recording

SAGE hosted a webinar with our [SAGE 2020 Concept Grant winner](https://ocean.sagepub.com/concept-grants), Andrew Lovett-Barron, on how to design trust relationships with participants in research using Knowsi. [**Knowsi **](https://www.knowsi.com/)is a portal to manage research participant consent in compliance with data privacy regulations.

In this post, we share the webinar recording and Andrew Lovett-Barron writes up the key points he discussed in the webinar in a guest blog, as well as answers your questions that he didn’t have time to cover on the day. Enjoy the post and get started with Knowsi today by **[signing up for a free account](https://www.knowsi.com/join).** If you want to upgrade to the paid-for version, use the code **SAGE **to get two months free.

[**Watch the webinar recording.**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJrqP_XM4SQ&ab_channel=SAGEOcean)

## Guest blog from Andrew Lovett-Barron

Designing a research program is a difficult task. So, it comes as no surprise that often the participant experience gets cut in favor of focusing time and resources on refining your interview guide, recruiting more participants, or wrangling your Research Ethics Board.

But participant experience can be the key to great data and great research outcomes. By investing in the trust relationship you have with your research participants, you invest in their willingness to engage openly and comfortably with your research and its objectives by freeing participants from the emotional and cognitive toll of being responsible for their own wellbeing and privacy.

In a webinar I gave last week, [Designing Trust Relationships in Research](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJrqP_XM4SQ) — I proposed a structure for applying the front-stage/back-stage model articulated in Service Design to designing the participant experience. Service Design is a design practice which looks at designing not just objects and experiences, but looking at the holistic experience that users have around a given service. So in the banking sector, a service designer would consider not just the banking app, but ATM, the physical bank itself, the training of the customer support staff, the anxiety and concerns of the banking customer, and the different phases a banked individual might go through as a holistic experience.

In the past, a research project was often defined linearly.

![](/assets/31bcf1d1c0a718db0c6b02b9a16db3b78ae46ed2-570x124.png)

But with the advent of the GDPR and a more aggressive focus on protecting the privacy rights, a necessary feedback cycle and continuation of the participant experience has emerged. What originally appeared to be a relatively linear experience with a clear endpoint suddenly becomes a longer relationship between researcher and participant that requires deeper consideration.

![](/assets/a1dd05550ad45d681970beb3c2e8ef7a0239e995-570x313.png)

### THE PARTICIPANT EXPERIENCE

It’s easy for us to empathize with the researcher experience, but how does that map to the participant experience?

Participants don’t have insight into the research per se, but rather the majority of their experience is around managing contact and anxiety over trust. While a researcher is focusing on maximizing the value that a participant brings to the research project, the participant is often focused on minimizing potential harm while maximizing potential gains from their participation.

![](/assets/ceff46733d26c87aaeb59cc5263ba3135d0c0ce8-570x398.png)

This management of trust cascades into a fairly substantial amount of effort and energy asked of the participants — a tax on energy for their involvement.

By applying a service design and design thinking approach to the participant experience, we are empowered to see some of the core concerns that participants might have about each phase of the research. The power here is that while a researcher might believe this is a simple and rote experience, to the participant it might come with a considerable cost to their attention and anxiety.

![](/assets/6e78449604867ae502cd69b49d94e9ee59d95e31-570x370.png)

###

### DESIGNING THE PARTICIPANT EXPERIENCE

How do we design a better participant experience?

Each research project has its own needs to design for. I’d recommend spending at least a few hours with your team carefully considering the participant experience and addressing those needs with as empathetic a lens as possible — perhaps going so far as contacting past participants to interview them about their experience directly.

Then, use the tools for service design to break down that experience!

To start, the metaphor of front stage/back stage provides a useful framework — allowing the researcher to identify some of the individual components of a participant experience such as that first introduction, or the consent form. From there, a researcher can consider how their own operations impact those experiences — such as data storage infrastructure impacting ones consent form approach, or understaffing impacting the speed of response to individual participants.

Finally, these operational realities can be considered in light of existing norms and rules: such as the GDPR requiring the withdrawal of participant consent to be an easy process, which in turn requires certain administrative concerns, which in turn affects the participant experience around consent.

Of course, [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com/) makes that a lot easier for you.

![](/assets/84aceec7e46f36d5f5379b3c49edc67d98d81dc2-570x380.png)

Over the next few weeks, SAGE Ocean and I will be publishing some of the specific ways that we can design around this, some of which we reviewed in my webinar.

If you’re interested, [sign up for Knowsi and our newsletter](https://knowsi.com/) to learn more. We’ll be addressing a different part of the participant experience with each post and how you can design better experiences around it.

**Get started with Knowsi today by [signing up for a free account](https://www.knowsi.com/join). If you want to upgrade to the paid-for version, use the code SAGE to get two months free.**

##

## Q&A

**Does Knowsi work with all computer platforms?**

Yes. Knowsi is a progressive web application, so it lives in your browser like a normal site. You can also add Knowsi as an “app” on your mobile device by clicking the Add to Homescreen link on IOS or Android.

**Can you generate consent forms in different languages?**

There is a still beta version of form translation in the system right now. When you are editing a form, there is a tab for Translations that allow you to create a duplicate but linked version of that form in a different language. You’re ultimately responsible for providing the proper translations for your documents, but we try to support as much as possible with headers and similar. Currently, this feature is incomplete — but if it’s something that you’d like to use in the near term, please get in touch and we can move it up on the roadmap.

**What are the key benefits of Knowsi in building a trust relationship in research?**

Knowsi provides a consistent platform for participants to manage their consent and relationship with the researcher — respecting their agency in the process and putting actions behind the privacy rights and expectations they have under law and social norms. Perhaps most importantly, Knowsi also takes the guesswork out of good privacy practice in a research team. Forgotten forms, unclear communication, and complexity of regulatory compliance make for considerable liability concerns that any research team needs to navigate. Knowsi automates the complexity of compliance, and helps you and your team focus on the content and the research.

**Does the Knowsi platform come with detailed instructions/guidelines on how to use it?**

For the most part, Knowsi relies on a clear user experience to guide both researchers and participants through the application. However, there is a growing set of documentation that lives in the question mark icon on the bottom of the screen. You can also use this feature to directly contact the Knowsi team for any kind of assistance.

**Sometimes we need to use deceptive strategies in research so participants do not change their behaviour. Is it always necessary to obtain full consent from participants while doing research on them?**

Knowsi allows you to collect consent both remotely and in person - but it is incumbent on you to not be deceptive in how you collect that consent. Basically, consent needs to be informed, freely given, and generally unambiguous when it comes to data collection about individuals. You can update consent after data has been provided though, and send users the appropriate consent form to use the gathered data in this new way. I’d suggest engaging with your REB to specifically workshop the language of your form before sharing it with your participants, as frequently you can gather specific consents while also maintaining the integrity of the study.

**Does Knowsi work directly with any Ethics Review Boards at universities? As Knowsi is GDPR-compliant, I think it could make getting approval through Ethics Review Boards easier.**

Absolutely. Please contact [andrew@knowsi.com](mailto:andrew@knowsi.com) to arrange a meeting.

**The excel tracker template shown in the webinar was great! If I sign up to Knowsi can I download this?**

You can download the template [here](https://ocean.sagepub.com/s/knowsi-research-guide.xlsx). I share templates like this and other handy assets in my newsletter. You can sign up to the newsletter by registering for Knowsi or simply from the form at the bottom of [our website](https://www.knowsi.com/).


Designing trust relationships in research with Knowsi


_Originally published as a guest blog on [**Sage Ocean**](https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/tools-and-tech/coordinating-global-cities-research-knowsi-case-study)._

##

## **“We haven’t met yet. Do you trust me?”**

This is the dilemma that any researcher faces at the outset of their recruiting process — to find people who are willing to share their stories, experiences, frustrations, and victories with a total stranger. The secret to building trust often comes down to explaining in person while performing the interview — creating a rapport with the research participant and listening deeply and critically to their stories.

But there’s a trust-building step which happens before that.

The formality of research consent serves as a strong signal to your participants that their needs and information will be respected and protected. That signal, and the processes which underpin it, not only set the foundation for high quality interviews; it also serves to protect you and the participant through an agreement on process and procedure. With research travel constrained by budgets and now additionally by a global pandemic, we find ourselves building trust and rapport without the benefit of face-to-face contact. These formalities build strong foundations and stronger research.

![](/assets/e94f212909f8e1a7d64eeeec57a44d971ff469a5-940x627.png)

This is what John Lynch discovered when his company, [Context Studio](http://getincontext.ie/), worked with the [Open and Agile Smart Cities ](https://oascities.org/)network (OASC) to better understand the needs of the global member cities. Founded in 2015, OASC was built on the idea that interoperability in technology and policy was a fundamental gap in the smart cities market. The network structured itself to provide guidance as well as the sharing of best practices and mechanisms to address that need.

In 2019, [Context Studio](http://getincontext.ie/) was hired to provide Service Design consulting to OASC — making sure that the services provided by OASC’s were grounded in the needs of the public servants providing across the globe who are helping with the digital transformation of municipalities.

Service design is a discipline grounded in using person-centered qualitative research to map and intervene in complex systems — in this case, an international network of cities composed of bureaucrats, elected officials, technologists, and activists. For a multi-month project interviewing dozens of individual contributors across a dozen different municipalities around the world, [Context Studio](http://getincontext.ie/) needed a way to bring to not only build trust from afar but also keep organized.

This is where [Context Studio](http://getincontext.ie/) chose to work with [Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/).

Since many of the participants were Chief Information Officers, Data Officers, Data Protection Officers, and others across the different municipalities; their work demanded that the tool not just _signal_ that privacy was being protected, but actually show the research participants that privacy was being taken very seriously. Knowsi helped [Context Studio](http://getincontext.ie/) in a few ways:

First, Knowsi provided a participant dashboard and accountability system for each of the research participants. It puts participants in control of their consent and their data and facilitated an automated GDPR deletion process.

![](/assets/63176c53376d27515906020246b30f510cf2fd51-940x705.png)

Second, John was able to customize his consent forms to both the needs of Context Studio, for the research process, and those of OASC, his client By being descriptive and specific about what consent he needed from his participants, there weren’t any surprises and everyone was covered.

![](/assets/d1cfac04efebe30f82c2f123664bed45be52805d-617x456.png)

Finally, as participants completed their consent forms, John was able to track where people were in the recruitment process in real team — getting updates directly to his dashboard as the consent forms were signed. This made it easy to keep track of interviews and make sure that he could send interview schedule reminders as he progressed.

![](/assets/440971def0d38651dccb300d618256c18c86724b-940x705.png)

**“I think people were impressed. They thought it was a handy tool.”**

John described the experience of using Knowsi as a way to build better relationships with his participants, and ultimately conduct better research. He suggested a future where one could **“Just send a Knowsi for our conversation tomorrow.”** and participants would know exactly what that meant, in the same way some of us use “Doodle” or “Zoom Invitations” today.

As Knowsi is in its early stages, we’re still learning quickly. John helped us discover that while “Sending a Knowsi” is the ideal future state, we’re not there yet. We consistently found that when Knowsi users [wrote their own emails and included the appropriate link](https://medium.com/knowsi/research-recruitment-email-b862186ef3ba) to the consent form from Knowsi, then response rates were about 30% greater.

Research administration is difficult, and the complexity of trust requirements and respondent/client expectations in research just makes it even more so. Knowsi helps you deliver a great privacy experience for your research participants while automating as much admin as possible. You and your research participants can focus on building a great rapport and conducting great research.


Coordinating global cities research: Knowsi case study


As the exogenous force of coronavirus has pummeled the globe, America has had its own endemic disease roar to the surface.

On February 23rd, Ahmaud Arbery was chased down while he was on a jog by vigilantes in Georgia and murdered in a [terrifyingly modern lynching](https://www.vox.com/21263899/ahmaud-arbery-lynched-video-mcmichael-glynn-county-georgia). Because they are white, because Ahmaud was black, and because Georgia remains a bastion of white supremacy in the United States, Ahmaud’s murderers were initially released and uncharged. It was only after the video became public that any form of criminal proceedings started [74 days after his murder](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/outraged-by-the-delayed-arrests-in-killing-of-black-jogger-protesters-in-georgia-demand-justice/2020/05/08/8e7d212a-90a9-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html), on May 7th.

![](/assets/4dbabf3793d4aa40bdbd763f40ca24ec65f596e6-1180x786.jpg)

On March 13th, Breonna Taylor, an EMT in Kentucky, [was shot eight times in her home after police entered on a “no-knock” warrant](https://www.vox.com/2020/5/13/21257457/breonna-taylor-louisville-shooting-ahmaud-arbery-justiceforbr). As the police did not identify themselves, Breonna’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker thought they were experiencing a home invasion and attempted to defend himself and Breonna. Gun ownership is widespread and legalized in the US, and Kenneth fired at the legs of one of the officers, not knowing it was the police. Breonna Taylor was killed by indiscriminate return fire. Kenneth’s call to emergency services stated “I don’t know what happened … somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.” Shortly after, he was arrested by the police for assault. The individual the police were searching for [was already in police custody](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/13/breonna-taylor-not-target-louisville-police-investigation-when-shot/5181690002/) when the police invaded Taylor and Walker’s home.

On May 25th, [a video surfaced of Christopher Cooper, a New York City birder, being verbally attacked by Amy Cooper (no relation) in Central Park](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/amy-cooper-dog-central-park.html). Christopher was birding, and Amy was walking her dog without a leash in a section of the park that requires leashing. When Christopher asked her to restrain her dog, Amy called the police on Christopher and specifically identified him as “African American” in an attempt to express her understanding of power over him as a white woman living in a society founded on white supremacy. Amy’s actions resulted in her losing her dog and her job, as well as her being [brigaded online](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/brigading-online-poll-meaning). But in a time before smartphones and online video, Christopher might have lost his life and certainly would have lost his dignity, his freedom, and his security.

Finally, on the same day in Minneapolis, a white police officer had his knee on the neck of George Floyd — [choking him to death](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html) over the accused use of a counterfeit $20 bill and George’s justified fear of the men who had taken him into custody. The police officer’s knee didn’t move for eight minutes and forty-six seconds as George begged for his life, lost consciousness, and died.

In the week since George Floyd was murdered, protests have started and escalated [across the United States](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52872401) and [around the world](https://www.npr.org/2020/05/31/866428272/george-floyd-reverberates-globally-thousands-protest-in-germany-u-k-canada). For example, in Copenhagen, [2000 people marched on Sunday](https://www.thelocal.dk/20200531/over-1000-protest-in-denmark-over-the-death-of-black-american-george-floyd) in front of the US embassy, a sign of support and outrage against a system that the United States has —unfortunately — come to stand for: white supremacy.

![](/assets/143a841e7abb9e2300ae65f4e5c5a12181df876a-1180x786.jpg)

I write a lot about systems in this newsletter, and how systems come to be influenced, leveraged, and undermined. I believe that the real intersection between design, politics, and international relations is around this capacity to not DESIGN systems (which is hubristic and insane), but rather influence and navigate systems (which we can do both intuitively and intentionally). [Trevor Noah articulated the flashpoint of the past month brilliantly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4amCfVbA_c), starting with Amy Cooper. [“You have this woman who blatantly knew how to use the power of her whiteness to threaten the life of another man and his blackness.”](https://youtu.be/v4amCfVbA_c?t=214).

Amy Cooper was intuitively leveraging a system of power that is endemic to the United States. Because of the circumstance of her birth, her geography, her genetics, and the history of the country she inhabited; she occupied a space where she could exercise power. Given her acculturation and lack of critical engagement, she understood how she could use that privilege to get what she wanted.

In Isabel Wilkerson’s book [The Warmth of Other Suns](https://amzn.to/2zXxYkN) on the migration of black Americans away from the South between the 1920s and the 1970s, she describes the violence that black Americans faced and that was utterly normalized in that society. Speaking of the period following World War 1, she states “All blacks lived with the reality that no black individual was completely safe from lynching.”

This is the reality of American society that many have tried — in different ways — to heal, to cure, to expunge. The election and widespread popularity of a black American president, the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, abolishing the 13th amendment and banning slavery. These are all incredible and laudable steps, but are they just treatments for something that lies at the very center of American society? Something that is endemic? What I’ve learned and come to believe over the years is that perhaps this can’t be cured or treated in isolation — instead, that the problem cuts across the whole system.

Currently, in America, people are on the streets questioning the very foundation of that system and whether it is actually worth saving. The far-left wing of the Democratic Party is asking the same thing — is it time to completely remake the system? Overwhelmingly the protests have been peaceful (which is the ideal and [according to scholars like Erica Chenoweth, ultimately a hell of a lot more successful](https://amzn.to/2Xrixdq)), but I think it’s also important to acknowledge the legitimacy, the rage, the fear, and the trauma that spurs more violent forms of protest and property damage. [The razing of a police station](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/29/minneapolis-police-protest-george-floyd-288361) after the police murdered an innocent man can be argued as proportional — property can be rebuilt as funded by taxpayers, but a life stolen is lost forever.

![](/assets/906df5a0131754ac5d89d247358d9e6c66271235-1180x1770.jpg)

Systems of power and oppression are often parasitic to something more fundamental: powerful actors within those dominating systems irrevocably wrap themselves in the flag, for example. They will insist that to question it is to question other values, peoples, and histories. But it’s more complicated than that. America should be proud of its role in crushing fascism and the Nazis in World War II, while also being [ashamed that black American soldiers were lynched for walking with pride upon returning home from the war.](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-tragic-forgotten-history-of-black-military-veterans) Systemic ideals like checks and balances between the governing houses and the rule of law can be lauded for their intention, even if the result included the perpetuation of Jim Crow laws in the South for most of the 20th century, and a de facto or [new Jim Crow](https://amzn.to/2XvMDN0) system through mass incarceration of black Americans.

Anyway. Something has to change. America as a concept and as a country will not collapse [if state and local police are held to a higher account](https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-rashawn-ray-police-violence). It is not unpatriotic to do everything in your power to destroy the [gerrymandered voting system that perpetuates white supremacy in elected offices and violence against black Americans in their policies](https://www.propublica.org/article/partisan-gerrymandering-is-still-about-race). And it is absolutely reasonable to insist that black lives matter more than the property, prosperity, and power built through the centuries-long perpetuation and continuous reinvention of a racist caste system.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/1f61aad452abb5427a579b081f74648318dbf911-1180x1007.jpg)

[**When Jim Crow Reigned Amid the Rubble of Nazi Germany**](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/magazine/blacks-wwii-racism-germany.html)

I got curious about this while reading of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster’s military service in Germany before and after World War II in The Warmth of Other Suns. His experience sounded like something that was all too common, and unfortunately, it was. This article does a good job of reviewing the contribution of black Americans in the war against fascism, and the reality that many white American soldiers brought the norms and expectations of a Jim Crow America with them in their dealings with their fellow soldiers.

It’s worth giving this article a read. I didn’t know a fair bit of this history, and while much of it wasn’t surprising, some of the ways that race and class played into cold war posturing was quite new. Finally, I found this quote summed things up effectively:

“Despite their treatment by white American service members, a number of black troops expressed their preference for life in Germany compared with back home. The percentage of black G.I.s extending their tours of duty in Germany was three times that of white G.I.s.”


Diverge Weekly Issue #13: The Endemic Issue


Being a creator of things — software, products, services, policy, etc — means navigating a world of constraints. There were two stories of constraints that I encountered in the past week which I wanted to share.

![](/assets/a869f7304125e66efb8b8d3ba4729a2521da69c6-2048x1365.jpg)

The first is about constraints on a geopolitical scale. My friend Chris introduced me to a new podcast called [Wind of Change](https://crooked.com/podcast-series/wind-of-change/), which explores the potential CIA sponsorship of a popular eighties power ballad pushing for European unification. It's an absolute trip (the type that starts with a reluctant listen followed by binging most of it), but it tells an interesting story of constraint.

Given the competition between American and Soviet blocs during the Cold War, many different mechanisms for influence spun out for lack of the more direct military one. Instead of the two nuclear-armed powers going toe-to-toe, competition occurred through proxy conflicts as with the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan vs. the CIA-backed Jihadis, and through foreign interventions in the domestic politics of polities across Africa, MENA, and LATAM. It also occurred through weaponized culture like posturing in chess and the Olympics, [smuggling banned literature](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/doctor-zhivago), and perhaps this particular power ballad. As justifiably divisive as the CIA can be, that such an innovation might have emerged from the constraints presented by the Cold War and the bureaucracy of the CIA is itself a fascinating mystery to explore.

Constraints create context, and context begets emergence. The speculation about the CIA’s involvement in a heavy metal band has some credibility partially because these clandestine agencies were scrambling to find ways of exerting influence when the old methods were no longer tenable options. The whole violent history of humanity skidded to a stop in the twentieth century when the nuclear sword of Damocles was strung up, but as far as states were concerned, that looming threat didn’t stop them from attempting to exert power and influence. Just… without cutting the string.

![](/assets/d0f4856520d6ead304d16550c3c1ec69298f7dbd-2048x1365.jpg)

There are also those structural constraints that simply close options to individuals. As I mentioned last week, [Our Women on the Ground](https://amzn.to/36y6yOr) is a focused survey of those systematic constraints. A collection of essays by Arab female reporters, the book recounts many different experiences of becoming professional journalists in societal conditions that create incredible —sometimes violent— friction towards those identities.

A favourite was the essay by Amira Al-Sharif, a Saudi photo journalist who grew up in Yemen. One of her stories recounts being stopped and detained because she wasn’t traveling with male relatives — and was forced to sign a statement acknowledging that doing so was considered “shameful” in the eyes of the state, or at least the eyes of that agent of the state. Because of her interwoven identities — as a someone who grew up in Yemen, as a woman, as a reporter, and as someone against whom an armed authority figure projected a paternalistic power structure — the scope of what and where she can report, and ultimately who she is able to be, becomes inexorably constrained. And yet, reading her essay and her included photography, these constraints have also given her a lens and sensitivity that empowers her to tell stories and capture photos no one else could.

![](/assets/d033f355c8dc7a73aa2637d5abcf1555fbe8d105-2048x1366.jpg)

Amira and her fellow authors in Our Women on the Ground expressed and created as fervently as they could — each encountering different and overlapping constraints in their individual countries, cultures, and communities. Lina Attalah, founder of [Mada Masr](https://madamasr.com/en), writes of her evolving relationship with her father, relative to her identity as a feminist, an activist, a journalist, and an entrepreneur in Egypt. That consideration helped her find a point of connection as well: wondering how the constrained expectations the state had imposed on her father trickled down to her experience with him and the construction of her own identity.

All of this to say that some strange, terrible, and wonderful things can emerge from constraints. People become who they become; designs resolve with the needs, resources, and context at hand; and sometimes a particular geopolitical strategic context begets some chart-topping power ballads. Thinking about the constraints from which something or someone emerges IS ultimately the story.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/1460c3f725d3e0e6308b6d1043131187305c881c-1180x787.jpg)

[**Women in Combat: Five-Year Status Update | Center for a New American Security**](https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/women-in-combat-five-year-status-update)

Very American centric, but an interesting survey on the role of women in the combat arms of the US military. Structurally there remains a huge number of barriers, and the military does appear to be making steps towards opening up those roles.

The section on the special forces community is worth considering. Women have always worked with special forces teams, but often as outsiders or support personnel. In the US military, SOF has its own procurement and healthcare system that supports the increased risk its members face, and many of those support roles which can face the same risk don’t get the same level of care if they get hurt, or quality of equipment to prevent injury in the first place.

So. This is worth keeping an eye on. Countries like Norway and Israel both include women in compulsory conscription, Russia has historically seen considerable female participation in combat roles, and Canada opened up all roles to women in the eighties with our charter of rights and freedoms. As the largest military in the world slowly catches up, it will be interesting to see how it navigates that evolution and how that trickles down into society as a whole.


Diverge Weekly Issue #12: The Constrained Issue


Building a Newsletter from scratch placeholder

NOIMAGE


Building a Newsletter from Scratch


It’s been 70 days since my family and I hit “go” on our particular lockdown, only preceding the overall lockdown in Denmark by a few days. In that time period, a lot has happened for us and for everyone else, but it’s been consistently encapsulated anticipation — that we’re waiting to understand the road we’ll be on tomorrow. I’ve heard a lot of folk describe our current state as a kind of limbo.

![](/assets/0a57760961648a020157d5875cc17ccf527e6a38-2048x1365.jpg)

A year and a half ago, I interviewed a number of people who worked with refugees and displaced peoples. One of these was Nick Hayes, who [wrote this article](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/12/nick-hayes-graphic-artist-pictures-refugees-calais-camp-jungle?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other) on his time volunteering at the Calais camps (colloquially known as The Jungle) in Normandy, France. Nick’s article comes to mind right now as I think about the cause and effect of anticipation.

For a refugee who finds themselves at the Calais camp, waiting is the imposition of a system against you. Many things can drive someone to migrate — war, hunger, opportunity, persecution — but that act of migrating suddenly situates you within a system that is both outside of what you can tacitly navigate, and often actively hostile to your social interface with it. Nick’s description of the Calais experience becomes one of waiting: for an opportunity to continue onwards, for something to happen, for strength to return, for a system to open. This is a limbo where you KNOW something is on the other side, and for reasons outside of your control, you don’t have access.

We are all experiencing a different kind of waiting. Instead of transitioning between systems and social contexts, we are instead seeing a system reshaped around us. The flash of anger when someone gets too close in a grocery store, the anxiety around consuming what was a few weeks ago a basic service, or even the recognition of “essential” labour within a society (and what that actually means) — all manifestations of our orbits being changed relative to some new and sudden phenomenon.

![](/assets/d6bb5c6fe027dba17ed0e6496ce76a9e41203ec5-2048x1365.jpg)

In Hyper Objects, Tim Morton describes a class of objects that are almost larger than we can understand, possessing a complexity that we can’t wrangle, aggregate, multidimensional, atemporal, etc. Climate change is one such example: a phenomenon that transcends time, space, and location yet is descending on us like a bomb (but we don’t know when). [Styrofoam is another](https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/introducing-the-idea-of-hyperobjects): physical, but lasting forever and accumulated beyond our control. Coronavirus is too, which [Morton pointed out on ](https://twitter.com/the_eco_thought/status/1234828156449759232?s=20)Twitter. In fact, one could argue that a pandemic as an abstract thing, and THIS pandemic are now independent — covid-19 having presented itself to society.

One quality of hyper objects is that they exert their own gravity: pulling other things with lesser weight off-kilter and transforming the world around them. We’ve already seen this with the refugee crisis of the past decade— for all the horrible dynamics of the Syrian civil war, there’s a strong argument that [climate change served as a primary factor](https://daily.jstor.org/climate-change-and-syrias-civil-war/). A friend of mine, Britt Wray, has spoken about this in her [research around climate change and anxiety](https://www.ted.com/talks/britt_wray_how_climate_change_affects_your_mental_health/transcript?language=en). We collectively sense what’s coming for us: whether we respond to that with denial, activism, or just slowly increasing blood pressure. That same force has hit us with Covid-19, which projects its own gravitational force today— bending existing plans and shifting our orbits towards previously unknown axes.

![](/assets/088d10e9d664cee930bd7cdcce4511334f250c90-1365x2048.jpg)

I’ve personally found that projecting a degree of objectivity overtop of the current existential threat helps. Not because I can do anything about It with a capital I, but rather because those things that I can affect are often highlighted against its surface, and likewise pulled into its orbit. We’re all waiting to see what our new orbit will be.

_A quick request!_ There’s a lot more of you than there used to be, and I would love to get some feedback. *If you have a few minutes, please* *[fill out this short survey](https://andrewlb.typeform.com/to/aQPfsG), and let me know what you think of Diverge.*

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/46693a5139839bb4e020828529d3e505e6bb4a9a-1000x1284.jpg)

[**Of Course the U.S. Military Has A White Supremacy Problem. It’s Baked In. - War on the Rocks**](https://warontherocks.com/2020/05/of-course-the-u-s-military-has-a-white-supremacy-problem-its-baked-in/)

On the theme of waiting, this caught my attention. War on the Rocks is an interesting professional publication. It’s well respected in the American national security establishment, and many of its writers are colonels, generals officers, and senior officials currently or previously within the US Department of Defense. So when an article explicitly criticizing the long-term cancer of racism and white supremacy within the American armed forces, it’s a preliminary signal that perhaps things are moving in a better direction.

America has never really reconciled with its history of slavery and systematic oppression of black Americans. The result has been generations of potential undermined through active and passive discrimination, and a society that still bears an open, festering wound. But the military can — in principle — serve as an exemplar for a kind of cultural and historical healing. Through its hierarchal structure, the education of its officer corps, and the dispositional towards historical awareness of its members, I’d argue that it has symbolically and actually greater power than American federalism allows outside of the federal armed forces. With the role that the military plays as an employer and opportunity-creator for millions of Americans (there are currently 18 million veterans in the US), that change in who is celebrated in bases, statues, ship names, and heroics has the potential to create an enduring impact and perhaps shorten the wait for some kind of healing.


Diverge Weekly Issue #11: The Waiting Issue


First, I want to share a point of gratitude. My small business, [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com/), was awarded the [Sage Ocean Concept Grant](https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/tools-and-tech/concept-grant-winner-knowsi-interview) this week by Sage Publishing. Knowsi is a solo project I’ve been slowly developing over the past year with the goal of improving informed consent practices in user research. It still has a long way to go, but I’m incredibly grateful for the help of the Sage Ocean team as well as all the friends, colleagues, research participants, and customers who have helped Knowsi in its first year. The goal over the next bit will be to extend it to support social science research needs as well (as well as generally get it out of public beta, whatever that means).

Anyway, onwards.

![](/assets/74acf12f0f4bc499a4d1cb3549ba0e296c088dd7-2048x1365.jpg)

There’s a certain flatness to things recently.

Being in a lockdown with a tenuous end date makes for the psychological equivalent of sitting in the back seat, asking “Are we there yet” to an equally puzzled parent. For most of us living in liberal democracies, this is the most sweeping form of state control many of us have experienced — barring incarceration and military service. While we strained against that control in different ways —from [right-wing protests in California](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/01/california-coronavirus-protests-huntington-beach-sacramento?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other) to [pro-democracy rallies in Lebanon](https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/lebanese-protesters-back-streets-despite-covid-19-lockdown) — the reality is that our leaders and institutions are as perplexed as we are: they can only read the signs on the road and actuate the vehicle of state incrementally along its existing path.

Decision making against the moving goalposts of economic and public health is at its core a challenge of perspective with existential consequences. I wrote an essay this weekend for a strategic studies course — the kind with nuclear weapons, hybrid warfare, and Prussian generals — and the only thing I felt I could write about was how narrow the idea of strategy can feel. Taken to an almost unhelpful level, strategy attempts to impose a kind of will or intent on complex systems that — by their very nature — resist such control. One example was in the lead up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 [which Robert Jervis describes in detail](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-165X.2010.tb00672.x). In his account exploring policymaker use of intelligence analysis, the central challenge was not that the Bush administration didn’t have intelligence and awareness about Saddam’s regime: but rather they so convinced themselves of a procedural solution to that complexity, that the only obvious choice was to invade Iraq — no other option would do. Strategy became a lens through which details faded and flattened into an utterly catastrophic decision. Perspective is a function of how refracting and reflecting light eventually hits our eye: it is situational, subjective, and temporal.

![](/assets/cbe428c652e4ac7b73c09aa48b37ab0a5206650f-2048x1365.jpg)

The other part of this is the lens through which your particular perspective is consumed. My friend Scott Young [wrote a piece for the Canadian magazine Macleans on Sweden’s response to the Coronavirus](https://www.macleans.ca/news/world/lessons-from-kronavirus-is-swedens-anti-lockdown-approach-more-strategic-than-it-seems/) this week, and he makes the point “No one would predict the winner of the Stanley Cup on the basis of Game 1 in the first round, so why do so many feel comfortable excoriating Sweden so early in this pandemic?” This is a distinctly Canadian metaphor, but it’s on point. From my vantage point in Denmark, I’ve looked at Sweden’s response with shock and concern (especially with close friends in Stockholm and Malmö, Scott included). But I also got a haircut last week as Denmark opened, and I shared the [numb terror](https://andrewlb.com/diverge-weekly-issue-7-the-gradual-opening-issue/) associated with sending my son to daycare earlier this month. In Scott’s article, he acknowledges that the Swedish stance is perhaps reckless, but how wide or narrow a lens we take dramatically affects the returned image.

A narrow [focal length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_length) surfaces details further off and with greater specificity. It also might make different objects appear RELATIVELY closer than they actually are. Narrowing one's focus on a subject (to the exclusion of others) might pull a background object into the foreground as well, as tourists in Italy do as they use [forced perspective](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective) to hold up the leaning tower of Pisa. The effect of this is to [distort the data](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photography)#/media/File:Nybldgs.jpg>) and force a differing interpretation of outcomes. The Bush administration fell victim to distortion by simplifying the complexity of Saddam’s regional defence, sectarian, and political posture in Iraq (and if this is of interest, honestly, read Kim Ghattas’ [Black Wave](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X4CK1FF). I’ve mentioned it a few times now, but it is brilliant). The inability to manage this unforeseen complexity, including [disbanding Saddam’s Republican Guard](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq) and the guerrilla violence that followed, came in part from this narrowed scope. Of course, a wide lens can present its own problems. Too much information, ill-defined subjects, and distortion can leave the viewer unsure where to look and how to act. Same perspective, different lenses, different story, different strategy.

![](/assets/638951d86f328661dfc4c3887569a0dbbcf0f395-1365x2048.jpg)

So back to this flatness I’ve been wondering about.

I think most of us have taken a very narrow view to this pandemic, albeit from a multitude of different vantage points. The result is conflicting narratives about what falls between our present and a distant object. [Everyone fears the second wave of infection](https://www.politico.eu/article/as-europeans-dream-about-beach-holidays-experts-worry-about-next-virus-wave/), but the vantage from Copenhagen with the Danish government feathering the economic breaks vs. Sweden with its potentially newly resilient population ([or potentially not](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/we-still-dont-know-how-the-coronavirus-is-killing-us.html)) will present a very different story — even focused on the same object. It might also mean that the next few months will look incredibly different for the two countries, and certainly for every country around the world. While states may shape the outer bounds of our day-to-day experience, we still have great agency to “set up the shot.” And perhaps together — sharing our different experiences and perspectives — we can lend a bit of dimensionality to the unknown looming in the background.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/0cc8d832404973ff52c53fb19a25d6889b3b3a52-553x369.jpg)

[**The problem with militias in Somalia: Almost everyone wants them despite their dangers**](https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-problem-with-militias-in-somalia-almost-everyone-wants-them-despite-their-dangers/)

I thought this was pretty interesting. It’s not too often that articles like this recommend the acceptance and embrace of complexity. This article explores an important way to consider multilateral engagement in the context of vulnerable states: working with and collaborating with militant groups. Somalia has had a difficult ride. From the civil wars in the early 1990s, a popular kritocratic governing coalition — the Islamic Court Union — emerged but was undermined through foreign support for the weaker (and secular) Somali government. Of course, aspects of this were reasonable: al-Shabaab, a violent Jihadi group, was allied with the ICU, but its dissolution has further fragmented the Somali political landscape. Part of the issue at hand is that navigating the Somali political landscape comes down to negotiating with disparate forces whose power and position are incredibly fluid. For anyone looking to do work in Somalia —neighbouring regimes, an NGO, a superpower, or a terrorist group — that work comes at the cost of navigating a deeply complex web of relationships and power structures. But, it isn’t impossible.


Diverge Weekly Issue #10: The Flattened Issue


_This interview was originally published on May 11, 2020, by [**Sage Ocean**](https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/tools-and-tech/concept-grant-winner-knowsi-interview)._

SAGE has [announced](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/press/sage-publishing-awards-concept-grants-for-innovative-software-tools-for-social-research) the 2020 winners of its Concept Grant program, which provides funding for innovative software solutions that support social science research. This year, £15,000 was awarded to scale up one winning tool, [Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/), and five further grants of £2,000 were awarded to early-stage software ideas that support the use of computational methods in social research.

In this blog, the creator of [Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/), [Andrew Lovett-Barron](https://twitter.com/readywater), explains how he uses new technologies and design thinking with Knowsi to improve a very routine but critical part of the social science researchers process, and how the Concept Grant will support that.

### **1. WHAT IS KNOWSI?**

Knowsi is a portal for researchers and participants to manage their consent relationship. It’s a platform built out of my own experience as a design researcher seeing first hand how the friction of administrative requirements led to poor documentation, confused participants, and missed opportunities. Knowsi aspires to make the process of collecting participant consent simple and consistent across projects and to keep research compliant with progressive privacy legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). **Knowsi makes respect for the consent of research participants as easy to implement as it is to say.**

### **2. WHAT IS RESEARCH CONSENT AND WHAT CHALLENGES DOES IT BRING FOR RESEARCHERS? AND HOW DO BIG DATA, NEW REGULATIONS AND NEW ONLINE EXPERIMENTS IMPACT THESE CHALLENGES?**

Informed consent is the permission a participant gives of their own free will and with sound mind to be subjected to something such as sharing personal information or participating in an experiment, given an honest disclosure of what that participant is going to experience and what will come next. Under legislation like the GDPR, consent is also something that is living: a participant must be able to withdraw or otherwise change their consent as well.

Today, gathering consent is often done via paper. A participant is handed a consent form with a disclosure of information and a request to sign over information rights and media release. Ideally (though not always) the participant will get their own copy, and there will be little recourse for withdrawing that consent short of seeking out the individual researcher — leaving participants disempowered and without an obvious means to follow up.

For a research team, managing the records of consent becomes its own administrative task: coding and transcribing data, ensuring both anonymity and traceability, validating that consent was given for media to be used (if needed), and ensuring that the data is discarded at the appropriate time. Qualitative data is difficult enough to sift through purely for insights and information, so the complexity added for administration to support the privacy of participants becomes an extra burden.

Gathering good and consistent consent is important. It’s mandatory in an academic setting, it exposes considerable liability in the private sector; it can make participants uncomfortable and impact the outcomes of a study; **_and finally, it’s foundational to ethical research._**

Legislation like the GDPR and CCPA is an important step to mandating good consent practice, but it also introduces operational complexity. One example is that it states that consent should be as easy to withdraw as to give, while not providing clear guidelines on how exactly a researcher should accomplish this. Without mechanisms to automate, this can create unpredictable complexity when dealing with participant relationships and scaling issues for large internet or remote studies.

### **3. HOW DOES KNOWSI SOLVE THESE CHALLENGES FOR RESEARCHERS?**

Knowsi solves many of the operational and administrative challenges of good consent practice. First, Knowsi makes it easy to collect participant consent through a simple and readable form that participants can sign in person, receive through email, or access via a link.

Upon signing the form, a participant will receive a receipt with their own copy of the consent form and the ability to update their consent, connect with the researcher, and request their data.

The researcher, meanwhile, gets a summary of their participants’ consent on their dashboard, can track goals and deadlines for the research project directly through their project dashboard, and reach out to participants for future studies or contact (provided they’ve consented to that).

### **4. WHY IS KNOWSI BETTER THAN OTHER METHODS/TOOLS FOR MANAGING RESEARCH CONSENT?**

Today, consent in both the private sector and the world of research is still frequently done by paper or through ad-hoc tools like Google Forms or Airtable. Paper has its obvious downfalls especially when researching at scale, and while these tools have a place, they are insufficient for the task and the increasingly regulated domain of informed consent. Some tools exist for tracking consent in clinical studies, but they are cumbersome, expensive, and specific to the needs of clinical environments.

_Knowsi is focused on providing the best consent experience for both researchers and participants,_ and has demonstrated this so far through early customers and beta testing in Denmark, the UK, and the US. **By framing consent gathering as a user experience problem, Knowsi is well-positioned to do what great administrative software does best: disappear into the background with the problem it was designed to solve.**

![](/assets/201146e27be2f285de852c37acc7de5fa2f2c547-1500x1000.png)

### **5. WHO ARE THE MAIN USERS OF KNOWSI? AND WHO ELSE IN THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY COULD KNOWSI BENEFIT IN THE FUTURE?**

So far, the main users of Knowsi have been user researchers and students. This is partially due to my own background: as a design researcher myself, it was a community I knew. The other specific users group we pursued were photographers and videographers who are required to collect a media release.

However, as I built Knowsi, its utility for academic research became obvious, especially as potential users from the social sciences and clinical research domains inquired about and tested the tool. While clinical research might be some ways off for the technical integrations required, our near term horizon is building a comprehensive and accessible experience for academic researchers with the right mix of tools and integrations to be the obvious choice for their research needs.

### **6. WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO CREATE KNOWSI AND HOW WILL THE CONCEPT GRANT HELP?**

As a design researcher, I was always frustrated by how we treated consent and our research participants. Being a research participant can be uncomfortable; you are often providing incredibly detailed personal information to a stranger in exchange for a form stating (broadly) how your private information will be used, and perhaps some cash or a gift card. Researchers are also incentivized to be maximally extractive of information, with the principal that it will drive better quality research outcomes.

The power relationship between researcher and participant is already asymmetrical, but it doesn’t need to be zero sum. My idea with Knowsi was **to create a tool that made the experience and outcomes better for both researcher and participant** by providing clarity and continuity of intent to participants, eliminating administrative overhead for researchers, and automating as many of the uncomfortable parts as possible.

Now that a public beta has launched, the SAGE Concept Grant is going to be vital in helping us reach what we believe will be a primary user group: social science researchers. While Knowsi has been used successfully in the private sector and by design students, we still need to build in the right tools, workflows, and templates for universities to properly benefit from Knowsi — both from a researcher experience and a procurement perspective. The SAGE Concept Grant will help us bridge the gap between the current public beta and an enterprise level tool that universities and other institutions can feel confident implementing.

### **7. HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE SAGE OCEAN CONCEPT GRANT AND WHY DID YOU APPLY TO IT OVER OTHER GRANTS?**

I was originally contacted as part of Dr. Daniela Duca’s research into startups for the SAGE community. While I had known about SAGE’s work in publication and academic support, I hadn’t realized how deeply SAGE was involved in cultivating the future of research tools. I learned a lot from Dr. Duca’s expertise and knowledge, and it had already helped inform some of my thinking when the Concept Grant email popped up in my inbox. I saw the grant as an opportunity to of course benefit from the financial support to build the tool, but perhaps more fundamentally to borrow SAGE’s insight and expertise of the research community; which would most benefit from Knowsi and where I want it to grow.


Concept Grant 2020 winner: Knowsi


First, thank you and welcome to all the new subscribers, and to [Hillary Predko](http://hillarypredko.com/) for sharing Diverge in [The Prepared](https://theprepared.org/). This is a weird newsletter that aspires to be about design and global affairs — but I take some latitudes.

The pattern of my day-to-day life is mostly contingent. It rests on the physical infrastructure that makes urban living possible. It is attuned to the temporal and interpersonal nature of knowledge work. It is capillary to the logistics of on-demand consumerism and [platform capitalism](https://amzn.to/3b5wjGt). And it sets tempo to the increasingly stressed network of labour that empowers my own specialization.

![](/assets/9aba682bedfafedee8345c053ef49a4bfb16c96c-1180x786.jpg)

Over the past months, those dependencies have started to show their cracks. I recently had my Gore-Tex jacket fail, and so the weird properties of Gore-Tex have been on my mind.

As designed, the multiple layers of Gore-Tex work together to keep you dry and climate-controlled in some pretty grim conditions. It has the remarkable property of being both waterproof and breathable — allowing moisture to pass away from your body while also preventing water from entering. Also durable, light, etc etc. It’s magic. Having been trapped for hours in a mid-May downpour while bike camping in Sweden, I love Gore-Tex.

But it’s also a fragile fabric. After only a few wears, the body’s oils and dirt will start to permeate the fabric, causing the laminate of different materials that provide for these unique properties to shear off — [bubbling up and giving the garment an almost organic appearance](http://tectahoe.com/delamination/) as it delaminates. Repeated use and friction can cause the tape that prevents seams from leaking to peel away, while improper care will undermine the jacket’s first line of defence — a hydrophobic coating called [Durable Water Repellant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_water_repellent) — and cause the entire garment to soak through.

Taken together, Gore-Tex is a pretty complex material that relies on and leverages multiple systems to perform its function of keeping its wearer dry, INCLUDING the labour and consciousness of its wearer. Failing to wash the jacket, or to properly care for its DWR coating leads to a systemic failure and a wet inhabitant.

![](/assets/4bf307d5bf990cd9149be30538c777b32ce2e086-1180x786.jpg)

The past few months have taught me about the fragility and interdependence of so many of our systems — especially those systems that underpin our own identities. Part of my identity is being a bit frenetic — constantly reading, writing, making, exploring. Not necessarily anything good, or particularly long-lasting (my short-lived foray into woodworking being an example of this), but it’s part of who I am.

However, the liberty to be that frenetic comes with an absurd web of dependencies. It’s facilitated by leisure time that comes from position, job expectations, and a certain earning power — itself constructed of a lucky mix of skills and interests within a market, and the cultural narratives around their value. It’s purchased with the labour of others: those who deliver groceries and meals when my wife and I are too exhausted to cook; the incredible childcare workers who care for and teach our son during our workday; the front-line retail and service workers whose work supports the enterprises who end up being my clients — this list can go for a while.

When the coronavirus hit and things shut down, it was like that taped seam ripped or the DWR failed: the bubble built around me wetted through and suddenly the contingent identity was compromised. For me, the dependence on childcare and absolutely catastrophic impact of working full time while caring for a one-year-old was my untaped seam. The fatigue and stress undermined everything else. With daycares now open, I think about this weakness every single day.

![](/assets/e644d6b6af96005145c48d1043e7fcdfaa3ca832-1180x786.jpg)

In many ways though, I like having these dependencies. I love what I do (whatever it is that I do), and am massively grateful for the repeated opportunities to do it (whatever that might be). Having someone to thank, to be connected with, and to follow the trail of their experiences as well — these are wonderful things. As is having someone else think about where I get my water 99.9% of the time. Human and physical infrastructure facilitates that opportunity. But the current global crisis — in its utterly tragic and freakishly muted way — is surfacing the stories of where those dependencies suddenly end. [When we played our catastrophe forecasting game](https://andrewlb.com/covid-anxiety/) last month, it also gave my wife and I the chance to game out how that disappearance of resources and infrastructure might transform our own lives.

So. I’m not quite sure what to do with this anxiety. But the thing that came to mind was perhaps how to be comfortable in dependency but resilient to insecurity. Kind of like a prepper with good healthcare — building resilience where it makes sense to build resilience, and reinforcing dependencies where it makes to reinforce those dependencies.

Stockpiles that lend resilience might be an appropriate amount of food, a medical kit (and the knowledge to use it) for your family and your neighbour, some liquid assets wherever possible, and contractual relationships (rent, subscriptions, debts) within whatever means might be possible. Dependencies to cultivate might be a good relationship with a family doctor, friendships built on shared labour and goals, the maintenance of a shared building or public space, and healthy engagement in local political institutions.

Of course, all of the above is itself contingent. A meaningful relationship with your doctor is unlikely to develop if a single medical professional is covering an impossibly large community. [Contractual relationships like employment are difficult to navigate when power asymmetries undermine one's options](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon). Liquid assets can scarcely be accumulated without a market that values your labour, or fails to compensate you fairly for it.

![](/assets/435b680d2fd36462a1f93879b17f736b64d69590-1180x786.jpg)

A Gore-Tex jacket properly cared for will last you a long time. But getting that jacket in the first place —with the protection it affords and the opportunity to care for it— is a lucky and privileged thing. I do think about the weakness that the coronavirus exposed daily, but I also think about the strengths and imbalance that it surfaced. After all, a failing motor that sputters to a halt still takes you a bit further down the road through simple momentum. And so I think we’ll see that the catastrophic failure of a business will still facilitate opportunities and networks that can cushion its beneficiaries from absolute destitution. Hopefully too, a tragically undermined social safety net in the US will still provide citizens with a small economic buffer — [even if it comes with the mad king’s signature](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/stimulus-check-trump-signature.html). If nothing else, this crisis has taught us that having access to and wearing the right protective gear saves lives.

So I’ll continue to build dependencies even with their fragility: My life has been richer and stronger for it. But within that web, I’ll strive to [at least see those dependencies for what they are](https://amzn.to/2LaUKYd), to adjust those relationships as they evolve, and to build in the redundancies that support my community, my family, and my ability to be who I am.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/4b78e5b258f5ff8f9f3b4894d2ca2488d24b37de-1044x698.png)

[**Making Sure Peace Isn’t a Casualty of COVID-19 in Fragile States**](https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28734/making-sure-peace-isn-t-a-casualty-of-covid-19-in-fragile-states)

This article is a great overview of where dependencies are suddenly failing, leaving weakened communities and threatening the central institutions of peace. From day-labourers cut out of vital work in Afghanistan to East Timor seeing its financial safety-net pulled out from under it — fragile and developing states around the world are seeing their citizens’ most fundamental expectations about government and their lives tested in ways that are unfair and could have been at least buffered. Not working for a day without any savings leave you hungry and weak, not working for a few days leave you desperate. A weakened community and a weakened state are unable to fill the gap, and we might see desperate people do desperate things.

This article has a number of recommendations and principles about how the international community can help avoid the worst outcomes — with all sectors having a part to play from commercial services to religious communities to public sector entities. Dependencies often go both ways: debt holders don’t want to see countries bearing the debt default; nor do they want to see the humans who constitute those nations thrown into even greater chaos (one hopes, anyway). And so discussions of debt relief on the national scale could be a vital pressure valve for otherwise terribly leveraged developing economies.


Diverge Weekly Issue #9: The Dependencies Issue


Everyone I talk to lately is tired.

For those of us in countries with a nominal “flattened” curve, it feels like we’ve climbed up to a ledge to find a temporary respite, with the knowledge that we can’t stay here too long. Those still experiencing uncontrolled outbreaks (the idea of control itself is dubious) only have the belief that a ledge might be close by — without much thought for where one goes next. Either way, we find ourselves stuck, unsure of how to get down safely or keep going forward. And this is an experience that everyone is independently living.

![](/assets/a254673bd0cf6c730e318103e21e42ff0a8a5d8a-1180x786.jpg)

The [impact of uncertainty on stress](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/%0Ahow-uncertainty-fuels-anxiety/388066/) is something that is often obvious and widely acknowledged, but still insidious. We might dismiss a friend’s inquiry into our well being with a “Things are good” or “I’m fine” not because we feel that way, but simply because it’s the ingrained default. The construct of normalcy around us — whatever that normal might be — drives our behaviours until those norms are no longer load-bearing.

I think we’re hitting that point where the erosion of localized norms is beginning to undermine the foundations they were built on. The Prussian military scholar Clausewitz (I’m a security studies student, what do you expect?) has this idea of [Friction](http://www.strategybydesign.org/friction) — the accumulation of little unknowns and events that undermine “the plan.” Clausewitz argues that a path to victory in war is managing the relative friction between various combatants: reduce your own friction and increase the enemies. The ubiquitous American MQ-9 Reaper drone is an example of something that amplifies an enemy’s friction (“Where the hell is that buzzing coming from?”) and reduces allies friction (“Eyes in the sky”). But we don’t have a Reaper drone for our current situation.

![](/assets/15af66b910ad83ba9f2112ba343078f245489b6c-1180x786.jpg)

Instead of other humans, we are engaged in a species-wide war of friction against a virus. Covid-19 is a particularly friction-producing bastard. Its slow incubation timed and high infection rate allowed it to slip past our virological Maginot line, and emergency measures have been the result. By staying home and keeping physically distant, we’re doing something to balance those scales: the virus can’t spread what it can’t reach, and even if it does, it can’t spread far within an isolated household. This creates friction for the virus and we’re starting to see the results — [Angela Merkel’s explanation of the effect of friction on the virus’ spread](https://www.vox.com/2020/4/17/%0A21225916/coronavirus-in-germany-angela-merkel-lifting-lockdown) being perhaps the best framing of the impact that we can have.

But still, our norms are eroding. My wife, son, and I had a picnic in the park this weekend with some friends. They sat two meters away and we commented on how weird it was. It was also an absolutely incredible relief and utterly surreal at the same time.

There’s a New Yorker article that came out this week called [Abandoned](https://www.newyorker.com/%0Amagazine/2020/04/27/americas-abandonment-of-syria). It explores the American abandonment of the Syrian Democratic Forces — a mostly Kurdish force responsible for the defeat of ISIS in Syria and long-time ally of the US. The entire thing is worth your time, but the section on the re-habitation of Raqqa stood out for the dynamism with which people were trying to reclaim their lives. Wiring electricity for light and television, planting a garden, cleaning the debris as best they can. In shattered buildings, families are doing whatever they can to reclaim the shape of normal, but will never see those previous lives.

The human impact of the Syrian civil war and our current battle with covid-19 can’t and shouldn’t be compared, but it points to what happens when our foundations are torn from us: we establish new ones. New norms come slowly and with pain, but they do come. Often, design (particularly interaction design) looks at eliminating friction as completely as it can, but sometimes friction can beneficial results. An example is the [IKEA effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect), which shows that people tend to over-value things they create — like building Ikea furniture.

![](/assets/d8e290861a9392f971a761d15b07b72159647cbd-1180x786.jpg)

The friends I met in the park had shared how they’d taught themselves to make bagels, how they were looking after a sick friend from a distance, and how they’d rediscovered their PlayStation. Anecdotally, everyone seems to be making sourdough — the shortage of dry yeast in grocery stories spurring folk to discover that yeast that is constantly floating around us. In the book [Wild Ones](https://amzn.to/2Sgs8Rr), Jon Mooallem explores the idea of shifting baselines relative to generational norm-setting — what we understand as “normal” isn’t the normal for our children or those geographically dispersed. But what we’re experiencing now is this shift at a much more dramatic speed.

Writing this newsletter each week has — for me — been a bit like that act of making sourdough or bagels in reaction to those shifting baselines. It’s a manifestation of my own labour and allows me to meditate a bit on what each week or sequence of weeks feels like — from my own perch in Copenhagen working as a product designer and manager, from the news and articles I read from around the world, and from the people I talk to across timezones. We are all incrementally building new norms — some of us under incredible stress and risk, others from a position of privilege. And perhaps the confluence of those new norms — and the friction they create for the coronavirus’ spread — will create a more resilient world on the other side.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/f560e7fecd4bcf9aed4b51335e99be01a0544ce1-1180x663.jpg)

[**Foreign Policy: The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural**](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/20/coronavirus-pandemic-bioterrorism-preparedness/)

Max Brooks is a favourite author of mine. World War Z is a book I’ve re-read about 10 times as a kind of comfort food, and it’s one of the best pieces of speculative fiction I’ve encountered. I regularly recommend it to students and colleagues alike. This article is a fantastic look by an expert at the global security threat of bioterrorism, and how in some ways, our learning from the coronavirus pandemic may help ward off potentially greater threats down the road.


Diverge Weekly Issue #8: The Just Tired Issue


My son had his first day back at daycare today (I’m writing this on Monday).

When he left, he wasn’t yet able to stand on his feet. He was just starting to say “hi” and wasn’t obsessively waving at things. He wasn’t yet one year. But now he’s (sort of) walking, getting incredibly creative with his toys, and as I tucked him in tonight, waved sleepily and bid me goodnight with a “Hi.”

![](/assets/03d44af7eb749ee28d18119904f09f7cd6294a2d-1180x786.jpg)

Navigating the past weeks and months has been confusing as the coronavirus has made its way around the world and into our lives. At the end of January, I ordered some masks for the family just in case and at the time worried that they’d only get used the next time we had to paint something. This past week, my wife and I have been quietly obsessing over whether sending him back to daycare was the right call — knowing that the health outcomes of our decision wouldn’t reach us for days or weeks.

So much of the work of design is around navigating unknowns, which I’ve written about in the [past](https://andrewlb.com/diverge-weekly-issue-2-the-global-pandemic-issue/) [few](https://andrewlb.com/diverge-weekly-issue-3-the-uncertainty-issue/) [posts](https://andrewlb.com/diverge-weekly-issue-4-the-cycles-issue/). We have tons of tools to make that navigation a bit less fraught, but ultimately our goal is to reduce the absolute surface area of the true unknowns and take our best guess at what we should cover it with. A small patch of true Unknown (I’m trying not to [invoke Rumsfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns) here, but you know what I mean) can bring the whole edifice down, but it’s less likely to.

![](/assets/20958ed62466d780885d1de0b7e060206cda97e9-1180x786.jpg)

In Copenhagen, the unknowns are being navigated in several ways. People are out. They’ve active and enjoying public space where they can find them. They’re keeping their distance. This photo perfectly captured the “vibe” of a weekend in Copenhagen: Small groups keeping their distance. Masks are still unusual: I wear mine in the market and it clearly surprised people. And the daycares are opening. I navigate these unknowns in a way that is informed by what I see in Asia, and what North America and Europe are only now coming to understand.

Looking at the [Danish government’s decision to open daycares](https://www.thelocal.dk/20200413/schools-and-day-care-centres-gear-up-for-staggered-and-restricted-reopening), I see a bit of this personalized navigation of the unknown. That surface area of True Unknowns has become a little bit smaller, and so perhaps something can be built on it. The government is setting a scope, and the schools are implementing it as best they can. We’ll know how it went in a few weeks. Certainly, as a parent, the time afforded to work and be productive by state-supported child care is welcome. I probably had my most productive morning in the six weeks my son has been home during the workday, but I know that time is built on unknowns. It’s built on the labour of others taking a risk. It’s built on a Danish societal valuation of certain things over others. It’s built on a risk tolerance that is only possible with privilege.

![](/assets/31517f39677519070f73a5efab57a78ce5330b41-1180x786.jpg)

So we’ll see over the next bit. I know many of you reading this are in Canada and the US, and things are [pretty scary](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-cases-covid-19?stackMode=relative&time=2020-02-14..&country=DEU+ITA+DNK+CAN+USA). We’ll see whether what we built holds. In the end, design is in large part about making decisions based on what we’ve learned and committing them to form. It’s not faith, but it might be a particular kind of localized [interpolation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation) of what we’ve come to know (or believe) over the true unknowns that still exist within our scope of design. Of course, our methods of interpolation can skew that result [pretty wildly](https://matplotlib.org/1.5.3/examples/images_contours_and_fields/interpolation_methods.html).

We don’t always get a choice when to navigate an unknown, and we don’t always get a choice in the navigation either. But for now, this first day with our son back at daycare was scary for the unknown seeds it plants and outcomes that grow out of it. But then, positively influenced by his playmates and the incredible team of teachers at his school, perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong outcomes?

Thanks as always for reading this. I tried a bit of a different format this time (lighter content, more visual), and would love to hear what you think.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/312f37cf391a337a6cdce680c266392090dd00b1-1180x663.jpg)

[**Why China is Developing Military Vessels at the Center of its Coronavirus Outbreak**](https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/why-china-developing-military-vessels-center-its-coronavirus)

Similar to the earlier Foreign Policy article on Beijing, this article shares some interesting context on Chinese investments in extending and maintaining power as the existing global system seizes and sputters under the weight of this pandemic.

“China is “taking advantage of the lull in activity” around the world by bolstering its military in nearby seas, said Jay Batongbacal, international maritime affairs professor at University of the Philippines.”

Again, all of this should be watched with interest and potentially alarm.


Diverge Weekly Issue #7: The Gradual Opening Issue


I’ve been reading and thinking about foresight — especially as it relates to the current pandemic and security. As a result, I’ve been getting interested in why we believe what we believe about the future.

With the rise of platform empires, we’ve effectively [ceded the original vision of the internet as a distributed space](https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/). Battle after battle of the free internet was lost to convenience, monetization strategies that drove consolidation, and **the pens, mice, and post-its of designers locked in market-driven competition**. Some of the most interesting conversations one can have on this are with Facebook designers who are both critical thinkers (which applies to many of those I’ve met) and who are anxious about the impact of what they’ve helped create. Yet they find themselves captured through unvested stock, individual loyalties within their teams, and the completely legitimate hypothesis that they might be able to make things better.

I don’t really know the answer to this one. [We’re all culpable for the internet that we lost](https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/06/09/pirate-bay-founder-weve-lost-the-internet-its-all-about-damage-control-now/), and there’s some very good designers at the platform giants — good in skill and good in soul — who we shouldn’t throw under the bus. But I do think there’s a meaningful discussion to be had around this idea of capture and recognizing when we ARE captured.

I read an article recently by Patrick Porter on [how the British national security apparatus undermined its own foresight efforts by unconsciously insisting on confidence in their capacity to handle whatever might come](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-international-security/article/taking-uncertainty-seriously-classical-realism-and-national-security/1022E6B6D12A8902E7F40B575D01C40B). This very idea is pathological: that they might both acknowledge the magnitude of the unknowns they face, and still require confidence that they can wrangle it given our current preparedness. Britain isn’t alone in this, of course. If you’re developing a product, you’ll experience microcosms of this every day: the feature or design decision you made just doesn’t glom on to reality. Your user or customer is frustrated, their user or customers are confused — all because your synthesis of their needs and your own sensibility missed its mark. The difference lies in the speed of iteration.

A designer can (usually) quite easily test their hypothesis. Find a customer, set up a prototype, launch a test, or simply watch how your (possibly socially distanced) neighbour interacts with it. But of course, that’s not so easy for a state’s national security establishment. Usually, national security institutions are pretty brilliant when it comes to punching through their own biases, using tools like [red teaming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_team) and others to explore alternative scenarios. But as [Micah Zenko’s book on Red Teaming points out](https://amzn.to/3aaWM4X), the role of the Red Team can often be institutionally undermined in subtle ways: [be it explicitly walking back a decision during a war game](https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/) or [tacitly signalling leadership’s dissatisfaction with the results](https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/07/red-team-a-tale-of-how-a-general-didnt-listen-to-internal-criticism-in-afghanistan/). In both cases, the act of simulating alternative options — of diverging from the current mode of thought — becomes dramatically constrained by the needs and fears of the commissioning institutions. It’s effectively nullified.

I think the same thing happens to the sensibility of designers captured by institutions. The scope of potential divergence becomes naturally constrained by the needs of the institutions they serve, and so their sensibility [is reinforced and narrowed along those lines over time](https://andrewlb.com/diverge-weekly-issue-4-the-cycles-issue/). And I think this is part of what I want Diverge Weekly to combat. This idea of capture is a reflection of a point in time for an individual or a class of designers where the aperture is narrowing. But I’d like to believe it can still be opened.

So if the intent is to widen that aperture, functionally how do we start to open it again?

That’ll be for future issues.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/6b5f74bc7ae89afc5a3df11d6314578aa07dcd76-1180x1180.jpg)

[**Millennium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and its Legacy**](https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/)

I’m not going to talk too much about this, beyond recommending giving it a full read. I mentioned some of it at the start of the newsletter, but these kinds of true tales of institutional capture, unfortunately, cost lives and end careers — and not always that of the negligent party. The capture can be summed up in this section: “JFCOM and the Office of the Secretary of Defense were determined to validate the principles and concepts that would support the advanced technological military transformation that Rumsfeld and his senior aides had been insisting upon.”

Capture takes place over time, and capture takes place when one's priorities, values, and sensibilities are subsumed by another force. It also often happens to incredibly smart, talented, and dedicated people who could know better, but whose scope of potential futures have narrowed.


Diverge Weekly Issue #6: The Captured Issue


We’re going to try something a little bit different this week and reflect a bit about this project and its goals. This is issue #5 (including a prototype issue 0 which no one saw), so it felt like time to take stock.

## What is this Newsletter?

I’m still trying to figure out what this newsletter is meant to be and where its identity lies. The current subtitle of the site is: _Every Wednesday, a look at design and designers through the lens of global affairs to inform, inspire, and activate._ This tagline is going to change a fair bit as the site changes, of course, but it does do a good job addressing what I want to accomplish:

1. **To use design practice and discourse as a lens to engage with global affairs** — from conflicts, to supply chains, to our current global pandemic. I’m also trying to focus on the work of design, asking what products, services, insights, and experiences are generated through design practice and where we are seeing that in international events.
2. **To funnel critical international relations theory and practice INTO the domain of design practice.** I’m currently doing a masters in International Security Studies, so this is very much something I’m discovering. I’m not quite sure what this looks like yet, but one of the ways I’ve been trying to do it is through the “Happenings” section, which looks at regional news, highlights non-western (though ultimately usually still English language) news sources, and contextualizes that news around the weekly topic.
3. **To highlight the different ways that design manifests around the world, ESPECIALLY where it doesn’t get framed as design.** IR scholar Cynthia Enloe suggests that _“Making feminist sense of international politics requires that you exercise genuine curiosity about each of these women’s lives—and the lives of women you have yet to think about.”_ I believe that this person-centric lens on the international is the most meaningful entry-point for designers, and perhaps one that should be most familiar to designers. Engaging with the question of who does the “invisible work” of global affairs becomes a foundation for considering how design can have impact. I’m interested in looking past the often homogenous cliques of world leaders, looking at why power dynamics are the way they are and looking to the individuals and groups engaged in those systems.

### Informing

My goal here is to highlight news that you might not see if you weren’t looking for it. I consume a lot of news, and I recall when I was living in the States, most of that news was caught up in American federal politics. Since moving to Copenhagen, I’m still pretty wrapped up in American politics, to be honest, but I’ve also been following a lot more news from the Middle East (I’m learning Arabic), from China and East Asia out of interest, from Africa as part of my masters and startup mentorship activities (that part is a bit random), and of course, lots and lots of European sources.

I don’t think you need to consume all of that. I probably shouldn’t. But as there’s a topic each week, I think the exercise of reflecting on that topic through the lens of these articles (primarily in the Happenings and Security Blanket sections) helps flush out the argument and gives you a starting point to structure your own view.

### Inspiring

My perspective on all this is shaped by the designers and thinkers I’ve had the good fortune to work with, not to mention the near-unlimited access to the process stories of incredible design work from around the world. In the Design Voices, Feature, and ultimately this main writeup, I’m hoping to bridge design practice to the global in a meaningful way and set the example of how individuals and groups are already engaging in this work.

### Activating

Finally, this is where I’m going to be developing this newsletter as I would develop an application. I want to use this platform as a way to create tools that help people get involved. Right now, that just looks like the job postings I share each week. But I’m also writing how-to guides and resources for preparing for international work and jobs, as well as personal design tools (like the [Covid Anxiety forecasting game](https://andrewlb.com/covid-anxiety/) my wife and I made) that will help bring a level of focus to that work.

So. There is a lot going on here, and already from starting 6-7 weeks ago on this project, my perspective is changing and narrowing in quite a bit. Fundamentally though, **I want to thank you for subscribing early and helping me get this going.** It means a lot. Most of you are friends or former colleagues, some of you found your way here from my design research and consent app, [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com/), and some of you just found your way here some other way. But I’m super grateful that you’re here. Also, if you want to give me any feedback (some of you have filled this out already), [I have a small feedback form I sent out in Issue 3 which is still open](https://andrewlb.typeform.com/to/AGyImr).

## Redesigns?

You might also notice that the newsletter and DivergeWeekly.com site have the beginnings of a redesign. The first version of the newsletter came together in January in two or three days. It’s a heavily DIY project. As a quick intro: I wrote the newsletter generator using GatsbyJS, a static website/blog tool I use for my website andrewlb.com. I modified it pretty heavily so that in addition to creating a static site (hosted on GitHub), it also generates the files for the newsletter, and uploads it to my self-hosted newsletter application, Sendy.co.

From there, each week I write this newsletter in Markdown, compile it using the special format that I developed, make sure everything is in place and hit send.

The first site didn’t have any visual design applied to it. This next version will have a fair bit more, and I’m hoping to get some help from someone with better visual design chops to develop the brand and layout a bit. However, what you’re seeing is the first step, and you can expect more changes in format and visuals to come along.

Additionally, I’m working on changing up the data model a bit so that it’ll be easier to see the Design Voices, News, and perhaps most important, jobs in a single place. That won’t happen immediately (this is a late-night passion project), but expect to see that coming up.

Finally, I mentioned the how-to guides and similar. I’m going to be interviewing other designers with international work experience both on the consulting and employment side of things in the weeks to come. So if you know anyone who fits that bill, [please let me know, as I’d love to chat](mailto:alb@andrewlb.com).

Thank you again for subscribing to Diverge! I love writing this, and I’ve been incredibly grateful for those who have helped. In particular, [Ayla Newhouse](http://www.aylanewhousedesign.com/), [Scott Young](https://twitter.com/scottalyoung), [Zahra Ebrahim](https://twitter.com/zahraeb), [Kai Brach](https://www.brizk.com/) and [Michael Schwanzer](https://www.zeitdice.com/) to name a few.

As always, please subscribe to and share Diverge Weekly if you haven’t, and [send me a note](mailto:alb@andrewlb.com) if you have questions or feedback!

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/116caf18ccff8b3b9045d4226e27c8d89518219d-512x342.jpg)

[**US cast as culprit in global scrum over coronavirus supplies**](https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-united-states-cast-as-culprit-in-global-scrum-over-supplies/)

One of the most striking things about the Covid-19 pandemic has been the surge in protectionist measures that different countries have taken. It makes sense. The generous argument is that a country manages its own crises and then is able to open up to help its allies. Sitting here in Denmark as we’re beginning to loosen restrictions, I’m watching the Danish relationship with the much more at-risk Sweden around that particular theory.

But then there’s the more realist view that this was inevitably going to be the response — that state structures hold primacy, and that the state places its own power and security over all other things. What we’ve seen so far certainly can be seen as supporting that view. Countries are desperately competing for supplies, with the US leveraging its incredible wealth to push many of its allies around — most recently with the supposed hijacking of a personal protective equipment shipment to Germany.


Diverge Weekly Issue #5: The First Reflection Issue


**Design is a cyclical action.** While individual artifacts are ejected from the process (like this newsletter and its upcoming visual redesign), the actual process of design is something ongoing.

Throughout my career, I’ve wrestled with the fundamentally commercial nature of design output. We live in a capitalist society and must create something that someone else sees as being of value to be rewarded within that system. As this system too is cyclical, our reward is fed back into the system to reward others for their production of something that we value. This is the most simplistic of frames, but a good place to start. I quite like how Donella Meadows framed these systems in her book [Thinking in Systems: A primer](https://amzn.to/2UodGbs).

![](/assets/2120b125baf2e65bab37a1b50802354c3bcad103-1180x1224.png)

Design process and one's evolution as a designer manifests in almost the exact same way, but with memory. As designers, we are driven to create artefacts of some value to others. We engage in a cyclical process to create these artefacts and then “freeze” the process in time (as a manufactured object, as a defined version of code, as printed material, as an executed experience) to reflect our understanding of maximized value to the consumer. Then, we either start working on the next version if we’re product-focused, the next aspect of the experience if we’re service-focused or something else entirely if we’re consultants.

But in the process of creating that output, our experience as designers has been altered. By designing something, you engage in a cyclical process of orienting a designed thing alongside the needs and values of a consumer (so you can be rewarded for that thing with capital somehow). What that means is that you situate your process as a designer alongside a market demand, and your process — your identity as a creator — is altered to better adhere to that market. In many ways, you come to be a reflector of those market needs and demands when engaging in design process.

**This reflection collectively impoverishes the discipline of design.** By unconsciously aligning our identities with the demands of a capitalist economy, we serve to limit the scope of what might be created in lieu of that allegiance. In my own market-focused product, Knowsi, I struggle with this immensely. The strategic goal of this tool is to alter the behaviours of researchers so that protecting the privacy rights of their research participants is EASIER than not protecting them. For me, it is more valuable to design a tool that represents my own values around privacy, but for the consumer, it is more valuable to have a tool that maximizes their power in the researcher/participant consent relationship.

We see this tension of value everywhere. Today, one of the most intensive debates is around the overreach of the FAANG software companies and their approach to privacy. In his book [Platform Capitalism](https://amzn.to/2wJ0Hbi), Nick Srnicek points out that “if these platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data — and they must invest in the fixed capital to do so.” **Designers of these platforms are faced with a potentially excruciating choice: engage with the individual value set of their own design process — one which might value privacy, or one which emphasizes restraint, or one which celebrates sustainability — or engage with the incredibly tangible value set of the market — valuing competitiveness, defensible assets and property, and relative market share.** This choice is often not as hard as one might think, as we are all often hundreds and thousands of individual design decisions down the path of the market’s frame on value.

So how does one escape this? I actually don’t know that you can. Here are two examples of lock-in: one positive; one negative.

A product that I’ve really admired over the past bit is [Solar Sack](https://solarsack.com/), a startup from Denmark’s Innofounder program of which led design mentorship in 2018 and 2019. Solar Sack is a brilliantly designed product. It’s a mechanism to heat water using only solar energy, and it’s cheap, durable, and easy to use. Its customer base is rural Africans in need of a cheaper and more sustainable alternative to burning fuel for heat and purify water. It has a sustainable and profitable business model that isn’t extractive to its customer base, and vitally, the value system of its designer Andreas aligns brilliantly with the value his customers receive from the product. But Alexander has been working on this thing for years. The product emerged from his masters in industrial design, and before that, he had spent time in Kenya working and volunteering. The product itself was vitally co-designed with its users: with Alexander taking multiple extended trips across Africa to work with his potential customers. As such, by the time Solar Sack hit the market, he had been through countless cycles of a design process that oriented his values toward those of his customers and facilitated the emergence of this product.

Take an alternative, far larger, and far more tragic example: the US failure to aid and rebuild in Afghanistan. Between the invasion in 2001 and 2016, [the United States spent more money attempting to rebuild Afghanistan than it spent rebuilding Europe in the wake of World War II](https://www.vox.com/2016/2/26/11116874/afghanistan-failure). And yet now in 2020, the Trump administration is in peace negotiations with the Taliban, attempting to retreat from the marginal gains in civil liberty and governance that have been made. With the caveat that any commentary on this failure is both subjective and incredibly generalizing to such a wickedly complex problem, I would make the argument that the challenge lies in a deep misalignment between the value system of the designing entity (the US-led coalition) and what is VALUED by those receiving the aid. Access to capital, development projects, education, and political enfranchisement are certainly great things on the surface, but on what terms? And for whom? In his 2013 article Money Pit, Joel Brinkley recounts examples of failures from the US development in Afghanistan. As the US DOD Government Accountability Office put it, “we noted that without an adequate number of trained oversight personnel, DoD could not be assured that contractors could meet contract requirements efficiently and effectively.” This resulted in such memorable mistakes as a dining hall without a kitchen, a shower facility without plumbing, and a forward operating base built so flimsily, its staircases were a greater threat to US personnel than the Taliban.

The issue of oversight, in this case, is **a failure to receive feedback from one's market**. If the goal of US aid in Afghanistan is to replicate the modality of reconstruction that Europe saw following World War II through the Marshall Plan, then the necessity of feedback is all the greater. As mentioned in the [quote section of last week’s newsletter](https://divergeweekly.com/issue/3/), free market economies thrive on the dissemination and aggregation of information in common pools. The stock market, for example, is believed to be an invaluable aggregator of sentiment and mood within an economy. By the same token, the synthesis of a dozen users interviewed is believed to be a vital aggregation of your customer’s needs and intent. Across the myriad ways that the US aid program in Afghanistan differed from the Marshall plan, those feedback mechanisms are primary. Without effective feedback, how could the US government and its many agencies possibly get to a model of development that reflected the real needs of the Afghan people? And perhaps more fundamentally, is it even possible for an occupying power to provide for those needs given the gap in the occupying power’s value system and the definition of value held by those occupied?

**Design is a cyclical and continuous action. We constantly reflect back our observations and actions in the world, and incrementally re-orient our world views over time.** Perhaps my favourite articulation of this is John Boyd’s diagram of the OODA loop, but instead of the microsecond articulation of that loop that Boyd envisioned in aerial combat, I imagine it as spread across the entirety of one's life as a designer.

![](/assets/10ec01ef440f42c2e43b2457ca7aab37405dcaf4-1180x482.png)

Alexander’s Solar Sack is an output of years of iteration leading him to the creation of that design and that business. The US aid mission in Afghanistan is an output of decades of iteration across hundreds of organizations and thousands of people that locked it into a particular belief about how to accomplish that mission.

I believe that **the frontier of contemporary design is to find the tools to break out of our shared path dependence.** Individually and collectively, we’ve become trapped by our own processes, and we need a way out.

To that end, looking at the sudden shift in value that we’re seeing in the wake of Covid-19, I wonder if perhaps now is the time to question everything. I don’t know that the business model canvas will save us, if only because it presupposes a particular flow of production and value. I don’t really believe that offering “free consulting hours” will help us, especially if consulting around a paradigm that left us this fragile. I think we need to change and look outside of what we thought worked, and I know that won’t be easy.

But right now, trapped as we are between a brittle past and an uncertain future (probably in our homes, possibly with loud neighbours), what better time to turn the cyclical motion of design in on ourselves, and perhaps shake free of the grooves we’ve found ourselves in?

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/1efd2b58f88b370d87681e6f706156bf515386f1-800x533.jpg)

[**China’s Military Claims to Be Virus-Free**](https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/20/pla-coronavirus-invasion-chinas-military-claims-to-be-virus-free/)

[**DoD isolating critical troops and commanders to be ready in a crisis amid pandemic**](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/politics/us-military-special-protection-measures-coronavirus/index.html)

The contrast in how the militaries of great powers are engaging with the coronavirus is stunning. Whereas China is taking the official stance that there are no active infections in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the US military is being both open and proactive in engaging with the threat. Unfortunately, the nature of military service is close proximity and frequent rotations, so it is inevitable that a substantive portion of the uniformed service of both countries will be infected.

The way this virus is reshaping our security landscape and relative strength is important to watch. With the US military reeling from nearly two decades of war, the sudden reality that the homeland is no sanctuary may come as a lasting shock. By the same token, just as President Xi was dealt a major political blow when his administration failed to cover up the Wuhan outbreak, President Trump is facing the same for his unwillingness and inability to enact any meaningful preparation as the chief executive. With that, both leaders have now turned to blaming the others for what is effectively a risk that was inevitable: whether it emerged from a Chinese wet market, an American farm, a Brazilian forestry site, or an African mining operation. These cycles of blame and escalation are incredibly dangerous, and it’s these types of cycles and feedback loops which we need to watch as closely as the immediate effects of our current pandemic and economic crisis.


Diverge Weekly Issue #4: The Cycles Issue


Last week, [I wrote about the balance of intervention and foresight](https://andrewlb.com/diverge-weekly-issue-2-the-global-pandemic-issue/) in a design-based response to the coronavirus pandemic, and closed with the William Gibson quote “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” We are all experiencing Covid-19 on different schedules and scales, with Italy being the most egregious case and with [America marching blindly into its wake](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/24/trump-wants-to-restart-economy-by-mid-april-146398). _This means that our individual construction of the future in this pandemic is relative to our own experience and belief about the future_ and that relativism is the focus of this week.

Here are three ways that I see this being constructed:

**1. An act of Apprehension**

I’m in Denmark right now and writing this on Saturday, March 21st. My wife, my one-year-old son, and I have been self-isolating for 10 days, as have many of our friends. We were early in preparing for this lockdown, and this apprehension is a judgement of risk relative to the array of possible futures at the point of decision, and making a “best guess” for which set of possibilities we should prepare. We might have felt pretty dumb pulling our son from daycare a few days early if things had turned out fine, but since [I’ve worked remotely for two years now](https://andrewlb.com/writing/remotework/) we had the right tools and support set up so that the cost of being wrong was effectively my son joining a few video meetings and my exhaustion. Ultimately, an act of apprehension can go either way and is a gamble on trying to position oneself along a more preferable future.

**2. An act of Mitigation**

Only yesterday, my university in the UK announced that they were closing the school and modifying distance courses: despite the fact that by percentage of the population, [the UK has a higher rate of cases than Denmark](https://cream.io/?m=tcpp&r=United%20States%2C-45&r=Italy%2C-35&r=South%20Korea%2C-31&r=Denmark%2C-45&r=United%20Kingdom%2C-45&s=log&z=3) – even with Denmark being in lockdown for over a week. As cases and deaths grow, [PM Johnson’s reactions have been compared to that of the Mayor in Jaws](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/20/coronavirus-myth-economy-uk-business-life-death), keeping the beach open for tourist season despite a murderous shark in its waters. Here then, our action and judgement is responsive to independent variables and driven by the same. Apprehension may drive our consumption of information, but the action of mitigation is only to offset the damage that is already being done.

**3. An act of Ignorance**

The most worrisome trends are where no action is being taken at all or the threat is seen as negligible. In Denmark, I was shocked to see folk pushing past each other while grocery shopping and the school closure being seen as an excuse to party, not shelter. This aligns with the stories of [American students congregating on beaches for spring break](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-51955362/us-students-party-on-spring-break-despite-coronavirus), or worse, [exposure by those attending the rallies of Brazilian president Bolsonaro](https://politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,bolsonaro-tem-contato-direto-com-ao-menos-272-pessoas-durante-ato-mostra-video,70003234397). This route is either willful or unintended: resulting from a dearth of information or — worst of all — given the information available, doing nothing or doing harm.

The problem with these three actions is that they reflect an inflection point that is being considered by everyone: informed by their lived experience, their state of mind, societal pressures, and access to resources. My decision to self-isolate 10 days ago might have occurred at the same moment in time as someone’s decision that spring break was a great idea.

But these decisions and actions have a vital influence on our future and the outcomes we march towards. Design futurist Stuart Candy is well known for his Cone of Possibility, a rendering of the present squeezing a series of potential futures through its aperture. The question is: when does the future catch up and which set of actions lead us to what is preferable?

![](/assets/d6002187139aebae1ee9dc809213a5e65e7916a2-1180x1062.png)

If we’re looking at the longer tail of this crisis, apprehension, mitigation, and ignorance might not be all that different in terms of collective outcomes, but they ARE decisions that we make. This pandemic is a collective action problem: individual actions might offset or buffer one from the worst (or in the case of the spring breakers, drastically increase their own and others’ risk), the aggregate outcome is still likely to be the same. But then the question is, at what scale?

If individual action is smoothed over from the lens of the aggregate action or inaction of others, then I would argue that the route to designing an intervention is to _identify the scale and scope of intervention_ so that one's actions have an outsized effect. Is it the country? The state? The community? The family?

Consider [the open source community’s effort to expand access to life-saving ventilators](https://github.com/PubInv/covid19-vent-list). We don’t actually know yet if this work will do anything particularly productive, but it is a fervent and well-organized effort to try and do something with the scope that one has. [There are dangers and risks](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm4mb/people-are-trying-to-make-diy-ventilators-to-meet-coronavirus-demand), but perhaps the communal contribution at the appropriate scope can cover that, and perhaps this can multiply the impact at a local level in communities with maker spaces or universities.

While we may be trapped at a point in a cone hurtling towards a future we can’t really comprehend, I’d argue that we — designers and design-adjacent creators engaged in a practice that is fundamentally participatory — are incredibly well situated to identify our scope of impact and organize around it. Design might not have a “seat at the table” (I hate this term so, so much) when it comes to policy-decisions right now, but we can contribute and organize locally.

Look to [Zahra Ebrahim’s Covid-19 Toronto app](https://covidto.glideapp.io/) and the [google doc that she coordinated to bring it all together](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IAn2bwZeYj2Oy9TdGCO8wB3w3lv3wnLMpyzEYFfWDI/edit). As a leader in Toronto’s design community, she turned to her network to identify the needs and resources of her home, but with a designer’s person-centered bias created something of real value.

Zahra’s work might shift Toronto’s future in a particular way, and if that process can be replicated ten thousand fold around the world, our family, community, state, country, and civilizational outcomes will be so much better.

If the future isn’t evenly distributed, how might we distribute the right future more evenly?

On that note, my wife and I [created a very bleak, no-fun game to try and predict and prepare for potential futures](https://andrewlb.com/covid-anxiety/) this past weekend. It’s a **simulator and scenario generator for what might come —for you, specifically— in this pandemic**. Despite being a game, as my description of our first play-through indicates, the results were exhausting (but useful). I encourage you to give it a try.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/36fd0fcfbbf7f6b64f7064c2207abdf86d0e6241-550x305.jpg)

[**How Coronavirus Scammers Hide On Facebook And YouTube**](https://www.bellingcat.com/news/rest-of-world/2020/03/19/how-coronavirus-scammers-hide-on-facebook-and-youtube/)

The rise of large scale, low cost, multi-actor, and wildly decentralized disinformation campaigns is one of the greatest security threats of our present era. Why? They frustrate meaningful engagement in collective action problems like a national political process or — just by way of example — global pandemics. They do this to the point of paralysis. Bellingcat paints a striking picture of what I believe is **one of the greatest design failures of the 21st century**: the capacity for contemporary disinformation campaigns (and individual actors) to permeate and diffuse the major social networking platforms that so eagerly embraced human-centered design in their inception and growth. I’m inclined to believe that the various platforms _are_ trying to do better (perhaps not so far as good), but assuming this, their inability to effectively combat disinformation is telling.


Diverge Weekly Issue #3: The Uncertainty Issue


This past week we’ve seen the “exponential” part of exponential growth hit the world like a tidal wave. Markets have dipped, businesses are scrambling, and the people that constitute both are unsure of what’s coming.

What we’ve seen with this global crisis is a failure in planning, and for those of us who are designers, planning is our business. At its core, **Design is a time-delayed activity**: one where we engage with people and systems to plot out a path to a better future using artifacts and experiences. In this pandemic, we’re instead seeing a reversion. Far from having planned redundancies and designed for resiliency, we’re instead facing the stark fragility of a system co-designed with agents of unchecked growth and profit.

In this definition of design, we have two key components: foresight and intervention.

**Foresight** asks: what is needed in the future? Why do we believe this? What needs to happen for that to exist? What else might happen? On a systemic and world-spanning extreme, the peak of this practice is in world-building fiction. Books like [Max Brooks’ World War Z](https://amzn.to/2TR3O9Z) and [Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest](https://amzn.to/33jAs79) both take a worldly and step-by-step approach to exploring human behaviour and outcomes given distinct conditions: for World War Z, a global zombie pandemic; and for the Dark Forest, an impending apocalypse and humanity’s instinct to flee, fight, or simply give up.

For the nearer term, the designer has a host of tools available, from [card games like those created by Near Future Lab](https://nearfuturelaboratory.myshopify.com/products/design-fiction-product-design-work-kit) for generating scenarios, and structured “gap-filling” tools like [backcasting](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249060842_Backcasting_-_A_framework_for_for_strategic_planning) to map the pathway to the preferable outcomes. But at best, foresight samples and extrapolates from the potential territories that we march toward, and informs the context and constraints of our design activities.

On the other end is **intervention**. With the current coronavirus outbreak, the rhetorical focus has very much been on POLICY interventions: how can we wield the apparatus of states to tackle a [collective action problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem) like a global pandemic? For examples of this discussion, [there’s a great episode of Vox’s The Weeds](https://megaphone.link/VMP2383267901) on the American policy response, and [Vox’s global affairs podcast Worldly has an additional North American-centric exploration of outcomes and implications as well](https://megaphone.link/VMP2017093543).

But we’re also seeing an active response in how design engages with the crisis. As Malcom McCullough points out in his book Digital Ground, “The success of a design is arrived at socially.” Across China —an already incredibly sophisticated and integrated surveillance state— software serves to mitigate, inform, but also surveil. [Chinese public-private partnerships have led to a colour-code based access system to public space](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/china-coronavirus-surveillance.html), with quite legitimate concerns for social acceptance of surveillance post-pandemic. A state’s over-reach might seem prudent in a crisis, but what provisions are in place to revert once the crisis has passed? [We don’t always get Cincinnatus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus), after all.

South Korea is taking a similar intervention with a different implementation — [free drive through testing in your car with a simple text-message based notification of your results](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/13/815441078/south-koreas-drive-through-testing-for-coronavirus-is-fast-and-free) which allows testing infrastructure to be incredibly lightweight in a country where two-thirds of people own a car. In other words, we are seeing “crisis architecture” churn through society once more: the [modular hospitals in Wuhan](https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/china-building-1000-bed-hospital-over-the-weekend-to-treat-coronavirus) being in the same family as [the post-9/11 segmentation of America’s airports](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-32-design-for-airports/).

Clearly, design has a role in this crisis, but how does the individual designer engage? The most useless thing I’ve read about the coronavirus was this [list of how design thinking is going to save us from coronavirus](https://fortune.com/2020/01/28/the-coronavirus-problem-could-be-solved-by-design-thinking/). If you’re a “design thinker” only asking these questions now, you’ve already failed. The examples in China and South Korea are an adaptive strategy with an adaptive design to a fast-moving crisis that came from either excellent foresight activities (taking a more strategic approach) or simply learning the hard way (the more intuitive approach). As such, the context for an appropriate design to emerge, succeed and hopefully obviate its utility already exists, as we’re already seeing with the [1000 bed hospital in Wuhan being disassembled](https://archpaper.com/2020/03/wuhan-shutters-all-temporary-hospitals-covid-19-risk-dissipates/).

As we collectively weather this pandemic, the thing we should recognize is that **foresight without intervention is simply speculation, and intervention without foresight is** [**naive at best**](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22453746) **and** [**incredibly harmful at worst**](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/12/814876173/coronavirus-trump-speech-creates-chaos-eu-says-it-wasnt-warned-of-travel-ban). As those working in or adjacent to design, we have a responsibility to look ahead: both systematically using the tools of our trade, and ambiently by absorbing information globally and from many sources.

Be safe and be generous. Finally, look after yourself now, because like everyone’s favourite William Gibson quote, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” [Just as China is finding itself able to respond to Italy’s needs](https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/coronavirus-china-sends-medical-aid-to-spain-and-italy) because of how it handled its own spike in infections, we all might be in a position to help others depending on where we are in our own infection curve.

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/63a170eb9964bdad3bc841c542edbd5dc543237b-1180x787.jpg)

[**Islamic State Advice on Coronavirus Pandemic**](http://www.aymennjawad.org/2020/03/islamic-state-advice-on-coronavirus-pandemic)

A newsletter to ISIS members, translated by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a researcher focused on the Syrian civil war. As objectively evil as the Islamic State is, it is still an organization that has to look after its members and do what organizations do: communicate, align, and act. Some of the language in the newsletter is pretty interesting from that lens and a good cue for how these kind of societal threats get translated across orgs and cultures.


Diverge Weekly Issue #2: The Global Pandemic Issue


For most of my adult life, my country (one of them anyway, being a dual citizen between the US and Canada) [has been at war somewhere else in the world](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2020/02/war-afghanistan-2001-invasion-2020-taliban-deal-200229142658305.html). But the experience of that war for American civilians was often ambiguous or bureaucratic, not tactile or kinetic.

Recently, the announced agreement between the Taliban and the US has been a sign that this defining conflict is drawing to a close, [but many unknowns remain](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/03/04/on-afghanistan-give-peace-a-chance-but-be-wary-of-the-taliban/). Foremost amongst these concerns is how negotiations with the existing Afghan government will go (as they are not part of the US/Taliban negotiations). And the bigger question: what will happen to the rights and access that many Afghans have fought to establish amongst conflict, but outside of the Taliban’s day-to-day control.

Afghan women have particularly led these social changes, and have a lot to worry about with an unshackled Taliban. [While impressive strides have been made in women’s leadership](https://giwps.georgetown.edu/a-new-generation-of-afghan-women-leaders/), it’s often overlooked that the [status of women in Afghanistan had been progressive](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/womens-rights-afghanistan-history) prior to the Soviet-led coup in 1978. This event sparked the formation of an insurgent Mujihadeen and the eventual rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, and with their rise, the persecution of and restrictions on women they enforced. A rehydrated Taliban power in Afghanistan might mean that much of what women have fought for in the past decades will be repressed again, and those women and men who have led that fight will face retaliation.

Consider this in the context of the impressive design work emerging from Afghanistan — both tangible products and services supporting people. I want to draw attention to [The Anabah Maternity Center](https://aquietrevolution.emergency.it/#/introduction) as a bright spot in how vital service delivery — in this case reproductive care — in Afghanistan is meeting both the health and cultural needs of those it serves. Originally created and supported by the Italian nonprofit Emergency, [the site has really grown into something led and operated by women serving the needs of their own community](https://brightthemag.com/health-women-maternity-afghanistan-security-da7a37b8e0bd). In a country where the female working population is (and will be) recovering from years of repression, we can celebrate the design and implementation of a healthcare system led and staffed solely by women. They support other women who otherwise wouldn’t have any healthcare options because of patriarchal and religious barriers.

Good design doesn’t always come from those trained in design practices, but rather can emerge where a human-centered disposition comes together with a systems-oriented mindset and an inclination to make something tangible. Design training and a tested process certainly facilitate and make repeatable that emergence, but as designers, we can take a lot of inspiration from instances like Anabah: where its planners and operators performed great service design in the absence of a service designer.

That’s it for this week. As always, I’d encourage you to subscribe if you haven’t and [send me a note](mailto:alb@andrewlb.com) if you have questions or feedback!

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/63a2720be55566b9404bf30c7bcf9add91e2c329-1098x732.jpg)

[**Google denies link to China’s military over touch-screen tools that may help PLA pilots**](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3017141/google-denies-link-chinas-military-over-touch-screen-tools-may)

An interesting look at how consumer UX expectations bleed into critical military and defense applications. Having been a product designer at the Pentagon myself, I can generally say that the state of military UX is pretty dismal EXCEPT for when it is mission-critical. In a culture obsessed with Job Boyd’s OODA loop, speed and efficiency for warfighters is a strong argument. Seeing how that is playing out in other militaries, I wonder if UX will become yet another front in great power competition.


Diverge Weekly Issue #1: The Afghan Peace Talk Issue


With the coronavirus probably hitching a ride in one of your co-workers, it’s possible that your work (especially if you exist in that oh-so-nebulous world of knowledge work) is implementing a more permissive remote work policy.

Many of you will think “I can’t do that.” Many of you might be right, since a lot of very real, outcome-driving work happens in the interstitial space between “actual work” and socializing. But I would suggest that there is a balance to be struck that will allow you to work remotely or mostly remotely, thereby reducing your risk of exposure (or at least [flattening the curve](https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/6/21161234/coronavirus-covid-19-science-outbreak-ends-endemic-vaccine) so that local healthcare systems don’t get overwhelmed).

![](/assets/9e2f148cb1ca3cfcdc2ec65c1b7b1e1fa387ae37-600x356.jpg)

I’ve been working mostly remotely since mid 2017, when I realized with a bit of a shock that the fellowship I had accepted was for a remote team. Turns out it works out well, but oh my god, was the learning curve painful. Currently, I work mostly remotely as a product manager, a job that I would not have guessed would fit that mode.

So here are a few tips on the remote work thing, with the goal of inspiring you to give it a try.

## Create an Accountability Structure

This is the biggest thing and also should be table stakes. Some folk have intense internalized accountability, and they might just get the work done because of fear, pride, whatever. I’m not one of those. I am both very goal-oriented and very exploration-motivated, so I’ll work frantically and gleefully, but my attention will turn on a dime without some accountability structure to keep it in place.

For me, what I found worked best was consistent deadlines and dramatic transparency about responsibilities. Every week I broadcast to the team my goals, deadlines, and expected outcomes as a baseline, and then run my team’s product specific standup. I also keep a lot of documentation. 90% of that isn’t read until it’s needed, or not at all, but the act of documenting helps makes things concrete, and it’s a motivator for me knowing its done and making it public to the team. Currently, I run the documentation with Notion, where I keep everything from year-scoped strategy, to feature specs and data models, to weekly notes and to-do lists.

## Over Communicate, but Not Like That

Language by itself is low bandwidth. The reason why face-to-face meetings are so vital is that trust is built through being in the room, showing openness, communicating physically, demonstrating emotion, taking risk, etc. There’s a lot communicated outside of just words. Unfortunately, one of those things might be coronavirus. So let’s compromise.

You can work remotely and still have high bandwidth communication. _What you shouldn’t do is be a sociopath on Slack_. Not everything needs to be liked, but communication and requests DO need to be acknowledged. Not everyone needs to see the gif, but sometimes a gif drives the point home. Basically, focus on the quality of your communication and the context that it creates, instead of becoming a one-human version of the PRC’s surveillance state.

A concrete example: your team’s engineer shares what she just pushed to staging, asking for feedback. You acknowledge and give a timeframe for feedback, so expectations are set. Somewhere in that time period, give it a look. Instead of just rambling off feedback in slack, make a list. Open a notes application (I use BearApp) or your issue tracking software, and make a list of what you’re seeing. Maybe take some screenshots, maybe record a screencast of a bug. Copy and paste your feedback (or links to the feedback) into a slack thread responding to the request, and tag the engineer in your response so she knows that the feedback is there. Probably you’ll have a discussion about it. Probably everything will move on easily.

In this case, the communication is focused, high quality, but also flexible enough to respond to the needs of the problem and is pretty damn fast. When so much of communication is performance, the thing you need to be “performing” when working remotely is competence and a focus on outcomes.

## Take Your Damn Breaks and Put On Some Pants

![](/assets/34240773fa538c1c9af02a21ef9c320db5d62398-1080x608.jpg)

Me casually on my way to the officeOnce you get used to working remotely and find your stride, it can be very, very easy to suddenly wake up on the other side of the day with a brilliantly demolished to-do list, but no clothes and a hole where lunch was supposed to be.

I love the experience of being so engrossed in making something, I don’t even notice time and the world passing by. That’s gotten a bit less desirable now that I’m a parent (because I want to be spending that time with my son, frankly), but nonetheless it can be great feeling if you like and value your work. However, it can also be unhealthy and unsustainable.

When colocated with other workers (i.e. in an office), there is rarely continuous flow. You get up, you stretch, you get coffee, you run an errand, you get pulled into a brainstorm, you chat with a colleague about their weekend, you play foosball, you get your ass handed to you because you grew up in Canada without a foosball table and why are all the European designers so absurdly good at this game and ugh whatever. The work day has its core of work, but this core is supported by the daily conversations, rituals, and inefficiencies that being human brings with it.

Some folk use things like Pomodoro or “stand up” reminders to keep themselves on track. I occasionally use a countdown clock called a Time Timer if I need to do something that I desperately don’t want to do, but just needs to get done. It’s like a time prison. But mostly, I wouldn’t do that. Maybe set a reminder for yourself if you find you missed lunch once or twice. Make a point of getting up to get water, or treating yourself to lunch outside of the house. The point is to create rituals and habits, so that healthy breaks from your work are not only consistent but also so obvious as to be practically invisible.

## Be Aware of Dead Reckoning

![](/assets/619d1136cb7ae36ce3e7478d0281bb97212b4f0c-1180x488.png)

Things slip. It’s just how it goes. With every decision, and action, a little bit of error is introduced into the system. With each subsequent action, a little bit more error is introduced, and over time, these errors compound and you’re not where you thought you were.

This is the essence of dead reckoning: a navigation technique that takes your previous position and estimates your current position based off of speed, travel time, etc. Except every position determined from dead reckoning is an estimate, not the truth. And so to reduce the error on that estimate, we need a way of identifying that “truth.” This cuts across the two big risks of remote work: 1) alignment with your team and stakeholders, and 2) actual delivery of value when outside of a co-located accountability structure.

When we work outside of the co-located office, we lose the ease with which alignment can happen on a team working towards a common goal. This alignment certainly isn’t always correct, but it’s easier for the team mindset to take over. When working remotely, it’s easy to look at a low-bandwidth message on Slack or Microsoft Teams (which is terrible) and infer alignment from shared language used. But the mental model that you and your other conversant might hold can diverge pretty wildly, and lacking the added nuance of higher bandwidth modes of communication (like face-to-face, or as I like to call it, corona-close) the signal that you’re actually misaligned might not show up until it is too late. As a general rule, any time someone says “Great, we’re aligned on that” I take a minute to spell out exactly what it is that I’m doing next.

## Be Kind To Yourself

Finally, be kind to yourself and others who are trying remote work for the first time. It’s not going to be for everyone. It might suck, it might be awesome, but it’ll absolutely be different. Give yourself space to fail the first month or two, and be open about what’s working and not working with your colleagues. Please extend the same generosity of spirit to them as well, and experiment with different tools, processes, and similar until you find something that sticks. With my current team, we’ve been through three different tools and several rounds of iteration before we hit something that really feels comfortable.

Ultimately, this need to work remotely is coming from an inherent fragility in our existing ways of working. Flatter organizations and open office environments can certainly lead to a stronger network effect and more co-creation within organizations, but it also gets you Gweneth Paltrow in Contagion (which I’m guessing was cross-marketing for Goop?).

So I hope this helps. Don’t go too far down the productivity rabbit hole, but rather be reflective, be communicative, and be kind to yourself.

Also, if you’re looking for more on design and global affairs (like Coronavirus), subscribe to my newsletter [Diverge Weekly](https://divergeweekly.com/), where we explore how design emerges around the world and how design impacts issues of health, security, trade, and climate.

Also wash your goddamn hands.

![](/assets/cb0c693685826df5a996175ca092a0235dbd8620-500x231.gif)


On Remote Work and the Coronavirus


Welcome to the “preview” issue of Diverge Weekly, a weekly look at systemic design around the world. This is the first issue, the preview that was used for prototyping and testing the idea. You may not have gotten this in your inbox, but if you did, thank you for helping make this happen!

To start, this newsletter is an investigation and roundup of the role that design might play in international affairs.

This week, we’re seeing the global spread of COVID-19, or Coronavirus, to the Middle East and beyond. New cases popping up in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Oman, Qatar, and around the world, cases in the Americas and Europe are causing alarm. Pandemics make visible much of what we believe and how we behave around systemic uncertainty, and often these behaviours manifest through artifacts tied to sickness. Face masks and hand sanitizer clipped to bags are two artifacts I’ve seen here in Copenhagen, [though the former is perhaps more a totem than something with real utility](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/2/6/21124979/wuhan-coronavirus-face-masks-hoarding). The real question is whether our focus on totems might [serve to exacerbate the crisis if we hit a certain tipping point](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-face-masks.html): yet another object designed for one catalyzing negative outcomes for many.

In the United States, the democratic presidential primaries are in full swing, with Senator Bernie Sanders emerging as a frontrunner with a message focused around [Medicare for All](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/upshot/medicare-for-all-basics-bernie-sanders.html). For many of us who have experienced universal healthcare systems (in my case, Canada and Denmark), the discussion around a need for continued healthcare reform in the US is exciting and overdue. Good design and good experiences should not only be for the wealthy, and neither should good health care.

[The ongoing battle for Idlib](https://www.aljazeera.com/topics/events/idlib-battle-syria.html) in Syria presents a less hopeful lens. Already a humanitarian disaster with countless refugees having fled to Idlib, the convergence of Russian-backed Pro-Assad forces and Turkish forces (both militia and actual military) has exacerbated their plight. From a design perspective, the ubiquitous UNHCR tent has been used [as cover by pro-Assad forces](https://twitter.com/TitusMichaeleus/status/1184867339331919872) to disguise their forces against the [onslaught of Turkish airstrikes](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200301-turkey-destroys-scores-of-syrian-army-targets-incl-airport-air-defences-and-tanks/). The subversion of humanitarian objects for military maneuvers is nothing new, but given the humanitarian catastrophe using the symbols of the oppressed as cover is horrifying.

This is the prototype newsletter, so please [let us know what you think](mailto:alb@andrewlb.com) and I’m looking forward to building something you enjoy reading every week!

## Security Blanket

![](/assets/2ffd9b9ea5ab387e9b6ed429bd0911e00ac691e7-1330x850.jpg)

[**How to train your AI soldier robots (and the humans who command them) - war on the rocks**](https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/how-to-train-your-ai-soldier-robots-and-the-humans-who-command-them/)

WOTR has been publishing weekly articles on artificial intelligence and defense. These articles have proven to be an interesting lens into the American defense establishment and the way that academics, officers, and acquisitions professionals are thinking about an emergent technology and the people who operate them.


Diverge Weekly Issue #0: The Prototype

Failing States Fail Terrorists Too


I wrote a rudimentary python script to bulk import your Audible library to Goodreads. I’ll caveat with a statement: this is still pretty manual, but it automates the parts that are most time consuming. Overall, it shouldn’t take more than 5min to get your whole audible library into Goodreads. Then maybe just re-run the process every few months.

[You can view the script here](https://gist.github.com/readywater/b71c11428a151654474cdb673756319e)

## Get Your Audible Data

It procedurally builds off of another script that [exports your audible library](https://www.themodernnomad.com/audible-statistics-extractor/) , which is required to get it working. To run this script, [visit your audible library](https://www.audible.com/lib?purchaseDateFilter=all&programFilter=all&sortBy=PURCHASE_DATE.dsc&pageSize=50) and run the script on each page by hitting command-option J to open your console (in Chrome and most other browsers), and run this script (which is just a minified version of the [one linked above](https://www.static-18.themodernnomad.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Audible-ScreenScraperJanuary2019.txt))

[Link to script](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/readywater/b71c11428a151654474cdb673756319e/raw/02f4e875aa1e55986c6e08a9dffd818bd7d92163/minified_audible_table_generator.js)

This will grab your library and turn the page into an html table. You can then easily select all on this table and paste it into google sheets or excel. Make sure to remove the repeated header data, but keep the top line.

You need to do this **for each page** of the library, so if you have 50+ books, simply go through each. Save the output; you can keep the file in an excel format or export to CSV.

## Convert the Data into a Goodreads Format

From here, you’ll want to run [the python script](https://gist.github.com/readywater/b71c11428a151654474cdb673756319e). Save the file to whatever directly you’ve stored your audible spreadsheet and open your terminal. On Mac, do this by typing command space and writing terminal in the spotlight search.

Before running the script, you’ll want to change two things. Open then python script and change line 17: df = pd.read_excel(r’/path/to/the/saved/excel.xlsx’) to the path to your file and line 35: df.to_csv(r’/path/to/export/audible-goodreads-import.csv’) to your export CSV format.

Then simply run py audible-goodreads-import.py in terminal, and you should get a file output with the CSV.

From there, simply [go to your goodread account’s import page](https://www.goodreads.com/review/import) and follow the import instructions.

It will import and update current read status, ratings, correct ISBN, and add it to an “audible” bookshelf.

## Next steps

Hopefully this serves to compliment other solutions out there, or as a starting point for someone who wants to put together a better solution for non-technical folk.

If you encounter bugs or improve the script somehow, please leave a comment below or in the [GitHub gist](https://gist.github.com/readywater/b71c11428a151654474cdb673756319e). If this works out for folk, I might put together something a bit more automated and a bit more user friendly eventually, but for a quick script thrown together while watching [Next in Fashion](https://www.netflix.com/dk-en/title/81026300), this works nicely.


Import your Audible Library to Goodreads


I have an affinity for jackets and bags. The two central functions to protect and to carry somehow stand out in my mind as being what this whole clothing endeavour is about. In the quest for a more perfect bag and a more perfect jacket, I’ve tried many form factors and materials. However, somewhere along the line this search evolved into more of a collection than a solution.

Taking stock of this jackets collection, I realised that many hadn’t been worn in some time and the same could be said for the rest of my wardrobe. I have my most comfortable quotidian wears, but a lot of the clothing that had inspired me up to the point of acquisition wasn’t being used according to that aspiration or inspiration.

Further, despite my attempts at the Marie Kondo approach (which definitely works), I’d hit a point of diminishing return. I really like the clothes that I have, though I suffer a bit from the [Blokewear](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/fashion-and-style/11432284/Blokewear-the-clothes-men-love-that-women-hate.html) thing between Engineered Garments’s infinity pockets and Acronym nerdy functionality. They fit an acquired, developed, or aspired style most times; they were mostly of a quality that was worth preserving and repairing vs. replacing; and sometimes there was even an emotional connection or story tied to them. So another option was needed.

## A More Perfect Closet

The digital closet is a trope that I’ve seen quite a bit from the tangible interface/new media world, not to mention the genius that is [Clueless](https://youtu.be/XNDubWJU0aU). What if computers could help us look good with what we have (though software business models being what they are, our wardrobes would likely balloon), and make the inferences and connections between different pieces of clothing for us. No need for colour coordinating, fit experiments, or quotidian creativity.

![](/assets/fef95b056e742a031524b621d0b25195e2e89c45-500x281.gif)

Elsewhere in my life, I’d been using different tools that “automated” the creative and planning side of personal fitness. Strava and TrainingPeaks both have scaling training plans that tie into your phone and your Garmin, effectually offloading the responsibility to plan and personalize. But I’ve come to believe this was creating an intellectual weakness in how I approached maintaining the body. When a training plan ended, or if I got knocked off it somehow by work, a cold, or travel, the return to that curated path felt unnatural. Despite the exhaustive metrics surrounding me, I didn’t know how I got there, so I didn’t know how (or why) to continue.

More recently, I’ve been using plans from the MT Institute, which just come as a weekly list of “Do this.” There’s no tracking or technical sophistication: their app is basically just a text document with a password with a few links to youtube videoes for how to do certain exercises. It was infuriating at first. But because of that friction, it has forced a planning and engagement with my fitness that I haven’t had in years. Somewhat naturally by extension, I started to learn the how and why of getting somewhere and keeping going.

![](/assets/a8e47e8a7e87c759d6e30a46f260e2cc2f2a5f62-225x400.jpg)

The MT Institute App

This relates to my wardrobe because the fabric we wrap ourselves in serves to work a kind of daily muscle. In some ways, we are incredibly constrained. We have a limited wardrobe, filtered through biases and the influence of media and the social scenes that we came to age in, to address a specific set of needs around environmental (rain, temperature), cultural (formality and clique), and personal conditions (mood, aspiration, functional exigencies).

But in other ways, it is incredibly liberating. It presents a daily opportunity for creativity, exploration, and novelty with the things that we already own, that are being created seasonally, or that others have left behind in the case of vintage. With all the cultural weight that goes into forging a particular piece of clothing — anatomy, cultural context, history, material requirements, cost requirements, style, and similar — there’s the daily opportunity for something new to emerge.

Despite having that opportunity (and me more than many with my absurd jacket collection), why wasn’t I working that muscle? I felt there might be a hint in the three things that these text-based training plans were giving me: productive friction, a need for planning, and additive practice. So I’m doing an experiment.

## Getting Organized

I’ve thankfully had a fair bit of experience working across different tools for project management. Everything from spreadsheets to Basecamp to Trello to Podio were potential options. I’d been aware of Notion for a while (mostly via a constant stream of Medium posts about either going to Notion and never looking back, or leaving notion and looking back in sadness), and from the ambient knowledge I had about it suggested that it might be a good option.

While my understanding of what Notion could do was pretty loose, the core of it seemed to be relational databases (data referencing other datas) with a handful of configurable views into that data: from table to spreadsheet to graph. Without thinking about it too hard, this felt like a good starting point.

Think about how you structure a wardrobe. You have lots of different types of clothing, all of which fulfill usually one or two functions. They have different properties to them: some are warm, others are waterproof, some are both. Some are made of leather, others of synthetic fabrics, still others of cotton. Some are blue, others gray, others black (at least in my case). So one can broadly generalize “clothing” as something with properties that serves to shield some part of your body. Of course, there are other things. Shoes, accessories, bags, etc. We’ll get to that.

In general though, an outfit ends up being some combination of those pieces of clothing, plus some of the other things. That combination is most fundamentally constrained by the cultural and physical environment, and what you have available. Then you get the next level down: constraints emerging from ones own taste and context — where did you learn to dress yourself? And then you get additional constraints emerging from the combinations with contrast, clashing, and complementary mixes coming up across variables of colour, fit, material, and so on.

Ultimately, no system that I put together in an afternoon is going to replace a sense of style and intuition, but maybe I could make something that productively augments what I already have. So I set out to accomplish a few things:

**Creative**

- To visualize or summarize how a set of things might look together without “going searching”
- To surface clothes not being worn so as to wear more pieces more consistently in combinations I hadn’t tried before
- To save the combinations I knew worked, and track the ones that don’t

**Practical**

- To be able to “schedule” what I was going to wear in advance (i.e. put things out for the next day as part of my other evening responsibilities)
- To track frequency of wears across the different pieces of clothes
- To track what I need to repair, tailor, or clean more effectively.

Understanding Notion as I did, I believed that the relationships would loosely look like:

1. Item (with properties)
2. Several Collections of Items (Aggregation of properties)
3. Schedule of Collections (Record of Use)

So I set out to implement it.

## Using Notion

**Clothing** Using Notion to realize the initial vision was simple. At its most basic, Notion’s data manifests as a table or text. I started by creating a list of as much as I could from memory (mostly jackets and sweaters), and then filling that into the spreadsheet. From there, I started to fill out the properties (i.e. columns) that made sense. Name, photo, tags, size, colour. Then more subjective things, like fit and potentially style: things that I could search by. This first part set up, I went full Mari Kondo on my closet, getting everything out and photographing the lot against a white(ish) background.

![](/assets/d621e88d8675917fb85a34a74328db2af7d4136a-2792x1800.png)

Spreadsheet of Clothes

This was the project of an afternoon, quietly accomplished during my son’s naps and an hour my wife was able to buy me. After I got everything in the database (all clothes, shoes, and bags anyway), I started to explore setting them up as separate views and creating the relational structure that would define the “outfit” idea.

![](/assets/755c01091bc05cc6609161263b2a484be961b414-2880x1800.png)

Too Many Jackets

**Outfit** The outfit is where things didn’t quite work as I wanted. Structurally, it’s relatively simple — just a matter of creating relationships to the different Clothing items. This ends up looking something like this, with a few variables that help with filtering and a photo for reference.

![](/assets/27498cadfe42178e7f8179f500d9b2b7058871d5-928x1366.png)

Model of an Outfit

Then, when browsing, I can view the individual outfits with a description and a focus on the jacket.

![](/assets/9cf386ffbd6b6974b36caf09b0dd66a98ff38b6b-704x590.png)

Thumbnail of an Outfit

In this case, I would frame this part as the “Productive Friction” component. Before I was just collecting data and constraints, now this is combining these pieces into a greater whole that (hopefully) works out.

Though this solution is “good enough” for now, I can’t wait for Notion to develop an API to query these objects and relationships directly, or to programatically establish filters. Basically, my ideal would be to create a collection of items with tags, and then have those items laid out in a gallery so I could see them visually. As it stands, there’s still a bit too much friction. Additionally, the actual selection of a relationship is a bit cumbersome with the naming scheme that I developed.

The manual way to do this is to create a view for a table, and then filter according to relationships. Unfortunately, since those filters can’t be assigned to a variable, the whole thing has to be done manually (as far as I know). The ideal would be to pass in a series of properties to the view that could manipulate the filter, but here we are.

![](/assets/e854e76d3ec1ec518a6ee591ef7d84c9ea9517e1-2190x1402.png)

A Single Outfit

**Calendar** Finally, actually making a day-to-day decision is tied to seeing those combinations and those other external needs. In other words, the need for planning. Filtering by the relevant constraint is the key here, organizing by one axis and filtering by another. I can take a look at the options and what I need for the day and make decisions on the margins.

![](/assets/d76436e8d38eec95adbb2a4a890efe6a6a2313ea-1632x1664.png)

Filter View

Calendaring is usable but a bit inefficient. This is an example of the past few days to test out this whole idea. Unfortunately, Notion lacks integration with Google calendar, so the calendar view itself ends up being quite limited.

![](/assets/5cef8b0954bcb30674abf9cdd83957b9a7e2f8ea-2128x1040.png)

What was useful (again, an API would be better) was filtering calendars by day, and then adding the view inline as shown below. This allows a trivial dashboard to be created, though again, it’s not particularly useful without a way to dig into the relations. The other frustrating piece is that these views seem to “reset” depending on other navigation you do within the database.

![](/assets/9e8caeba720c5c81c323c03b2dc8240872b7e343-2880x1642.png)

Dashboard View

**Conclusion** Notion is a pretty impressive tool. It’s a great way to create content and build up something data-driven pretty quickly. Ultimately, it got me a lot further than I expected, but if the [Notion public API wasn’t already a critical part of their roadmap](https://www.notion.so/Does-Notion-have-an-API-I-can-use-4541b07a5caa46dba0026624646118c0), I would probably be trying to figure out how to export all this work and build a small custom solution.

End of the day, a custom solution would be better, but as a catch all tool for personal organization or project management (eg. You can see in the screenshot that I’m also using Notion to plan and track these posts), I’m pretty happy.

## Getting to Outcomes

Technical details of how I’m approaching this aside, does it actually work?

I’m not sure yet. I’ve worn colours and individual pieces over the past few days which I haven’t touched in months. One pair of shoes had to be dusted off (though thankfully I’d taken good care of them previously). So only a few days in, I do feel like it is having an impact.

My hope is to follow this pattern for a little while. This is where the additive practice part comes into play. A decade ago, I followed blogs like the [The Sartorialist](https://www.thesartorialist.com/) and [FaceHunter](http://www.facehunter.org/), but never understood quite how someone got from where I was to where some of the repeat subjects on those blogs found themselves. Now, I don’t feel that same need, but I do want to use what I have for the greatest utility and the greatest fun. In this case, it means the goal is to reduce my sense of decision fatigue and increase the variability and interest in what I wear. So I’ll practice. I’ll follow this post up in a few weeks or months with the outcomes.


A More Intentional Wardrobe


2019 has been a weird combination of my most exhausting, fulfilling, chaotic, and structured year to date. Midway through 2018, I decided that I wouldn’t share anything until it was “done”, or at least passed a significant milestone. So while I usually don’t write posts like this, this year felt worth the reflection.

## Four Changes

Four big life changes happened this year, mostly set up in 2018.

First, and most importantly, my son Emil joined us. Writing this, he’s eight months and two weeks old. He’s trying to figure out how to stand, can put himself to sleep, and the teeth are attempting to come through.

Second, I created [Knowsi](https://knowsi.com/), a small SaaS business to manage informed consent in research. You can sign up for a free account if you use consent forms in your work.

Third, I started a (part-time) graduate program in International Security Studies at the University of Leicester. This is mostly inspired by my experience at the New America fellowship and at the Pentagon.

Fourth, I survived the fall, where all three of these came together with my consulting practice. Initially that survival was mostly a function of an unequal workload between myself and my wife, so not exactly sustainable or fair.

## The Baby – Emil

![](/assets/452ecb4a6e72228ef7b81c232d417b1c3e71cc1b-4032x3024.jpg)

In the summer of 2018, I was back in the US for a few weeks and had just walked out of my NREMT exam when I called Ayla to tell her I’d passed. On the topic of positive test results, she shared that she was pregnant and everything started to shift. The remainder of that year became one of preparing for something neither of us really understood: in our bodies; our identities; our relationship to work, to the world, to each other, and to the son we hadn’t yet met.

Emil showed up on April 10th, 2019 at our home in Frederiksberg. For all the classes and reading and discussions of the previous months, I wasn’t even close to prepared. Since he’s arrived, every week has been different and every week forces something new learned.

With some planning and savings, I was able to take three plus months of paternity leave. In this whirlwind of diapers and family visits, I learned a bit about how caring for Emil manifested as action: changing a diaper, giving him a bath, checking if he’s warm enough, making sure he’s fed (the first few times the confused look he gave me was incredible), rewatching the baby heimlich on YouTube for the 12th time. Cumulatively these little acts have started to paint a picture of fatherhood for me that I want to build upon — parenthood as a craft. Any craft requires practice and introspection and that’s been (more than anything else) the past eight and a half months.

Ultimately, I think this means taking the quotidian parts of parenthood incredibly seriously. Little actions done frequently build up over time, and so those little actions will contribute to who he becomes. But as important are the intuitions acquired after doing something many, many times, and using those intuitions to deal with the unknown and the unpredictable. We’ll see how this theory of parenthood changes, but at least for now this is the model I’m working with.

## The Product – Knowsi

![](/assets/d88f0091e52655c12e56f6c4072f10ae6e5c22f8-5000x3333.png)

[Knowsi](https://knowsi.com/) emerged from a conviction that consulting as I had been doing likely wasn’t the right path forward. Coming off of an extended consulting project that had seen me back-and-forth from the UK and fairly burnt out, I had been collecting and exploring different ideas (and savings) for a small, bootstrappable Software-as-a-Service business. My theory: knowing that Emil was on his way, I wanted to have something that could bring in income and support a working lifestyle that would let me be present.

I settled on Knowsi from a host of other ideas while flying into Paris for New Years 2019. Consent management had always been a challenge in user research, with lost forms and disempowered participants. As a user researcher myself, I knew the problem well and had seen when it goes wrong. It was a discrete need, something that I was solving for myself, and was feasible with my skillset as an indie developer and designer.

I spent the next few months getting it off the ground, piloting it with the the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and rapidly turning it into something that worked, could be used, etc. When Emil was born, I took a few months off, and my diaper changing speed improved considerably . Unfortunately, Knowsi didn’t progress much in that time, but I got my first customer and it was a huge boost in morale. In the fall, Ayla and I did a complete redesign of the site and relaunched it, and from there have figured out a good pattern of collecting feedback (and responding quickly to bugs), setting priorities, and aggressively pushing on particular features through time-bound sprints.

More than anything else though, I found that working on a business (vs a product) solo is maybe more trouble than its worth. While I can do most of the product work and some of the business, the constant focus switching is to to the detriment of the actual work. Also my marketing skills are useless. So in the new year, I intend to re-focus on Knowsi and seek collaboration and help from friends, colleagues, or people who share a similar excitement for qualitative research and privacy.

Finally, I also just launched free subscription tier to support students and solo researchers in gathering and maintaining consent with their research participants. So if you’ve been curious about what I’ve been working on but didn’t want to put in a credit card, [now you can use Knowsi for free](https://knowsi.com/join).

## The Degree – Starting a Masters

![](/assets/37a7325097264cb77b7e50852c9570a02ebc3e3e-3840x2160.jpg)

This has been a long time coming. I’ve flirted with graduate school for years. In 2012, I’d been accepted to NYU’s ITP program and almost moved to New York. However, after months of soul searching, I ended up saying no because didn’t want to be in that kind of debt.

Since then, I’ve had a lot of fun: starting two businesses, working at IDEO, at the Pentagon, being a think tank fellow, and currently living a slightly charmed independent consulting/product person’s life in Denmark. But every single year I start musing about returning to school, though that idea of what I would return FOR has shifted over time.

Coming out of my Public Interest Tech fellowship with New America last year, I had started to explore working more deeply in issues surrounding the refugee crisis, climate change, and a more systemic view of security. Technology skills are great and useful, but I believe that to really be effective (and not harmful), I needed to shore up my knowledge of the issues and the critical discourse. So after many conversations, explorations, and books read, I landed on Security Studies as a field.

Despite my career in code and design, my academic roots are in political science, so I had (rusty) familiarity with the topic. I ended up reaching out to my former professor, Renan Levine. I actually hadn’t had particularly good grades in Professor Levine’s classes, but I reached out to him because he had a massive impact on my transition into design. Specifically, he taught me how to visualize my thinking, how to approach it systematically, and how to use externalized ideation as a lever for creativity. Weirdly, I believe what I learned in his research, policy, and statistics classes became my entryway into interaction design and entrepreneurship. And despite nearly a decade between his classes and my application, he wrote my recommendation letters that helped me get into a security studies MA in the UK. (So thank you Renan and Matt Cutts for the letters of recommendation!)

Anyway, I’ve just wrapped up the first term and starting to think about my dissertation. I have difficulty expressing how excited I am for the whole enterprise. Life would be a lot easier without this as I have to be incredibly structured in my time: I’m often up till two or three in the morning, and it has meant getting creative with the day-to-day of the household (which I’ll talk about next). But even a few months in I feel like what I’m learning is surfacing new areas to explore and a new way for me to understand the issues that I care about, but have struggled to act on.

## The Problems — Survival

![](/assets/706432d0a26dc4bb59eafa7b3b3882796e8dd2c6-8400x6600.jpg)

Finally, survival. This year has had a lot to do with privilege. My wife and I have benefited from the Danish child care policies. I had access to personal capital, skills, and time to start a small business. I had a network and the time to apply for a university. I had the network and skills to be selective in what I do work.

Despite this, the past year has been the busiest in my life. Keeping up with friends and social engagements has been a struggle. Beyond even the normal limits to sleep that new parents face, to get everything done I’ve had an unhealthy number of nights with just four to six hours of sleep.

Dealing with multiple responsibilities: Emil, working with Knowsi customers, consulting as a product manager with IKEA, leading design mentorship with the Innofounder accelerator program, and finally, acclimating to my grad program. When all of those came together in September, I managed to burn out in a few weeks and things weren’t working. I didn’t see failure as an option though, and I was able to figure out some new techniques for time management and tracking everything. It involved late nights, but nothing really slipped — or at least that’s what I initially thought.

In this initial “balance”, I unfairly relied on my wife to pick up slack that I wasn’t seeing or was dramatically de-prioritizing. [A weakness in our household dynamic that had existed previously at a lower level](https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/03/women-are-overburdened-with-their-families-mental-loads.html) was suddenly becoming exacerbated by these new stressors.

Since that first month of chaos, we’ve been working together to figure out how to balance that better. Ayla and I have always used our skills as designers and managers to do the work of creating a good relationship and life together. So figuring out “okay, what does it mean to be equal NOW?” became a question that we were at least equipped to ask and start to figure out together. One tangible example worth mentioning is this (flawed but useful as a starting point) method in the [Fair Play](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44071899-fair-play) book. As a way of visualizing the unseen tasks (an issue for me), it’s been effective. Given the speed at which Emil’s needs change, we have a standing meeting every week to figure out how our needs are changing alongside.

Ultimately, a willingness to share, visualize, and design the hard conversations by way of whiteboard, post-it, and through artifact goes a long way. If you’ve got a background in service design and facilitation, turning those skills on yourself and your relationships is incredibly worthwhile (albeit painful sometimes). If we hadn’t had these skills to begin with, I suspect we wouldn’t have been able to surface the need to have these conversations as quickly as we did.

## What Didn’t Work

There are a few things this year that didn’t quite work out.

- As a **consultant**, I (purposefully) brought in a lot less revenue than I normally do. I’m fortunate to be able to even make the decision to work less and make less, but still, it was a dip from previous years and I felt a fair bit of emotional stress even with it being intentional.
- As a **startup design mentor**, I dropped the ball this autumn. Despite successful workshops facilitated and some great reviews from my teams, I wasn’t nearly as present or available as I had been previously. Unfortunately, I’ve decided that this is the piece won’t get any better down the road, so I’ve decided to step back from leading the Design Mentorship at the Innofounder program.
- As a **friend**, I was never around. Part of this is a function of adult life for anyone, but I was conspicuously absent from group chats, drinks, parties, and general hangouts. Even when friends came to visit, I often had to truncate my time to work on an essay or deal with work. I haven’t figured out how to be better at this yet.
- As an **indie dev/founder/whatever**, I got distracted chasing shiny things a few times. For example, instead of focusing on Knowsi, I spent a few weeks building an MVP of a product called [FitFaj](https://fitfaj.com/), a customized training plan for expectant fathers. There are a few people using it actually, but I really should not have done this.
- I started **studying Arabic** in the Spring of 2019 after almost six months of trying to get into an Arabic language school in Copenhagen. I’d initially been studying Danish, and abandoned it when the state-supported language centres were defunded. I’ve also been studying pretty consistently with a tutor from [Natakallam](https://natakallam.com/). However, I honestly don’t feel like I’ve gotten that far, and having just finished my most recent textbook, I’m struggling to figure out what the next step is. Regardless, the language itself is immensely interesting, and being able to read the script and understand some basics has me excited to figure out how to continue.

## Things that Did Work

- **Nutrition** was a bit of the bass rhythm for this year. I think I would have struggled without it. I started following a keto diet in 2018, and am doing a keto-like thing with just low carbs (no one should be denied lentils and bananas). In general, the keto diet was ridiculous and I wouldn’t recommend it. It worked well for me, with the greatest payoff being consistent energy and no spikes of fatigue mid-day. On the negative, it meant my eating habits were incredibly inflexible, and if I didn’t get the right vitamin and electrolyte mix, I’d feel like I was dying. However, it set up a framework for me to do a less restrictive but still low carb diet incredibly easily, so it was an effective habit maker.
- **Fitness** has been a bigger piece: I’ve been following a series of plans by the [Mountain Tactical Institute](https://mtntactical.com/) folk, and have really enjoyed them. I also got certified as a personal trainer (I use certifications to learn about things like this, also because of the FitFaj diversion). I don’t really follow my own plans (though have been making plans for others), but it has really helped make sense of the why and how of others’ plans, specifially the MTI ones. That knowledge has also motivated me to exercise with a consistency that I’ve never been able to keep before, about 6x a week.
- Zeroing out my **email** inbox is a obnoxious and terrible, but it’s been a primary technique for keeping on top of what’s coming in. Combined with a obsessive todo list keeping (I use Things3, but anything works, including paper), it has permitted an offloading and addressing of things in bite-sized chunks, and opened up more space for actually doing work. It’s far from perfect, but for whatever reason having unaddressed emails and tasks like that creates either avoidance or stress.
- Acknowledging **cycles**. This one was and is hard. I can work intensely and well in cycles, and then need to reset. This manifests as days of working quite passionately like a maniac, then needing a day or three of not doing really anything. When I fall out of these productive cycles, it manifests as my sleep schedule being out of whack, one of my core habits (like the inbox thing, or fitness) slipping, or feeling kind of anxious. This year, I feel like I finally got a handle on these cycles in a way that has made me a lot more effective.
- **Remote Work**. I cannot express how effective working remotely or semi-remotely is. I can be present with Emil, instead of commuting I can go to the gym, I get a massive amount more done, and the socializing and networking part of working becomes something that is more designed and less imposed. It requires noise canceling headphones and clear boundaries, but those headphones can be removed if you’re needed. It also requires a set of tools and technologies that really have to be tailored to each situation, and developed in collaboration with your team. Anyway, I hope to mostly work in remote or semi-remote context going forward, both to be around for Emil more, but also simply to get more done.

## Going into 2020

![](/assets/b90d63913641d8df9ee40a2c5e44fb2da980693e-1242x923.jpg)

So what does 2020 look like? Honestly, I don’t know yet, and to the point of my “don’t share until there’s a milestone” thing, I’ll share when it’s time.

In general, Emil is starting at daycare in the new year,so I’m going to modify my [Bullitt bike](http://shop.larryvsharry.com/) for daily dropoff and figure out my sleep schedule. I’m continuing to work on Knowsi, and want to explore ways to put more time into it and my customers. I’m continuing to consult with IKEA, and work with a burgeoning team there that honestly, I can’t wait to share more about.

Beyond that though, we’ll see. In a week, this post itself went from “I need to write a reflection” to “I want to share that reflection” to “I need to make that blog finally” to “maybe I should just redo my site as a blog.” So… here we are.

I’m going to be writing and posting more this year, plus there’s a maybe project with a friend from Toronto if you’re interested in international relations, politics, and design. So if you’re able, please subscribe to the update newsletter below!


Reflecting on 2019


Design research is about sensing and synthesizing the needs of your stakeholders: a fundamentally human task. But we’re tool-using mammals, and it’s worth spending some time thinking about the design researcher’s Everyday Carry (EDC). [While a quick google of EDC](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=everyday+carry) will usually surface photos of knives and paracord ([with William Gibson giving one of my favorite offhand critiques of it in Zero History](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/gear-queer)), I think we can make a strong argument for a softer and more open collection. Maybe it’s time for an EDC that isn’t all about self-defense and survival, and instead one that celebrates the vulnerability and open listening necessary to do good design research.

## **The Obvious**

### A Good Pack

No self-respecting EDC aficionado will go into the world without a good backpack. Whether it’s a fancy Peak Design bag, a 1000d Cordura knowledge worker special covered in molle straps (guilty), or an unassuming Fjällräven pack, the bag is the starting point.

Personally, I’ve been happiest with a 40L Goruck GR2 if I’m traveling for more than a week or so, and a decently modified 21L Goruck GR1 for home stuff. Both bags are unobtrusive and clean, and have survived everything I’ve thrown at them.

### **Audio Recorder**

I am a big proponent of recording interviews when you can. There’s always the risk of presenting a barrier to the participant for honesty and openness. but clear conversations about goals and consent can usually resolve this hurdle. Also having a small and unobtrusive recorder that disappears as the conversation picks up can make all the difference.

I personally use the Sony ICD-UX560 if I’m purely using it for transcription, and an older Zoom H5 if I’ll be using the audio in a production capacity. Using your phone is always a good option as well, but for file management purposes, I like the convenience of wiping the SD card after a research project.

### **Dedicated Camera with Video**

A good camera, either a DSLR or high quality mirrorless camera like anything in the Fujifilm X series of cameras will take you a very long way. Capturing portraits and environment photos can make the difference in communicating your research findings, not to mention sparking a new realization during synthesis.

For user tests, having a GoPro on a clamp mount is often a great approach with its wider field of view and ability to disappear.

### **Dedicated Notebooks**

I used to have a single notebook for everything, but more recently I’ve been creating dedicated notebooks for projects. For larger projects (like Knowsi), I’ve been using a hard cover A5 Leuchtturm 1917 with a dot grid for everything from sketching design elements and flows, to capturing interview notes, and exploring business models.

![](/assets/eda7933f16004d2a64c6fafbce2cedb0d7e31309-1000x750.jpg)

For a recent consulting project, I used a 40 page A5 Moleskine that I was able to fill up with participant quotes, and then date and archive it afterwards.

Multiple and specialized notebooks help you avoid some of the potential privacy pitfalls that you can encounter during the research process. Knowsi can wrangle the digital side for you, but having a good solution for the physical is also necessary.

### **Post-it Notes**

Almost always, I’ll take an interview and transcribe what I heard onto post-it notes, even if I’m using a transcription service. This forces me to think through and review what the participant said, and I get quotes and insights that I can move around and cluster during synthesis.

But I like to bring post-its with me during the interviews as well, since they are handy for quick prototyping and co-creation.

### **Extra pens**

Honestly, I’ve found myself without a good pen so frequently, it’s inexcusable.

I have two tricks: keeping a pocket filled with random pens in my backpack at all times, or selecting one or two expensive pens that I’m more likely to keep track of because I don’t want to lose them.

### **Sketching material (for interview participant)**

Depending on the purpose of the interview, having a good tool for sketching out a concept goes a long way. The quicker you can focus the participant on the co-creative act, the more time you have together to get to a good outcome.

### **Gathering Consent (i.e. use** **Knowsi)**

Most importantly, always have a consent form with you. If you are using the research data for commercial purposes (like building an app), then you have to collect participant consent. This also goes for collecting media and similar activities. Not sure why? Check out [this article](https://medium.com/design-research-matters/general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr-and-user-research-e00a5b29338e).

![](/assets/615561e05a85f0362972f02a94b51cf1c90cd2c1-2048x1536.jpg)

I think [Knowsi](http://www.knowsi.com/) is the best way to manage consent as a design researcher — that’s why I built it. You can also use paper consent forms, though be sure to keep them in a secure place, destroy the data after an agreed upon point, and provide a mechanism for your participants to change their consent going forward.

Or you could just use Knowsi!

## **The Less Obvious**

### **You Don’t Necessary Need the Laptop (but if you do, bring a charger)**

Think critically about whether or not you need a laptop. If you are recording and later transcribing the interview, I would argue that a stronger relationship can be formed with the participant if you don’t have a screen between you. Jotting down highlights or things that you want to return to in your notebook while focusing on what the participant says can be a much more effective strategy.

That said, if I am not recording audio or video and others will be consuming the interview transcript, I will always bring a small laptop or tablet with a keyboard to make sure my notes are accurate and complete. I type a lot faster than I write.

### **“Return-To” Information and Reward**

For all your research info, make sure there is a return-to address with a reward. Losing a client or participant’s confidential information is a massive liability, and it can set your work back weeks.

### **Medical Kit (and someone who knows how to use it)**

Having done research in situations where injury was a real possibility (one that in hindsight I should have predicted), I started to get nervous about my inability to do anything about it for either myself or my team. As a team lead, you’re ultimately responsible for your team’s wellbeing.

Last year, I did my wilderness first responder and EMT training with [SOLO wilderness medicine](https://www.soloschools.com/), and would recommend that in every team, at least one person has basic first aid training. A small medical kit with basics like nitrile gloves for body-substance isolation, benadryl for allergic reactions, small triangular slings for securing a break, ibuprofen, and other items like an epipen if a team member has a known extreme allergy. These can make the difference between a minor hiccup in the research trip and the whole thing going wrong.

### **Hidden Cash for Transit**

Always have some extra cash hidden away, especially if you’re doing field work. A lost wallet is bad enough, but having to walk back to your hotel to deal with it is even worse.

### **Water. Always Water.**

Stay hydrated. I usually have a litre of water with me wherever I go. I recently shifted to a [32oz Earthwell® Kewler](https://earthwell.com/products/32oz-earthwell-vacuum-bottle-kewler-cap) after about three years with the [CamelBak Chute](https://www.rei.com/product/866080/camelbak-chute-water-bottle-1-liter).

### **Snacks**

Bring whatever you need. I’m a big fan of almonds. I try to avoid sugary things, since losing the sugar high during an interview is a truly terrible experience.

## **Bring more snacks by bringing fewer loose papers**

Having a backpack full of consent forms used to be a necessary but annoying part of the design research process. [But now there’s Knowsi.](https://www.knowsi.com/)

Collecting the right consent from participants, scheduling, and organizing the media afterwards in a GDPR compliant and responsible way is easy. Plus, participants know you value their privacy because they get their own receipt of the consent form, and the ability to reach out afterwards.

[Give Knowsi a try with a 1 week trial today](https://www.knowsi.com/join), and [sign up for our mailing list](https://www.knowsi.com/?mail=true) for a discount code and more articles like this every few weeks.

![](/assets/214e7ca97916f7c7673fc14b493a9a8e024746cb-1400x847.png)

_This article was originally published on **[Medium](https://medium.com/knowsi/the-design-researchers-everyday-carry-799b4c44aaa7).**_


The Design Researcher’s Everyday Carry


One of my more traumatic design research moments is something I barely remember. I had flown from Palo Alto to London to lead two weeks of field research, and had made a mistake. I had scheduled the first interview for about three hours after I stepped off the plane. As a result, I found myself with zero sleep in a new city, about to perform an expert interview. On someone who is a bit of a hero to me, none the less.

Well, I barely remember the interview, though thankfully I had a recording. It actually went alright, but it was ultimately a wasted opportunity by not being in top form. And so after I staggered my way to the hotel and slept for 12-some hours, I vowed never to so poorly plan my research again.

## **Pre-Planning**

Planning out the who, where, and how of your research necessarily comes from the Why and What that you should identify at the outset.

I like to begin recruiting for a research program between 3 and 6 weeks out from landing, depending on locality and complexity. Where possible, I have loved working with a professional recruiter. These recruiters can help you develop an effective screener, manage the “where,” and serve as a kind of soft fixer for the research itself. They let you focus on the content, in other words.

If you don’t have access to a recruiter though, then get started yesterday. Identify what you’re looking for, make sure you set realistic expectations around access. Do the leg work to recruit the right individuals, or if you’re working within organizations or communities, work to understand what stakeholders act as gatekeepers to those communities. This sometimes means developing relationships that might take months to mature into access.

In many cases you won’t know those barriers until you actually encounter them. So start now, and talk to those who have come before you. [Here are some tools](https://medium.com/knowsi/bureaucratic-mysteries-design-tools-for-government-9842decdf9fa) that might help from a workshop I taught for Code For Canada.

## **Making the Plan**

Alright, so you’ve done as much as you can to map out the unknowns and have started the recruit people. You have a sense of your Who and maybe Where from the recruitment. Now you must identify the How.

I like to have 3 key artifacts for the “how” beyond the standard interview guide: the trip schedule, the daily schedule, and the interview schedule.

### **My Whole-Trip Schedule**

This is a calendar that shows who I’m talking to, what time I need to be up each day, and in broad strokes, where I need to be. It lets me build in relaxation and breaks for myself and the team. It gives me an overall sense of our goals, and it tells me at a glance when the hardest days are going to be.

Usually this is a Google calendar or a foam core board covered in post-it notes. With each interview listed as a post-it with the participant’s details, it becomes easy to translate that into a daily schedule.

![](/assets/60486a55113ef18b7db3e4a42ae5194a4da83084-640x640.jpg)

### **Daily Schedule**

My Daily Schedule, describing who we’re talking to, where they are, and importantly, when we get to take a breather. It accounts for travel time, it will often cover how we get there, and it lays out the specific goals for each part of the day.

If you’re working locally, I recommend sticking to a 9–4 schedule where possible. This gives your team a break if things are going smoothly, and it gives you breathing room if things go over or if participants are late.

If you’re doing remote research, then you work within the realities of what you need to accomplish. A budget pressed trip that won’t burn the team out (from my experience) might look like this:

![](/assets/3dc904707e960da74d0d662aad43639772103033-1362x828.png)

### **The Interview Schedule**

Finally, you have your actual interview schedule. This will vary depending on the subject, the timing, and what you are trying to accomplish (the why). It shouldn’t be too prescriptive, but should give you cues to shift topics and stay on track. Respecting the timing for the interview is a way of showing respect for your participant as well.

Here’s an example of what an interview exploring a new feature or design might look like:

![](/assets/fcbe3262eb7090725a303b0ba537bfd02a11b9ff-1372x1194.png)

## **Loose Tolerances**

The best research trips I’ve been on are heavily planned with loose tolerances. That means that we’ve covered a lot of contingencies, while still leaving room for serendipity, discovery, and rapid response.

If you get an introduction through an expert interviewee to another potential research participant, you should have the flexibility to respond and act on that introduction. Similarily, if you find that the research is moving in a different direction than expected, you should be able to cancel or reschedule with participants where appropriate.

Good research trips are about drifting between known unknowns and unknown unknowns (This Rumsfeld quote gets way too much play).

Your job is to make sure that a riptide in the Unknown Unknowns pool doesn’t derail your research. Make yourself open to new knowledge and understanding, while staying focused on why you’re doing the research. Tragically, poorly organized research can lead to teams thinking they have a deeper understanding than they do, when they’ve really just allowed their previous perspective to echo back at them.

Stay open, stay focused, explore deeply.

## **Oh, and get the admin right**

Of course, when it comes to research, there’s some important administration. Before, I always found this to be a chore. [Which is is why I built Knowsi.](https://www.knowsi.com/)

Collecting the right consent from participants, scheduling, and organizing the media afterwards in a GDPR compliant and responsible way becomes easy. Plus, participants know you value their privacy because they get their own receipt of the consent form with the ability to reach out afterwards.

[Give Knowsi a try with a 1 week trial today](https://www.knowsi.com/join), and [sign up for our mailing list](https://www.knowsi.com/?mail=true) for a discount code and more articles like this every few weeks.

![](/assets/214e7ca97916f7c7673fc14b493a9a8e024746cb-1400x847.png)

_This article was originally published on **[Medium](https://medium.com/knowsi/planning-your-design-research-trip-5eef90710026).**_


Planning your Design Research Trip


At the heart of great design research is note taking. Our job is to go into new environments, learn from and capture the experiences of others, and transform that knowledge into insight and action. Great notes and references serve as the bedrock of this process: making sure that you can represent your participant’s experiences accurately and not project your own on top.

Here are three fundamentals to keep in mind when starting a research session.

## **1) What is your role?**

What role do you play in this research session? Are you the primary researcher, asking the question and making the introductions? Or are you the note taker, stepping back a bit to capture, observe, and fill gaps?

Being up front about roles is vital for a healthy and smooth research session. Primaries need to be razor focused on asking good and open ended questions, on pursuing potentially fruitful branches in the conversation, and in developing a trust relationship with the research participant.

The note taker should step back and almost be in the background. A good note taker is taking verbatim notes, making sure all the paperwork is covered, photos are taken, and any recording equipment is functioning. Additionally, a good note taker should be keeping a list of questions that the primary missed, and filtering the conversation through their own experience that might differ from that of the primary.

You rarely want more than these two people per session, by the way.

## **2) Always record the session (if the participant consents)**

When setting up a consent forms, I always ask if we can record audio for transcription (i.e. internal) purposes. Why?

First, it helps you fill gaps. Sometimes information will be coming at you faster than you can record, and knowing that you have that fallback will help you relax and absorb the information without worrying about missing it. This is vital for asking the right follow up question.

![](/assets/9b564a77e41aab8cb02046b67b11aaa737a6b1c5-1000x707.jpg)

Second, it helps you validate what you’ve heard. Sometimes, a participant will say something and indicate something different by lieu of their voice or body language. This isn’t always captured in the moment, and so returning to gut check that you heard what you heard is always a good thing, and can be grounds for reaching back out to the participant to make sure they meant what you think they meant.

Finally, it’s a backup if things go wrong. If you’ve ever been caught in the rain after an interview (like I was recently in Copenhagen), it’s re-assuring to know that even if your notes are illegible, that recording you made will preserve the data collected.

## **3) Take a Breath**

As a researcher, you are engaged in a complex dialogue with your research participant, even if they are doing most of the talking. That dialogue doesn’t end with words though. Sometimes a note taken at the wrong moment can put a participant on edge, or even undermine the trust you’ve built with them.

I learned this the hard way interviewing at-risk patients at a clinic in the American midwest. While taking notes, I rapidly transcribed what the participant was saying because it was a significant experience, without actually engaging with the substance and emotional tenor of what she was recounting. For her, I was disengaged with her story and disinterested in her experience, and instead purely focused on hoovering up as much information as possible. And so she shut down and the interview fizzled a bit from there as the trust was undermined.

Reflecting on this experience later, if I had put down my pen and really paid attention, that trust could have been maintained. I would likely have gotten more from the conversation, and I always could have gone back to my recording to transcribe the conversation later.

So every once in a while, take a breath, put down the pen, and really demonstrate your attention.

## **Bonus: Don’t Fumble The Admin**

Of course, when it comes to research, there’s some important administration. Before, I always found this to be a chore. [Which is is why I built Knowsi.](https://www.knowsi.com/)

Collecting the right consent from participants, scheduling, and organizing the media afterwards in a GDPR compliant and responsible way becomes easy. Plus, participants know you value their privacy because they get their own receipt of the consent form with the ability to reach out afterwards.

[Give Knowsi a try with a 1 week trial today](https://www.knowsi.com/join), and [sign up for the mailing list](https://www.knowsi.com/?mail=tth) for a discount code and more articles like this every few weeks.

![](/assets/214e7ca97916f7c7673fc14b493a9a8e024746cb-1400x847.png)

_This article was originally published on [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/better-notes-for-design-research-1eace30b211e)._


Better Notes for Design Research


Get your modern CSS rendered right with Heroku, Puppeteer, and Styled-Components.

Sometimes, you really just need a nice PDF.

As I’ve been developing [Knowsi](https://www.knowsi.com/), one of the things that emerged from my research with design researchers is that **hard copies are a necessity**. Sometimes it’s a legal policy within the company to keep hard copies, sometimes it’s a lack of trust in digital systems. There were enough reasons that for the Knowsi launch, I needed to have an easy PDF export.

Knowsi is a NextJS SSR application, and follows a model where you wrap your components and application so that it can be rendered server-side before being served to the user.

I figured that given this server-side rendering, simply rendering that stream to a PDF file would be pretty easy. I was both right and wrong.

I started by looking at [this post by Stanley Folk](https://medium.com/@stanleyfok/pdf-generation-with-react-componenets-using-next-js-at-server-side-ee9c2dea06a7) as a launching point, and tried this function he shared that uses html-pdf as the PDF rendering solution:

```
> import { renderToStaticMarkup } from 'react-dom/server';
> import pdf from 'html-pdf';

> const componentToPDFBuffer = (component) => {

> return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
> const html = renderToStaticMarkup(component);
> const options = {
> format: 'A4',
> orientation: 'portrait',
> border: '10mm',
> footer: {
> height: '10mm',
> },
> type: 'pdf',
> timeout: 30000,
> };const buffer = pdf.create(html, options).toBuffer((err, buffer) => {
> if (err) {
> return reject(err);
> }
> return resolve(buffer);
> });
> });
> }

> export default {
> componentToPDFBuffer
> }
```

I ran into a number of issues with his approach though.

1. I wanted to create something application wide, vs. specific to a single page or component as described in his example.

2. CSS styles wouldn’t render easily.

3. When I did eventually get them render (see below), it failed to render flexbox and grid layouts.

So something had to be done, but I had to slog through each party to figure out what.

## **Getting the HTML**

When I tried to implement this in my \_document.js component (which is the override for the default rendering wrapper in NextJS), it choked and wouldn’t return either the compiled document or really anything else. I could get the demo to work, but not in my application.

This ultimately ended up being a good thing, forcing me to dig into the meat of how Document, Head, Main, and NextScript actually work, which got me to my eventual solution.

I settled on this approach for rendering out a PDF of the entire page by setting up the render in getInitialProps on the \_document component:

```
> static async getInitialProps(ctx) {
> const { req, res, query, renderPage } = ctx;
> // Setup
> const sheet = new ServerStyleSheet();
> const page = !pdf
> ? renderPage(App => props => sheet.collectStyles(<App {…props} />))
> : renderPage({
> enhanceApp: App => props => sheet.collectStyles(<App {…props} />)
> });
> const styleTags = sheet.getStyleElement();
> // Setup PDF
> const pdf = query.pdf === “true”;
> const server = !!req;
> if (server && pdf) {
> const initialProps = await Document.getInitialProps(ctx);
> const css = sheet
> .getStyleElement()
> .map(e => e.props.dangerouslySetInnerHTML.\_\_html)
> .join();
> const buffer = await pdfHelper
> .componentToPDFBuffer(
```

```
<html
lang=“en”
dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{
__html: `
<head><style>${renderToString(css)}</style></head>
<body>
<div id=“__next”>
${page.html}
</div>
</body>
`
}}
/>
)
.catch(function(err) {
console.log(“Error generating pdf”, err);
});
res.setHeader(
“Content-disposition”,
`attachment; filename="test.pdf`
);
res.setHeader(“Content-Type”, “application/pdf”);
res.end(buffer);
}
return { …page, renderPage, styleTags, pdf, server, query };
}
```

In this case, my big challenge was how to render out the CSS. Because I’m using Styled Components, I had to get the style elements, retrieve the rendered CSS itself from the styleTags element, and then put it in a format that would render as plain CSS. Then I could insert it into a head tag, and simply serve the static HTML to my PDF function. Ultimately, this will let me manipulate the PDF document structure down the road a bit if I decide to add footers or similar styles.

Great. This works, I’m ready to move on.

## **Getting the PDF**

Immediately, I ran into trouble with html-pdf.

It uses an older library called PhantomJS to render the HTML and export the actual PDF. It’s part of a set of headless browser-based testing tools, of which Selenium and Headless Chrome are also members.

Because phantomJS is an older tool, it didn’t include support for more modern CSS tools like Flexbox and Grid, both of which are used throughout the application. So what to do?

PhantomJS was a non-option, but I kept the shell of the application and explored Headless-Chrome and Puppeteer instead. After a bit of experimentation, I landed on this revised version of Stanley Folk’s original function.

```
import { renderToStaticMarkup } from “react-dom/server”;
import { devfrontend, prodfrontend } from “../config”;
import puppeteer from “puppeteer”;const componentToPDFBuffer = async component => {
const html = renderToStaticMarkup(component);
const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
headless: true,
args: [“—no-sandbox”, “—disable-setuid-sandbox”]
});
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto(
process.env.NODE_ENV !== “production” ? devfrontend : prodfrontend
);
await page.setContent(html, { waitUntil: “networkidle0”, timeout: 30000 });
const pdf = await page.pdf({
format: “A4”,
scale: 0.75,
printBackground: true
});await browser.close();
return pdf;
};export default {
componentToPDFBuffer
};
```

Let’s quickly walk through what’s going on here.

1. We receive the raw html from \_document.

2. We spin up an instance of puppeteer, with the arguments of no-sandbox passed. (This is not great, see below)

3. Set up a new page with newPage() and navigate to your root with goto(). This is necessary for any relative links (like images) to get fetches.

4. Pass the content to the page to be rendered with setContent and make sure it WAITS for the images to be downloaded appropriately.

5. Render the PDF

6. Close the browser

7. Return the buffer to the requesting client.

Simple and quick.

One point on the no-sandbox side. This is the fix that comes recommended by most of the internet for dealing with Puppeteer’s weirdness when deploying alongside a node instance. It’s also pretty obviously a big security hole, which [puppeteer itself identified](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/troubleshooting.md).

Because this is taking place 100% with owned content the buffer is being rendered and served by the node server itself), and I’m not rendering any external content, it seems like a viable option for my purposes, but I would strongly recommend not trying this if you’re going to use Puppeteer to render an external site, as with a link resolver or if you’re building a responsiveness checker, those kinds of things. [Here’s some more discussion that I’d suggest exploring.](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50662388/running-headless-chrome-puppeteer-with-no-sandbox)

##

## **Getting it Deployed**

The next hurdle was getting this thing deployed on Heroku. When I went to deploy staging, it uploaded nice and fine and thennnnn rendered nothing. Shit. Turns out that the whole puppeteer library was missing.

![](/assets/57fbdcaf19a9f193e84a748746868e56cbaa1198-1364x274.png)

Thankfully, there was an easy fix for this. Jon Tewksbury had put together a Heroku build pack to address this particular challenge.

An important thing here: **DO NOT USE** **heroku buildpacks:set** **(like I did) to install this thing.** Use buildpacks:add instead. Set overwrites what you already have, and in this particular case, will usually prevent node from being detected. [There’s a long and tragic thread to this effect](https://buildpack-registry.s3.amazonaws.com/buildpacks/jontewks/puppeteer.tgz) so just be forewarned. It will cause the puppeteer library to be built, and your node app won’t be built in this case.

Here’s what worked for me in my package.json:

```
> "buildpacks": [
> {
> "url": "[https://buildpack-registry.s3.amazonaws.com/buildpacks/jontewks/puppeteer.tgz](https://buildpack-registry.s3.amazonaws.com/buildpacks/jontewks/puppeteer.tgz)"
> },
> {
> "url": "[https://codon-buildpacks.s3.amazonaws.com/buildpacks/heroku/nodejs.tgz](https://codon-buildpacks.s3.amazonaws.com/buildpacks/heroku/nodejs.tgz)"
> }
> ],
```

You can also easily set this up in the Heroku UI by navigating to your app → Settings file, going to build packs, and adding the above build packs manually (her latter is just heroku/nodejs)

![](/assets/5e17397c981b1876771b4ffa704e060378f1724d-1400x512.png)

This order ensures that the puppeteer library builds first, and then your app builds second. I suspect that a Procfile would work here as well, but I prefer to keep all my build info in package.json.

After that, everything worked and I can now build any pdf file by simply add ing pdf=true to a query string.

My solution is far from perfect, but this method is a great way to do things like individual exports, and in Knowsi’s case, we need to be able to export all consent forms and media information in the event of a GDPR request or the closure of an account. This provides an easy and secure way to accomplish that.

**Speaking of, are you doing user research? Why not give** [**Knowsi**](https://www.knowsi.com/) **a try. Knowsi is the best way to manage the relationship between researchers and participants.**

![](/assets/214e7ca97916f7c7673fc14b493a9a8e024746cb-1400x847.png)

_This article was originally published in [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/exporting-pdfs-with-next-js-714735f0a473)._
a


Exporting PDFs with Next JS


We can’t predict the future, but that shouldn’t stop us from designing for it!

Designers today have a responsibility for designing tomorrow, especially when it comes to human health and well-being. Futurecasting (the practice of trying to envision the future) is challenging so to help we can use design thinking and rapid prototyping to explore the world of tomorrow in creative and divergent ways. This was the idea behind this first collaboration between Cookpad and the [Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design](http://ciid.dk/) (CIID). Our plan was to bring speculative design and home cooking together into a fun day for attendees of the Copenhagen [TechFestival](https://techfestival.co/). Our challenge: design the future of food in four hours!

Cookpad is a food technology company started in Japan, but now in almost 70 countries from UK to Jakarta to Beirut. The company is best known for their recipe-sharing platform, but are also building technologies, perspectives, and communities with the goal of making everyday cooking fun. Ultimately, the goal of our design jam was to change the way we think about food, specifically problems around access to ingredients and the knowledge of what to cook with them. Cookpad is partnering with CIID (a design school and innovation platform) to solve a global problem: that people are cooking less and this has a negative impact on our individual and collective health and well-being, our community, and our environment.

![](/assets/f5fd342b8eb07bf57b43cda68224133e72fcc9ea-1000x751.jpg)

Our Design Jam brought together over 20 global designers and foodies from countries like Taiwan, India, Copenhagen, Germany, Brazil, and beyond with three facilitators: from Copenhagen (Andrew Lovett-Barron from CIID), Shanghai (Simone Rebaudengo from [YEAST](https://medium.com/yeastlab)), and Bristol, UK (Philip Pantelides from Cookpad). Our challenge was to create a rapid-fire prototype and video exploring future scenarios. As the future is so unpredictable, the scenarios were created with a [random generator google spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DZBf9pJohb3O3a8g54oUr-kuzEyLop6Lwnk4f7CBMmA/edit?usp=sharing), and then massaged into ten scenario cards. (If you want to learn more about using scenario generation for design brainstorming, Andrew digs into the details here)

![](/assets/664014e1ae25b43e217aaf3d7c58ae5db19581ab-1400x933.jpg)

Within three hours and thirty minutes, all the groups had created a short video and prototypes to share with the rest of the group. The videos included stop motion with lego and characters, acted scenes and rituals, and improvised dinner scenes. How did they get this finished so quickly? We guided the teams through a structured churning of information into ideas, a process that you can also adopt when designing for the future or around complex problems:

## **Break it down**

We provided some guidelines for brainstorming, including breaking the concepts down into smaller, more manageable chunks. We provided this example for how to bring down one of the prompts.

![](/assets/2a7297072e39412361992124d534ca0ca494896d-1400x731.png)

## How Might We?

Once the problem was broken down, teams pulled out the Post-It notes to cluster themes. We asked each of the students to write one idea or one interpretation per Post-It, so that observations and interpretations can shift into understanding. How Might We (HMW) is a technique that allows you to flip the problem into an opportunity by rephrasing challenges into questions. For example: _There’s no cutlery_ becomes… _How Might We eat without cutlery_ which may result in a range of ideas including:

1. Hands
2. Straws
3. Robot arms
4. Food troughs
5. Food catapults

The goal is to find a design opportunity that results in divergent thinking. This means the possibility for solutions is increased. You can read a bit more about how to [use this technique yourself here.](https://medium.com/@readywater/hmw-how-might-we-c04423a4437d)

![](/assets/368911a6f6cff9a069b34b6a9ad1a0d45b841db7-1400x933.jpg)

## Draw, draw, draw

After identifying a design opportunity, the teams took to pen and paper to sketch out ideas, thinking both about the environment they were designing for and people living these speculative realities. Visuals are a great way to share the context of an idea, and you don’t have to be a designer to create a simple sketch. In this example, the students created a multi-pronged straw and pneumatic food device to extract nutrients in a world without cutlery.

![](/assets/46838a001c7d75432c1d4c43bc704bb24ab6870b-1400x1050.png)

## Storyboard time

Before prototyping, it’s is a good idea to map out the story you are trying to tell. This builds empathy with those experiencing an environment, and creates a cohesive narrative around the objects and services being designed: answering the question of what happens before, after, and during an interaction with the product or service you are designing. One way to do this is storyboarding, where participants draw out what they Imagine, and then act out what they think will happen to test their idea.

![](/assets/3b5cb03a5440aedabe5cff543db4f6313b8933f9-1000x1332.png)

## Build

When testing futuristic design ideas without actually building potentially impossible futuristic technology, the most important thing to remember is:

> **Context > believe-ability > feasibility**

The context in which the people in our stories will interact with the prototype is key. Where they sitting down? Are they using their hands? Is it dark? Are they underwater? Then comes believe-ability: this is where you draw from real world experience. In this example, a futuristic scene from _Star Wars_ is made familiar through the scenario of a grounded pilot at war.

![](/assets/2f84221883c143e9e6603a020407bb50ed2f8f17-1400x705.png)

##

Shoot a video

Finally, the teams used their phones to make short clips to communicate their solutions. Video prototypes help with explaining the concept, and also, importantly, with user empathy as you act out the interactions with the prototype. This forces the designer into the role of the person living that life, and forces a deeper interrogation of the ideas being developed. The teams explored how to interact with food and each other in a range of scenarios: in the dark, without cutlery, with no teeth, etc.

Pro tip for video prototyping: use Instagram stories or [Apple’s Clips App](https://www.apple.com/clips/)

One innovative team even used their photo library to make stop motion clips ( one filming the other as they flicked through their photo library)!

![](/assets/9ccb9d007f09919fb2c51598be52017abe8197ac-1400x1865.jpg)

We were super-grateful to everyone who came and threw themselves into these food “what ifs”. And we can’t wait to see what’s next for Cookpad and CIID’s creative partnership going forward.

![](/assets/c7a2cf23ae0eba3b32aeede20d307f1a55ce8033-1400x933.jpg)

_This article was originally published in [**Medium**](https://medium.com/ciid-stories/how-to-design-the-future-of-food-in-4-hours-feb3de598cbb)._


How to Design the Future of Food in 4 Hours


If you’ve ever worked with a designer facilitating a workshop, or a supplicant of design thinking, you’ve probably heard the words “How Might We” spoken as though they were capitalized.

How Might We’s (HMWs) are one of many tools in the designer's toolkit to think about a problem space within an intentionally expansive (or divergent) mentality, instead of in a reductive (or convergent) one. It’s a tool that you can use to facilitate a discovery process, structure your own ideation process, or force an expansive way of thinking — especially if that isn’t your path.

At the end of an HMW process, you’re often looking at a wall or sketchbook filled with different, reasonable, bizarre, obvious, unlikely, or bang-on-right ideas. These ideas can be discarded, recycled into the process, or explored in more detail. But the question is how do you get there? With a team of designers acclimated to the process, you’ll usually rip through 100+ ideas in a 15 minute session and get on to exploring the one or two standouts in more detail. For others, it might take a few tries before you really get use to and feel comfortable with the process.

## **Steps in the HMW Process**

0: Prep

1: Identify a general brief or “mission statement”

2: Break that down into “How Might We” statements

3: Breakdown and enumerate components of HMWs

4: Brainstorm solutions on individual HMWs

5: Repeat/Recycle/Research

**0: Prep**

Make sure there are enough 3x5 and 3x3 Postits for everyone at the table, as well as large format Sharpies (which take up more of the post-it, forcing brevity). Having a sense of what the project purpose is (see “The Cooperative Brief”) will help, as well as knowing exactly how much time you have. Assign a single facilitator to keep time, assign speaking rights, and serve as a live-synthesizer.

**1: The Brief**

A succinct brief is vital, and the fuel for this process. That brief can come from anywhere: the mission statement of your client or business; the opportunity you’ve identified in a customer base; or a policy that needs to be implemented. Let’s make up a mission statement, say: Our goal is to reduce digital addiction and get people outside.

So, that has two parts:

![](/assets/047067af69d7391f9654dc1e00986e84e3673d7c-456x150.png)

**2: Creating HMW statements**

Creating the HMW statement is tied to how you break down the brief. Reduce Digital Addiction is a good starting point, as you can already frame it as _HMW Reduce digital addiction_?

![](/assets/48c1440fad78fd3ab8eed4593581072352d1fcf6-699x720.png)

Consider your timing — you might want to vote at this stage, and only pick a few HMWs to focus on.

**3: Breaking apart an HMW statement (optional)**

This isn’t usually necessary for experienced design teams, but it’s a good way to push past confusion when facilitating.

![](/assets/f568f68b627859473b1a4fa7c4ed5a0cc565ab6a-702x549.png)

Repeat this step for each of the main HMWs you’ve selected.

**4: Brainstorming Solutions**

This is where we bring together the different steps into ideas. Focus on a single HMW, and put it in a distinct place where all the participants can see.

Then set a time limit and possibly a goal. 5 minutes and 5 ideas is usually easy for any team. Everyone goes heads down for 5 minutes and sketches out their ideas. The facilitator keeps time and reminds people to switch up every minute. The ideas can look like any of these:

![](/assets/01808a7f84f519b923fa115e071c7e855cab22ae-648x213.png)

After 5 minutes, ask everyone to go around and put their sketches up on the board, describing them as they go. Ask others to sketch new ideas or changes as they are inspired by what they see. Spend a few minutes talking about the ideas after everyone has had their turn.

**5: Repeat/Recycle/Research**

Turning these ideas into a clear next step is the hardest part. You have 3 non-mutually-exclusive options:

**Repeat:** Go through another HMW and generate new ideas. Just repeat steps 3–4 with the HMWs you have, as many times as you can within your time limit. Or, if you discovered new things about the mission statement or have new ideas for HMWs, you can even add on a step 1 and 2 if you want.

**Recycle:** Take what you’ve learned and iterate on the HMWs you’ve developed. This is where voting might help you focus as a team on the most representative ideas. Are there new directions or more specificity that emerged? Spend some time brainstorming new HMWs around new solutions to dig deeper.

**Research:** Take the solutions that your team selected, and vote on the best ones — probably the top 3–5 solutions. Split those solutions out into teams from the group, and spend some more time on them. This can be anywhere from 30min to a few days.

You’ll learn about the solution you identified, build prototypes and more in-depth sketches, find ways of testing it with users, and build a more comprehensive ideas understanding of the feasibility, viability, and desirability of the solution. Come back together and share what you’ve discovered.

### **What’s Next?**

This is one of many techniques that you can throw at a problem, but it’s particularly effective for focusing a team on the “think broadly” part of a problem without going crazy and getting lost. It also gives you a clear and repeatable way of going from a broad statement with many unknowns to a variety of starting points that challenge assumptions and surface  
new opportunities.

Always though, the next step should be getting real. Prototype your ideas, test your assumptions, and be willing to change course or start over.

## Do the better research with the right admin tools

Of course, when it comes to research, there’s some important administration. Before, I always found this to be a chore. [Which is is why I built Knowsi.](https://www.knowsi.com/)

Collecting the right consent from participants, scheduling, and organizing the media afterwards in a GDPR compliant and responsible way becomes easy. Plus, participants know you value their privacy because they get their own receipt of the consent form with the ability to reach out afterwards.

[Give Knowsi a try with a 1 week trial today](https://www.knowsi.com/join), and [sign up for our mailing list](https://www.knowsi.com/?mail=true) for a discount code and more articles like this every few weeks.

*Note: Thanks to* [_Ayla Newhouse_](https://medium.com/u/d3670aea1173?source=post_page-----c04423a4437d--------------------------------) *for co-developing this tool for a workshop we taught together.*

_This article was originally published on [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/hmw-how-might-we-c04423a4437d)._
**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/hmw-how-might-we-c04423a4437d).\_


HMW How Might We?


In design teams, the “Brief” is often a shared understanding of the challenge the team is facing. It should include the client or corporate understanding of the need, major stakeholders, deadlines, tangible outcomes to be delivered, and personal needs or constraints for the team. This is the basic checklist for the task at hand, and sets the groundwork for the next weeks or months of work.

But most briefs fail to provide design teams with an adequate structure for moving forward. They might articulate the need, but fail to identify the full breadth of stakeholders needed for a program’s success. Alternatively, they might see a glut of stakeholders whose articulation of the problem muddies the stated objectives: making quality work within the constraints of timeline and deliverables impossible. The design team is responsible for working with the client and between team members to develop an articulation of the problem that can:

- Deliver on the promise of great work
- Maintain a predictable but flexible course
- Maintain team wellbeing and mental health
- Help the client better articulate their goals

![](/assets/68d3e62d8b7280c492b876267065a9d755fbc2f4-1400x301.jpg)

## **Structure**

The steps described below are the five (or six) steps you might take in facilitating a workshop with your primary stakeholders/clients to create an effective collaborative brief.

0: Create the environment to create the brief

1: Look for the Hard Constraints (Budget, stakeholders, team, deadlines, regulation, etc)

2: Create lists of beliefs or needs (Our hypothesis is; We’ve found that; etc.)

3: Articulate the project goal in big letters

4: Identify Stakeholders and re-address any of the hard constraints or beliefs

5: Iterate on the project articulation as appropriate.

## **0: Setting the stage**

A strong design process as much about creating the right environment for great work to emerge as it is about creating the work itself. Designing your brief is no different. A great “Brief making” session looks like no more than about 6–8 people. It should include the design team lead, the main client and known major stakeholders. If it’s a technical project, a senior technical team member should also be present. If it’s a venture design project, getting a design-centric MBA who paid attention in their financial seminars is worth including on the team and in this meeting. If you’re lucky enough to have a mentor or advisor who can contribute to/bill time to the project, make sure she’s present as well.

The room should have whiteboards and ideally walls that can hold up postit notes or butcher paper for pinning. Pre-seed some buckets for people to fill with post-its and notes. Some examples might include:

![](/assets/ca98be98715c403766d0eef1b917a00564770049-714x342.png)

Budget at least 90min to work through everything, and try to have a loose timeline in place to get through everything that needs getting through. If you get everything but key stakeholders, for example, the brief will be incomplete.

## **1: Hard Constraints**

Surfacing the initial constraints is often the easiest part. Your client might be working towards a public launch date, or perhaps you’re working towards something that has to be completed before the end of the fiscal year. Sometimes there are only two others designers who can contribute to the team, or in-house engineering is unavailable. Perhaps there isn’t a timeline at all, but you have a capped budget to play with inclusive of expenses.

Surfacing these kinds of constraints early on helps limit the field of play, and helps give form to the project. Design activity is like a liquid that fills up whatever space it is provided, so knowing the size and shape of the vessel in question is vital, and a bigger vessel isn’t always better.

## **2: Beliefs and Needs**

Human activity starts from a place of beliefs about a problem or opportunity, and a need that drives an investment of time and capital. Surfacing these beliefs and assumptions becomes a vital activity to direct the early investigations within a project, and form the initial hypotheses to be surfaced. If the team becomes stuck at any point, revisiting these beliefs and needs can help identify important next steps.

There’s a number of facilitation tools you can apply in this section. A solid go-to is the Ad-Lib approach:

![](/assets/4243378559a428d45f97ae8f8a770d3997d4aefb-936x282.png)

Alternatively, a “spectrum” of Obvious to Far Out hypotheses can be a fun activity for users

![](/assets/38e706a21ede135dea5bccb149d6a2eaadd4532a-966x416.png)

##

**3: The Project Goal**

Effectively articulating the project goal includes two things: clear directions to the design team in terms of constraints and hard requirements, and providing flexibility in forging a creative path forward. In the best case scenario, a well-articulated project goal empowers the design team to represent the program’s intent in every decision, even in advocating for risky or contentious directions to the client.

Once again, an ad-lib approach when facilitating this section can be effective for focusing participants. Taking the example of **designing experiments**, I might put four buckets on the wall:

![](/assets/816f923f65580de7a8ff28c28aab42e22791bc58-1188x212.png)

After filling these buckets with content from the team and voting on them, you should be able to form a sentence:

“**As** Airline customer experience designers, **we want to explore** DECREASING service costs by providing a better customer experience to users. **This will enable us to** INCREASE revenue and extend our network. **We believe we can accomplish this by** ethnographic research within the air travel experience and co-designing with flight attendants.”

## **4: Stakeholders and Constraints again**

Once you’ve decided on your Project Goal, it’s time to revisit your stakeholders and hard constraints. Often the extended stakeholder network for the first idea isn’t the same as the decided upon brief, or occupy different levels of importance to the activity. A good exercise is to do a simple radial stakeholder mapping activity like this:

![](/assets/ad8251dbc068c25c9a71407f3ba13686ebd7e9b6-792x612.png)

Make sure to revisit the constraints. Maybe one of them is no longer a hard constraint, but is instead has become flexible or a guideline. Perhaps the previous deadlines weren’t as important now that the Project Goal has been more effectively articulated.

## **5: Repeat/Reframe**

This whole process is meant to be iterative. Don’t hesitate to revisit different sections, or go through the whole activity again if you haven’t locked everything down. Sleeping on the decisions made and coming back for a day two can help in taking things that extra step to a really excellent brief. It can take an extended team up to a week and multiple sessions to align on some more complicated endeavors, so don’t second guess the feelings that something “might not be quite right.”

## **What’s Next?**

The next step is to clarify and synthesize everything for the broader design time and stakeholder network. Sharing the outcomes of this workshop can take the form of a board, a deck, or a one-pager describing the project. It’s really up to how the client consumes and disseminates information. After the team gets started though, you’ll need to MAINTAIN this great starting point, which is what we describe in the next post.

Thanks to [Ayla Newhouse](https://medium.com/u/d3670aea1173?source=post_page-----e7570400299c--------------------------------) for collaborating on this post!

_This article was originally published in [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/building-co-operative-design-briefs-e7570400299c)._


Building Co-operative Design Briefs


With some luck and a generous vacation policy at my work, I was finally able to do a Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course. WFR is certification and training aimed at those who might need to stabilize a patient and wait for definite care in a setting where evacuation might take twenty-four hours or longer: Folk doing backcountry adventures, distance cyclists, Search and Rescue (SAR) volunteers, outdoor adventure guides, etc. In circumstances where you are over an hour away from care, there are things that you can do as a WFR that other first responders can’t in an urban setting: pulling traction on an angulated fracture to restore circulation and splint the injury, stopping CPR after no response, and ”clearing” a suspected spinal injury to name a few.

![](/assets/8b5a0d83fd85c81780eceb2976ecbce2bfb4d73a-668x1188.jpg)

I took the course for two reasons.

First, I’ve done a lot of distance cycling, bike camping, and some backpacking. But that fear over “what if” has stopped me from pushing myself beyond a few days in, or too far into back country. With this course, I hoped that I’d feel more confident in pushing myself to explore further.

Second, over the past few years I’ve had a lot of peripheral exposure to disaster management as a set of disciplines. I’ve found my interest steadily growing and the recent climate change exacerbated disasters in 2017 lent a sense of immediacy to that.

![](/assets/52551ed84d2ae36fb36e09dd6d8eaf37166b892b-668x1188.jpg)

Through IDEO, I learned from [work my colleagues did with Team Rubicon](https://www.ideo.com/case-study/designing-a-global-plan-for-disaster-response); had contributed towards the open source development of [City72](http://toolkit.sf72.org/) disaster information hub; helped put together a proposal for a disaster management incident command system; and worked with Planned Parenthood medical staff as we [researched patient experience](https://www.ideo.com/case-study/planned-parenthoods-new-way-forward). Also, my direct boss ran a Search and Rescue team in his spare time (somehow). Since then, I worked at the Pentagon for the US Digital Service, which came with its own variety of experiences and opportunities, including learning from the experience of service members who had served as first responders in the past.

![](/assets/ff2de4220bae7c7d15970a17cded0d381aaefc50-668x1188.jpg)

It’s a world that I’d like to be able to contribute more meaningfully to, and so this course, getting [ICS certifications](https://training.fema.gov/is/courseoverview.aspx?code=IS-100.b), and looking for a SAR team is going to be my next step towards developing knowledge in this space.

I had signed up for a session taught at Johns Hopkins University by SOLO Wilderness Medicine about 6mo before the actual course. The class filled quickly: mostly JHU undergrad students taking the certification in order to lead back country trips as guides for their outdoors club. There were two other older students like myself, both of whom were re-certifying their WFR.

![](/assets/acb79fb5cbbd30a6844edca2ad6a44f6dbac13fb-668x1188.jpg)

The course totaled 80 hours, with a mix of theory and practical scenarios. We had two instructors: Charles Kirland and Samantha Willsey, who had expertise that were different but complementary. Charles had some insane experiences, from remote field medicine in Antarctica to being a street medic in Texas. Sam had worked in conservation and education around the US, and had a list of jaw dropping experiences from lightning strikes to SAR stream crossings. Combined, they had a tale (and often a photo) for almost everything taught in the course.

![](/assets/e57c3ea29948f10e3328eb69ca5d1b1b258e5c3c-668x1188.jpg)

Over the 9 days, we were learning to recognize signs and symptoms, apply various structured assessment tools to investigate a victim’s ailment, and narrow in on potentials actions. We learned to assess the severity of an ailment as well, and ways to tackle threats to life and limb. What we learned in the classroom was quickly applied outside. One moment we’re learning about the locations of nerves and arteries in the leg, the next we’re pulling traction on and splinting another student’s leg with a simulated femur fracture. As a simulation victim, it often involved screaming, belligerence, and fake blood — our ability to understand and emulate symptoms being as much a component of the grading as understanding how to treat them. As the responders, we had to divide up tasks, watch each other’s backs, and look after our own well-being as much as we did the patient’s.

![](/assets/b98376ffffcc025c9189e3304a287cf759bfa2c2-668x1188.jpg)

Reflecting at the end of the course, I was was most stuck on that question of confidence. The skills I learned don’t really make outdoor recreation safer. I still might slip and impale myself on a tree, or get zapped by lightning, or step on the wrong snake or scorpion, or wrap around a tree on my bike. In fact, I spent no small part of this course reflecting on some of the stupid things I’ve done outdoors, from ill-advised bike jumps, to getting lost without map or signal device on a trail, to near-misses while climbing.

![](/assets/bb0181cccb9a9b12445b65a6778ead9e7be04a0b-942x942.jpg)

Bad things might still happen, but the skills developed as a WFR serve to mitigate the long-term damage a patient might receive from a trauma (eg. loss of a limb from lost circulation or frostbite, a brain injury from hypothermia, or being moved incorrectly when a spinal injury is possible). It should also help you reduce the risk of worst case scenarios by recognizing and addressing warning signs early, having a plan for evacuation, and getting them (or me) to definitive care. Or, best case, knowing what MIGHT happen and just doing things differently.

![](/assets/3ed3e528e1252163e843b2bb4db9c939ef381645-2268x4032.jpg)

To paraphrase my friend [Paul Bell](https://paulbelladventures.wordpress.com/) — you can take more interesting risks and ultimately have greater adventures if you cover the quotidian risks upfront. And I suspect that having some Benadryl and parachord in my pack (and a bunch of other things) with the knowledge of when and how to use them is a positive step towards that philosophy.

![](/assets/d6b99a1c4ecfef0b288461c973a3cc033c38e436-2267x4032.jpg)

_This essay was originally published in [**Medium**](https://medium.com/@andrewlb/benadryl-and-parachord-2a0f74d592f5)._


Benadryl and Parachord


*These tools were taught as a workshop to the first* [_Code for Canada fellowship_](https://codefor.ca/) \*team in November 2017. Article originally published in [**Medium**](https://medium.com/knowsi/bureaucratic-mysteries-design-tools-for-government-9842decdf9fa)**\*_._**

Building the actual product or technology is rarely the coda on the work that is social entrepreneurship and government software. More frequently, we see much of the labour existing in collaboration with our government and civil society partners: in building consensus, forming coalitions, cutting through roadblocks, and mapping the bureaucracy.

In my time at the US Digital Service, IDEO, and more recently New America, there are a set of tools I often apply in working through this complexity and communicating that complexity with my team. And a significant part of this technique I believe comes from some mental muscles I developed in college studying classical literature. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the characters create a densely interconnected — but logical– community of influence. Zeus sits as king: impertinent, meddling, and cruel. Hera is at his side, manipulative, jealous, but loyal. Athena is the goddess of wisdom and all things military: untouchable, disciplined, and wise. Hercules is the human face of divinity: brash, contradictory, and flawed.

Each of the gods in the Pantheon represented a place in Greek cultural thought. They are metaphors through which people described the world, and rationalized what they observed in it. In doing our work as government technologists, we daily encounter the same mythologies. Bureaucracy ebbs and flows in its daily patterns, but when the dam bursts or the crops die, we scramble for explanations as to why.

The goal of these tools is to untangle the web of stakeholders that make up any given technology project and to identify from the chaos the actors who appear most frequently in the story, who wield the most power, and who seem to hold sway over the narrative. If we can see that clearly, maybe we can push towards a better ending.

## Sisyphus

Bureaucracies are enduring because they codify understanding of a system through regulation and daily practice.

One of the strangest things I encountered in government and civil society was a manual practice of estimation. Every week, a group would run an ancient desktop program that created a model of resource distribution. This model would be manipulated by two operators (one of whom we’ll come back to later) to create a “recommendation” for how these resources might be moved between locations. This model was then transmitted through a variety of systems, and eventually landed at the desk of a planner. The planner promptly threw it out, and proceeded to run their own model through a combination of automated and manual processes. These processes were then implemented and acted upon. One of the operators who I mentioned earlier, having realized their sisyphean task, had more or less given up. His colleague continued to diligently push the boulder uphill.

Sisyphus is a Greek legend of a cursed king forever pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again. He is also patron saint of bureaucracies (at least to me). Nominally, he is being punished for his ways of subversion and deceit — breaking rules that were core to the Greek understanding of society. Bureaucracies are created to enforce and act along defined rulesets, and to enforce these rulesets, specific structures and systems calcify around them. These systems tend to follow rules themselves, each of which is specific to the organizations in question.

## Playbook

You’re a young social entrepreneur with a head for technology and a desire to have impact. Unfortunately, you have just beamed into a confusing landscape of different agencies and organizations, interests and histories. Your mission is to figure out what is going on, and hopefully identify why your constituents are receiving such terrible services. However, you don’t know everything: after all, you have your experiences to work from and don’t really understand the experiences of those who have been working so long to deliver these services in the first place. You need to get to know the landscape before you can hope to change it.

Here’s a quick checklist of things to know BEFORE and DURING your use of these tools.

**PRE-REQ**

- Get introductions
- Know the ranks (eg. in US, GS scale and mil ranks)
- Know the acronyms (USTRANSCOM, FYSA, USCENTCOM, etc)
- Know the key players (commanders, public figures, major past projects)

**Environmental Scan**

- Go to whatever agency you’re in
- Get to know the stakeholders
- Find the highest level buy-in person you can: in DOD that was a combatant command general or a secretary
- Go to the place where the work happens
- Stay there for a while and just wander around talking to people and knocking on doors

**Situational Awareness**

- Map out the territory
- Who is everyone? Be specific. Write down names, job titles, what they do, who they report to, where they sit.
- Get security card access. ALWAYS.
- Get to know the security people.
- Get to know the people who do the work (low levels)

So once some of all of these are in place, now what?

Below are four tools that build on top of each other, and will give you some of the hard-to-get information you need to move forward and make decisions.

## Archetypes — Identifying Roles

Who are these roles and what do they do? Why are they effective at their job and why are they not? What are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, and who do they depend on?

How long have they been there and where were they before?

Understanding the archetypes within the system allow us to break down the individual components of the system.

Working in government, the space I found most effective was in mapping out connections and “jobs.” Similar to a “jobs to be done” framework in product management, individuals in a bureaucratic organization tend to have _very_ specific jobs and responsibilities. These responsibilities are then mapped across the hierarchy, and sometimes accomplished by delegation and management.

###

### Why?

Articulating the archetypes you’ll encounter in your research gives you the basic knowledge to navigate a bureaucracy which often is self-replicating. It also forces you to narrow down the set of actors and look for commonalities across departments. Fundamentally, this is the building block of a number of clustering activities.

###

### How To

Archetypes are an artifact that emerge out of research and exploration. Go into a team and start exploring. Ask yourself: who is doing the most talking? Who seems to be deferred to? Who is responsible for what? Who is mentioned the most in one-on-one interviews?

If you have a research team mate (I hope you do!), review your research notes and transcribe to post-it notes. From these notes, whittle the whole thing down to the worksheet provided below. Even if you didn’t get a chance to interview someone, try and fill out their role as much as possible.

Don’t fill in the Archetype name until last!

**EXAMPLE Names include: **The Trickster, The Explorer, The Caregiver, The Hero, The Rebel, The Artist, The Ruler. However, **you should come up with your own archetype names**. Sometimes “the Trickster” is actually a brilliant synthesizer of information, and works tirelessly to move the organization into a more progressive and effective direction. Perhaps they aren’t “The Trickster,” but “The Revolutionary” or “Hercules”, to return to the Greek theme.

When you are finished, you will have duplicate roles. This is fine, and you can simply enumerate them. A thing to keep in mind is that too many of one archetype may actually be part of the problem you’re trying to solve.

### Worksheet

![](/assets/25e17653ae2de059aad833286500dcbfad0f3fb6-792x612.jpg)

### Example Scenario

![](/assets/7190552e0b1c3c2903054ded566819f0068456f1-1400x1050.jpg)

## Mapping the Pantheon (Mapping the Roles)

What is the story that creates the bureaucratic machine that we’re investigating? What is the myth that its operators believe? Its customers? How is that myth perpetuated, and who are the protagonists, the bit players, and the people sacrificed to the plot? The Pantheon as depicted on the Greek Parthenon and in friezes and artifacts across the ancient world, describes discussing the relationship between the different parts of a workflow or service. Its actors, its artifacts, and its outcomes. By visualizing, it gives us the basis to ask critical questions, and shift our understanding of the problem space

This activity requires you to embed with and map the existing system, and to extensively

Here, we map out a series of blueprints that map to the bureaucracies core functions, and weaving together the different stories that construct the system that you’re trying to intervene on.

### Why?

The goal of this activity is to make this flow, failure points, and handoffs of a system obvious. We also need to be able to easily re-tell the story to the stakeholders involved. This tool pays dividends later on as well when re-designing a service, beyond our focus on stakeholder mapping in this group of tools.

### How To

Print out a few of these sheets, and ask yourself: “Okay, what is the first step?”

In your notebook and during your interviews, you should have already started to map out some of these dynamics. Where does the information come from? Who owns that information? Who talks to the customer and who doesn’t? What is the catalyst for one of these workflows, and what causes the event or flow to be delayed?

These notes should be purposefully sketch-y. Don’t be afraid to cross out paths, make corrections, or work side-by-side with one of your government colleagues as you figure out what’s going out.

The path is important because it tells us where one smaller story starts, where it ends, and what new story starts where it left off. It helps us take a strategic lens to an information or human system, and trace it through its lifecycle. Finally, it surfaces the unknowns that are vital to making headway in this work.

### Worksheet

![](/assets/fc14d103e2d5be4a6689c5ee17803d722fdd9ac5-792x612.jpg)

### Example Scenario

![](/assets/af56e6efbdeee7215c5ef80954ce6ef2259b3f21-1400x1049.jpg)

##

## Mapping the Actors (Figuring out your wedge)

Mapping the importance of characters within the ecosystem is a tool for the individual and for the team to prioritize characters within the narrative. Matthew Weaver, one of the early US Digital Service leads who went by “Rogue Leader” often said “There is no bottom” when referring to bureaucratic challenges. But if there’s no bottom, then at least we can focus on the space around us to try and affect change.

This activity is focused on looking at our cast of characters and our maps, and developing a sense of who is important. Who is on our core team, or our confidant? Who is in every meeting and has a stake, but isn’t that core trusted figure? Who needs to be kept in the know or appears from time to time, but doesn’t need to be apprised of everything, or might contribute very specific and narrow value? Who do you want to push out, or just inform on a need to know basis?

### Why?

This framework is an excellent consensus building tool for your team, as well as a good way to communicate your understanding of the stakeholder map to the stakeholders themselves.

By asking these questions objectively and looking at the dynamics of who you want to bring closer and who you want to push out. You can push the question of “This person should be on the core team but wasn’t invited” towards “how do I get them closer?” or “Why not?”

### How To

Start by going through each of the archetypes. In pen or pencil, draw a little caricature or symbol, and write their name and what they do along the graph. You can also write them on small post-it notes or stickers, to let you move people around.

Looking at the two axes on the graph, plot where they might be. This particular graph is intentionally _biased_ towards importance to project vs. importance to bureaucracy when defining the different circles. If there are other biases or relationships that need to be captured, make sure you do that as well! As you draw out the different actors, always write down the REALITY of where they are, vs the IDEAL of where they might be. To represent that ideal, use arrows to communicate with your team where these folk should ideally be, and use that as a starting point to discuss how you might get them there.

### Worksheet

![](/assets/0c87bcf4402d18a9bc054b5f73f5fb84db3f6a5a-792x612.jpg)

###

### Example Scenario

![](/assets/b5c91ceb3fbcbaf32b1ddc43008aed9eeafa4924-1400x1050.jpg)

##

The Mysteries (Mapping the dark matter)

There’s the HIERARCHY of a bureaucracies and the SUBSTRUCTURE of the bureaucracy. The hierarchy exists above the surface and is often already mapped (or at least overt). The substructure exists below the surface and is non-obvious, but becomes intuitive to those who exist in that bureaucracy for long enough.

Consider the legend of Zeus and Dionysus. Dionysus is a translation of a hedonistic cult religion in the very early days of Greece. He’s the god of wine and alcohol, and also of madness. He doesn’t fit very well into the Pantheon, and yet is pervasive in Greek legends and tragedy. The Dionysian Mysteries were a set of practices that effectively undermined social constraints: a classical world version of basement concerts and beer pong. EVERY society has these things, as does every bureaucracy. They play the role of subverting the entrenched structure to really get things done. In this case, we want to understand WHO is a catalyst for this, WHERE these events occur, and WHY things have ended up this way. What are the stories behind the stories that make us need to break free?

In a research sprint I did at a hospital, I discovered that the real connectors were program admins: across deeply siloed research and technical units, the program admins were all only one or two steps removed from each other and _always_ knew which other admin to connect with after about 6mo on the job. These admins became de-facto gatekeepers to the programs, despite not having substantive power or title, and ultimately the design work (building more densely networked and open programs) resolved around their needs and capacity.

### Why?

This penultimate tool is meant to be a practical and evolving sketchpad throughout the program’s evolution. It should serve as a reference point within the team when making decisions about stakeholders and developing strategies for moving forward.

Also, and I apologize to our government friends, it’s also not always the best tool to share with your clients and government partners. This is a planning tool for the consultant team to make sense of an environment that everyone else takes for granted

### How To

This is the last step, and is the raw material for a strategy to influence the program. I always start with the core team, and organizing around them. This is a very practitioner-centric approach and not always the right one, but it is often where I am the most engaged. From there, go through your list of archetypes and the folk that you’ve listed on the Mapping the Actors activity, and list them all out. Start to draw lines between them, one-by-one. Who is a close friend? Who collaborates? Sometimes you can have both: rivals who nonetheless share intel, or teammates who are also close competitors.

Indicate the directionality of relationships too. These can sometimes be bi-directional. I’ve seen situations where managers are managing those who see them as competitors, or mentors whose status has been uplifted by their mentees. If there are other types of relationships, fill them in and find a way to represent them.

This activity is best done in a team setting, where everyone can contribute their opinion and perspectives on the relationships.

### Worksheet

![](/assets/1a7d3a5c8eb8c3844210ce9dbd3cc7efb1de99d9-792x612.jpg)

### Example Scenario

![](/assets/b8c5bfa101ad5d51533222be6334e2bd8af47a5a-1400x1049.jpg)

## What’s next?

You’ve used these tools to try and get an understanding of this landscape. So what’s next? Hopefully, you should have a good understanding of who all the major players are, who you want to be involved where, and how you might move forward on having a positive impact.

Here’s a quick checklist that can get you going on asking the questions to have impact.

- Use these tools to sketch out current AND ideal states
- Bring sketches along so you can show people in future interviews (“is this right? does this make sense?”)
- Who do you want closer to the project? Who do you want pushes out?
- Use your understanding of the Mysteries and Dark Matter to figure out who you need to win over and convince to push the problematic people out
- Who do you need to get in a room in order to collaborate?
- Who do you need to kick out of the room because they force themselves in?

This enhanced knowledge will help you understand where your technology and where your skills as a social entrepreneur will have the greatest impact, and by bringing those who you’re hoping to work with along for the ride, hopefully you’ll have made some great allies along the way.

If you have any questions, contact me at [alb@andrewlb.com](mailto:alb@andrewlb.com) and we can chat about how this approach might work for your specific challenge.

*Originally published at* [_pit.andrewlb.com_](https://pit.andrewlb.com/design-thinking-for-gov) *on February 1, 2018.*


Bureaucratic Mysteries


How do you know that a software business with a social mission is actually a Social Product Venture? Some might be able to glance at a business and declare “I know it when I see it”, but when dealing with the capital required to hire the best talent to build impactful social good products, we need a more effective and less inscrutable spotter’s guide.

Social Product Ventures exist across a continuum of potential organizational structures: from for-profit businesses with social missions baked-in, to not-for-profits with unique granting structures and partnerships, and everything in-between. Diversity in this way is helpful and good: it creates options and resilience within the social product marketplace. But it creates challenges when it comes to saying concretely “This is a Social Product Venture”, vs. the alternative. If we can’t have a concrete classification like “Delaware C Corp”,“501(c)3 Not for Profit”, “Washington Benefit Corp”, perhaps we can at least have a heuristic for Thoughtful Spotters to navigate the world of social good software businesses.

![](/assets/2b8b2b17de1977e1eac4b2016c1497e3830edf8c-842x595.jpg)

This guide came from my experience using the [Business Model Canvas](https://strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas). The canvas is a tool created by Alex Osterwalder et al. to prototype and explore business models in a rapid fire and concise way. The idea for the spotter’s guide wasn’t as a prototyping tool, but as a tool for classification and understanding. At IDEO, we worked with so many different kinds of businesses and business models, that our head would spin. The Business Model Canvas became an invaluable “Sanity Check” tool, especially when something was unfamiliar or sounded too good to be true. The Business Model Canvas helped us break down what we were seeing, and reveal the familiar and unfamiliar for what it was.

In looking at Social Product Ventures, this Sanity Check has become incredibly important. Many for-profit businesses espouse a social mission or vision for changing the world, but ultimately have nothing organizationally in place to support that mission. Likewise, many not-for-profits talk about technology and product innovation, but have no mechanisms in place to support actual product development and infrastructure. To start making sense of these, I borrowed from the business model canvas and broke down the four verticals that I think are most important:

- _Organization_ (Creators, experience, business type, and support)
- _Thesis_ (Value proposition, metrics, and mission contract)
- _Customers_ (Customers who pay, and Beneficiaries who benefit)
- And _Financials_ in summary (revenue streams, pricing model, expenditures, and key risks)

Each section has a series of checklists with points I keep encountering in my interviews with social product founders. For example, a product team almost always has a Technical person, a Designer, and Product person. In the social venture space, a legal/policy person might also be a subject matter expert, and the Product person is often tied to sales.

Some sections don’t have checklists because they are too diverse, or unique to that market. “Pricing Strategies” could be a checklist if it is a Software-as-a-Service business, but when navigating the relationship between Customer and Beneficiaries, there is often a unique proposition. For example, in the Electronic Health Record space, EHR systems were often priced according to federal funding for “Meaningful Use” dollars, and not market demand per-se.

**Organizations** is broken down into Creators, Experience, Business Type, and Support.

- Creators are the founding and core team. Where possible, I try to write who is what next to each checkmark, and often early stage businesses will have one person filling multiple roles.
- Experience relates to the founding team’s experience leading into the business. This is often a secret sauce that can hint at the potential for success.
- Biz Type is the type of organization and core model, which is a bit more static and foundational. Where possible, you can also list the type of incorporation.

**Thesis** relates to the core principal and world view of the business, broken down into the Value Proposition, how that value is measured, and what I’ve called the Mission Contract.

- Value Propositions can be defined in many ways. I’ve laid out a few examples that are common in the social good space, which are often simply improving on existing processes. A “Systemic Change” value proposition might be a [Grameen Bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank), an “Improved Efficiency” might by a [Turbotax-like tool for a terrible bureaucratic system](https://upsolve.org/), and a “New Capability” might be [Food Stamp balances over text message](http://splash.codeforamerica.org/balance/english/ak/).
- Metrics are split into Social measures and Business measures. Traditional business measures like Customer Acquisitions and Conversions, various measures of Recurring Revenue, and similar are vital for social good businesses to track. It becomes more challenging with Social Impact measures, such as [Social ROI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_return_on_investment). There are great tools like [Sinzer.org](http://www.sinzer.org/) that have frameworks for tracking and development these metrics, and I will be developing a tool to help Social Product Ventures explore and define their own success metrics
- The Mission Contract is a key section with a concrete list of things that enshrines and protects the social mission of the business. The might be on the far end of incorporating as a Not-For-Profit or B. Corp, or seeking mission-oriented Venture funding, or establishing an advisory board for community representatives. If this comes up short, you may not be looking at a Social Product Venture.

**Customers** are the general mix of customers, users, and beneficiaries. I’ve specifically not put User in this category, as that categorization is generally covered in the B2B vs. B2C (vs B2B2C) definitions in “Biz Type”

- Customers are anyone who is paying for the product. This might be a Not-For-Profit, an aid provider like a legal aid clinic, a company like Kickstarter looking to track its B.corp status with a B2B social impact tool, or a user who is a direct aid seeker AND paying for the product somehow.
- Beneficiaries have a mirrored list of check marks, and include anyone who directly (or indirectly) benefits from the venture’s value proposition. This is often someone who is seeking and receiving aid, or a Not-For-Profit that is able to improve its pipeline.

**Financials** are heavily abstracted, and are mostly a tool to drive more specific questions. They capture Revenue Stream and Pricing Strategy, as well as Expenditures and Major Risks

- Revenue Stream is anything that is bringing in resources with a monetary value (at this point). This can be investment, grants, in-kind partnerships, high-value volunteer hours, etc.
- Pricing Strategy is how the business makes money through its product or service. It might be a yearly licensing fee, it might be tied to a federal funding policy, it might be a per-user usage fee, or a filing fee. Every business has to find the pricing strategy that fits its model and mission, so expect massive variation here.
- Expenditures are the primary drains to your accounts. For software businesses, this is almost always salary and–at-scale–infrastructure. But there might be additional expenditures too, such as licensing, legal fees, property, or logistics.
- Major Risks are the big existential threats. In a highly regulated space, it might be the risk of being in breach or boxed into an ineffective business model. For a not-for-profit serving a smaller community, it might be over-reliance on a single foundation. These are many and should be acknowledged.

By explicitly mapping these factors for software-based businesses with social missions, it enables us to understand, compare, and explore businesses that seem wildly different on their surface, yet carry commonalities in their founding DNA. It allows us to ask the questions that are relevant, and explore the reasons for different decisions with a lens to learn from each business’ unique traits.

So what’s next? This tool is in its very early stages, and will be evolving continuously. I’m actively interviewing social product businesses right now, and have benefited from some great conversations that I’ll be sharing in the coming weeks. These are businesses that are building software products in a dozen different ways, with unique approaches to funding, and with a thoughtful eye for how they can both do good and grow at the same time. If you’re a Social Product Venture and you think you could fill out this Spotter’s Guide, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at [alb@andrewlb.com](mailto:alb@andrewlb.com).

_This article was originally published on [**Medium**](https://medium.com/@andrewlb/a-spotters-guide-to-social-product-ventures-d9eb8dd0ebde)._


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