andrewlb.com · craft

Mining Towns

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

For the last 20 years, we’ve all been getting mapped by machines. Global (who am I kidding? American) wealth has been dramatically shaped by this reality, and politics, identity, career, and opportunity are the fallout. There’s a purely extractive model to this mapping, as well as a constructive model. Both take — probably more than they give back. And while both are net negative, but I think the latter might have some human value.

Usually, this mapping is extractive via “attention economy” mechanics, where every mL of attention is being enthusiastically squeezed out our frontal lobes. This is the mined resource that powers the growth of software startups, the mentality of customer acquisition and churn, and the reality that most of us become captured by platforms that are just advertising platforms masquerading as communication tools. The grand bet that Meta took over the past few years is an even deeper mining of that attention via virtual reality. The new bet is that dumping all of our energy resources into GPUs will leverage (and refine) our attention, emotions, and time even more heavily. If the raw crude is all tapped via social media, let’s get into that high pressure fracking slurry — and make sense of it after.

Then there’s the constructive model of mapping. And I don’t mean constructive in the positive “that is a constructive comment.” More in the “pertaining to the activity of constructing” way. This is frequently of YouTube and Reddit, where individuals self-select into communities and a funnel of curiosity to interest to language to participation to identity is traversed. Throughout this whole process, micro-economies of purchase decisions, low-effort product, niche services, and thematic merchandise emerge. Sometimes organic (passionate participant creations, Etsy crafts), other times manufactured (drop shippers, market hunters), sometimes in between (fandoms). The important thing about the constructive model is not so much that products are coming out of it: it’s that the “mapping” taking place is manufacturing a new consumer within that milieu by moving them through this funnel. What’s interesting is that sometimes that consumer becomes a creator.

There are different ways to refer to this identity construction. I mentioned the curiosity-to-identity flow, but bumping up a layer of abstraction, I think these types work:

Civilian: Someone who is not part of the community or “fandom”. They might have curiosity and maybe some passing interest, but things stop there. I’m a Civilian when it comes to basically any pro team sport.
Consumer: Someone who consumes the output of the community, is usually “mined” for value in some way, and isn’t actively contributing to the community through new making. This is most people with an interest or hobby. Consumers are invested, but often from a “sunk cost” perspective. I’d be a Consumer on the “food science/history” side of things.
Creator: Someone who is actively creating within a community, but not necessarily profiting from their creation. Many communities have a very “low” threshold to creating, eg. anything that involves creating “fan art” or vulgar craft in a likeness of something. Importantly, creators tend to be “super consumers” as their participation enhances and reinforces investment in the community. I’m a Creator in the … whatever this is? gestures community side of things (newsletter, projects, etc).

Let’s look at four of these “constructive” communities where civilians get “mapped” by moving them through these flows. I’ll start each one with a “map” of adjacent communities, force projected for your social way finding pleasures. A brief description, and a breakdown of some key traits. I’ll then attempt to describe the structure as I see it, and represent that structure with a graph.

Indiehackers

https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=indiehackers

IndieHackers is an owned community site, but is broadly a group of solo, mostly technical makers of projects that are wired up for making money. I was (am?) one of these people with Knowsi, Pedal Pedal Club and Stupid Fits — though Knowsi was the only one that made money.

Key Traits

Classic e-myth revisited technicians -> Technical/makers seeking independence
Lifestyle vs hustle culture tension (4hr work week stuff)
Overlap with the “Digital Nomad” community
Content is basically performative success (“got to so-and-so ARR in 37 seconds on ProductHunt”), performative failures (“what I learned from 65 failed SaaS businesses”), or requests for assistance/feedback.
Community is overwhelmingly affluent, male, and technical.

Structure

Captures attention through a lifestyle promise and appeals to dissatisfied technicians (e.g. engineers at larger companies). These consumers are “transformed” into creators (or pseudo creators) through the community, which serves to feed the monetized platforms.
MANY of the success stories in this space are people who created a business out of serving this aspirational community. Coaching, courses, bespoke communities, paid newsletters, etc. Very MLM.
Capital is flowing into this community from aspiring indie hackers who are working on a side hustle while employed OR who have recently quit a role and are seeking guidance.

Vocaloid

https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=vocaloid

I’ve been playing with a vocal synth called Synth V recently, and had to wade through some weird youtube tutorials to figure out how to use it (though this song is great — top comment being “Making an anti AI song with a Vocaloid artist goes unfathomably hard”).

Vocaloids are vocal instruments that synthesize a person singing via a combo of synthesis and sampling. Originally sold as “backing vocals” (like the 303 was as a bass track for guitarists), they ended up being marketed via digital avatars meant to represent the synthesized voice, with their own fan bases growing around those characters. It got as far as David Letterman (who looks like he wants to strangle his producer).

Key Traits

Synthetic but charismatic brand entity/avatar is the focus, vs. the technology
Corporate brand owners leverage consumer interest to sell merch
Heavily online fan base and international — though focused in Asia.
Low barrier to entry for creative software, with lots of fan creations as a result. Several very talented producers write songs with Vocaloid, e.g. I thought this one was quite clever.
Fan content is attributed to the avatar, and often organized by it

Structure

Basic User-Generated-Content brand capture loop.
Civilians are exposed to some kind of charismatic brand entity, get curious, and are pulled into a consumer-to-creator funnel.
Creators generate content that reinforces the brand entity’s surface area and exposure
The copyright holders of the brand entity create merchandise and products tied to brand and encourage consumption.

ObsidianMD

https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=obsidianmd

Obsidian is approached as the mechanism for “personal knowledge management”, a response to information overload. Imagine forgetting a section of a book you read a year or two ago. Instead of re-reading the book and moving on with your life, you put on your game face and decide that you’re never going to lose again. That’s PKM.

Essentially, Obsidian takes an IDE approach to your word processing tool, and while I personally love it — it made the short list for this post very quickly when it came to “constructive” qualities within its community and business model.

Key Traits

Seemingly simple toolkit that is massively customizable — and therefore amplifies complexity.
Users trying to solve information/aspiration overload with software (looking at the map, you can see examples of language learning, note-taking, PKM, etc)
Aspirational minimalists with maximalist dispositions
Technical competent user base, but mostly not engineers
Broadly online, often in academia or knowledge work, and coming from other software (Evernote, bear, etc).

Structure

The Core Platform itself is free, and enables creators to build plugins on top of it. Plugins incentivizes consumers to get locked in to the Obsidian way of doing things (the investment/sunk cost trap of the consumer), even though the data format (markdown and folders) isn’t locked in.
Obsidian as a company has limited monetization of its community — but may be holding off for fear of chasing users off the platform. It essentially holds a monopoly to set the terms of its extraction because it owns the core platform.

Bitcoin

https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=bitcoin

Not sure how much I need to explain Bitcoin here. Putting my own politics on the table: I have a fair bit of optimism re: cryptocurrencies and protocols as a technology, but have a lot of skepticism around the capital markets and actors surrounding it. Ponzi schemes aside, the connection between the cryptocurrency technology cluster and /r/wallstreetbets is worth noting.(Obviously, if you click on this, PLEASE do not take any advice or make any kind of investment based on anything you see here).

Key Traits

A core technology that requires time investment and some prior knowledge to actually understand
A relatively high barrier to entry because the tech building blocks are built around a fundamentally different infrastructure and protocol
FOMO driven investment by both tech-savvy and consumer tech folk
Community driven by “true believers” and a formalization of “true believer” status through various protocols (e.g. NFT access to private discords)
Meme-savvy creators leveraging culture and the possibility of wealth to attract new consumers/creators

Structure

This one felt like the truest “loop” in the constructive/extractive model. Essentially Civilians end up gambling, consumers end up investing, and creators end up leveraging the core protocol around which the ecosystem is defined.
The platform itself creates a kind of hype-cycle which encourages progressively deeper investment in a particular protocol — with creators often “choosing a side” by focusing on one protocol or the other.
At every step, every type of participant is incentivized to promote and “hype up” the protocol. Particularly those with investments — as well as true believers — only have downside if new participants fail to appear with new investments in the ecosystem.

Mining Towns become Ghost Towns

There’s a lot of excitement in mining towns. They are typically frontiers; exciting and vibrant. People are working hard, things are getting made.

But mining towns don’t last. Eventually attention drifts elsewhere, and those selling shovels or novelty Miku hard hats move on. The interest part of writing this post was trying to sort through exactly what KIND of extraction I was seeing.

Dona Meadow’s Systems zoo is a perennially useful concept when looking at these interactions. If you’ve seen it once, you’ll probably see it again — just maybe with feathers next time. Looking the Bitcoin example, I wonder how much of the hype flywheel might apply in the Wallstreet Bets community? Would we find the same “UGC extraction” model of the Vocaloid communities replicated in other creator communities, like say Cricut or Midjourney? (Seriously people, avoid kits).

What makes me anxious is a future where we flit from community to community — swept along as the algorithm tries to pull us and our credit cards under. There’s no place in that world to take up roots, and being trapped as an attention-ally (not a word) fragmented consumer is not a life where one can really know themselves.

The Indie Hacker and Bitcoin examples seem dangerously slippery in that regard — growth-oriented communities that predates upon the unwary and doesn’t give anything in return unless the prey learns to leverage the system itself. In comparison, the Obsidian loop seems a healthy one — minimally extractive with an ecosystem-conscious extractor building the community’s engine. Maybe the Vocaloid one is fine — a benign parasite attached to a low-stakes system.

Still — there is some good to come from this mining town. In each of these cases, communities develop. Even if the entry point to a community is one that is artificial or predatory on the part of the corporation, consumers and creators who find themselves ensnared are at least with their tribe. The amateur Vocaloid producer making bitrotted pop covers isn’t creating for me, but for themselves and others in their “constructive” community. On the Obsidian side, I did the same with rehype-jsoncanvas — making a small contribution in a community of people trying to make sense of too much going on. Creating within a community is a wonderful thing, even when there’s a cost. Just know what that cost is.

Legibility in Work and Fiction

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

My path to technology and design is rooted in fiction. I realized this by when I revisited the source material. Here’s a little note about Cryptonomicon, being legible, and startups.

Cryptonomicon

I listened the the audio version of one of my favourite books — Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. This book has always been fun for me, but I don’t think I had entirely acknowledged its influence on how I think of the startup world on a normative level.

Basically, Cryptonomicon is an “social science fiction” adventure across two paralleled storylines — one in the late 90s dot com startup economy with a team of startup-types (explicitly using the metaphor of the Tolkien fellowship at times); and one taking place during World War 2. The main characters in both time-periods are mostly character archetypes and family lines from Neal Stephenson’s older series, the Baroque Cycle — Shaftoe the vagabond, Waterhouse the engineer/mathematician, Comstock the dilettante, etc. We get a wonderful treatments of historical characters like Alan Turing and Douglas McArthur in there as well.

In the World War 2 timeline, the characters live are overcome with how critical their skills with technology or cleverness relative to the war effort — and they lack a certain agency in applying these skills. The work is focused on cryptography, and the creation of the digital computer. Eventually however, they gain agency through accumulating power, or resources, or knowledge — and the importance of the war takes a back seat to their own interest, relationships, and beliefs.

In the dot com era timeline, there’s an inverse at play. The characters start with agency and lack focus. They exist in the era of computers, and specifically software and networks. They start with experience, community, and some resources developed almost by mistake — but because their environment doesn’t give them purpose, the main character in particular finds himself (using the Tolkien metaphor) “stuck in the shire.” This changes when the team creates a startup, and over the course of a year pivots their way around south-east Asia in the name of pursuing ‘shareholder value’ while having a bunch of adventures — culminating in each finding that overriding purpose and something new being created.

There’s a LOT more to the book than that (the information theory part itself is so, so well done), but for the purposes of this post, the thing to take from it is the adventure. The storylines orbit around the “new” in technological terms — the computer and the internet. And within that orbit, the characters are drawn into opportunity, danger, discovery, and awareness which results in an incredibly satisfying conclusion.

What was so incredibly striking for me as I immersed myself in this story again, was this thought “well shit, this is where my idea of starting a company comes from.”

Shareholder Value

I’ve had a few forays into the startup world, but have never entirely committed.

I created and ran Knowsi, a bootstrapped SaaS product which was semi-profitable — but it was part time, explicitly didn’t have external investors (though Sage Publishing provided a grant and network), and the idea wasn’t “big.” From the start, I wanted the idea to be small because I thought of Knowsi as one part of a portfolio of products I would pursue.
I’ve worked at three startups at different stages: pre-product as a founding IC, late-stage scaleup, and actually my first real employment experience was a highly volatile academic spinout. Usually in a design, research, and prototyping capacity.
I’ve consulted with startups in a few different ways: early product discovery and prototyping; strategic sparring with the founders; and capacity building.
I designed and supported a training curriculum for a startup accelerator

I have been trying to “make sense” of these experiences recently to focus in on my own summer strategy, and after an exhaustive multi-hour session with Obsidian canvas, this map emerged.

Now, I would love to share in more detail, but there’s a set of client references that can’t leave the encrypted vault. But a few trends emerged:

Moving to Denmark and becoming a parent has dramatically changed my frame on “good work”, especially relative to novelty-seeking.
My inner world of writing, building, and sharing is MORE intertwined with the social and family than my paid work is — especially when working as an individual contributor.
I’ve created unconscious barriers between personal life and work life that I don’t think serve doing good work for reason’s I’ll go into.
These barriers between personal work and commercial work meant that interest and expertise become less externally legible because the question of “wtf does Andrew do?” becomes hard to parse depending on where you look at my work.

Basically, a core thing I’ve taken away from this process is a need to think a bit more critically around how community and work intertwine. In Cryptonomicon, the community came about in two ways:

Hierarchical: In Cryptonomicon’s WW2, people were thrown together through a greater strategic will (gov, bureaucracy, etc). Those individuals then organized within and around that will, creating within constraints.
Distributed: In dot com era, people accreted around technology and defined a tribe; and then that tribe dispersed and did interesting things. They would then come back together around affinity and capital; creating around opportunity.

Working in a consulting fashion forces you to be a bit of a semaphore on this front: flipping back and forth between identifying opportunities and the skills around them — and then turning that into something useful for your client. Opportunity, constraint, opportunity, constraint. The key here is that being legible is what empowers you to do good work in either systems.

Huff Duff

Unfortunately legibility is forever incomplete and asymmetric. Cryptonomicon uses the idea of the “Huff Duff” station to communicate an information asymmetry: Huff Duff Stations were used to identify the location of a transmitting U-Boat. The Huff Duff operator swings their station in decreasing arcs to narrow in on what direction the U-boat is transmitting from — and dispatch a Catalina to find and sink it.

The Huff Duff station is situated in spots that might be advantageous to spot subs (eg. an isthmus or an island) — but share only limited dimensions of the target: direction and time (and noisy amplitude). Multiple stations can coordinate to triangulate on a signal, but that requires some degree of communication — networked or centralized.

The U-boat has the opposite problem: it knows that someone might be listening and that transmitting incurs risk. But the upside of that risk is high. It doesn’t know HOW ambient observers might observe or sense it — only the risk that it might be.

Anything outward we do can pollute the legibility of your skillset to those trying to make sense of your work. Think of potential collaborators or clients as huff-duff stations: you pop up briefly via a project, a post, or a referral. Your work is interpreted from their particular position, and that’s it. If you’re lucky and multiple individuals within a network are communicating, they might triangulate on a more representative and accurate idea of what it is that you do. Alternatively, if you pop up multiple times, then that one observer can get a more accurate view of that one angle. Either way we want to do the opposite of the U-Boat — maximizing the opportunities for others to observe — when, like the U-Boat, we don’t know anything about the configuration and location of our observers.

This can present great opportunities if you’re a specialist: you pop up around a specific skill and specific trajectory, and that one station can observe that trajectory as you go. If you’re a generalist, it becomes much more important for you to be observed by a network so that they can triangulate in on a pattern of creation.

Catalina

In a way, building Knowsi as an indie designer/dev/product person backfired a bit on me.

I had set out to use it as an example of end-to-end product creation — but accidentally became known as a user researcher for a lot of consulting opportunities after that. To market Knowsi, I was popping up a lot to do research subject matter: whether it was webinars, writing, or speaking. I love doing the work of researcher, but it’s a hell of a lot nicer when you get to make something out of it after that phase is wrapped. So it’s reasonable the professional huff duffs focused on that trajectory.

I think an alternative strategy is to focus on popping up in places were a network is more likely to exist. We want to be triangulated upon by a network that is sharing both purpose and information, so that the network can observe our skillsets and contributions more readily. Speaking at a local conference does this because people are talking about your work afterwards. Writing can do this, because folk can respond, share, or critique your arguments. Creating sharable projects either out of novelty or as an open source utility can do this. All of these mediums encourage the distributed affinity-based network to triangulate their observations around your work and — maybe — give rise to an opportunity.

This isn’t useful if the network isn’t oriented around triangulation or synthesis. Linkedin is a noise-scape for this because triangulation isn’t occurring despite the presence of a network: instead it’s like each observer uses an observed transmission to transmit their own location. I’m still trying to sort out what I think about this re: other short form social media (eg. my instagram experiment), but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s closer to the solitary huff duff station observing a series of transmissions over time.

Golgatha

So returning to startups and adventure: last week some friends asked me why the hell I didn’t take a stab at a venture-backed startup. I have plenty of practical reasons (IMO most companies shouldn’t be VC, I distrust pre-product funding, etc), but the biggest one is that I don’t think I’ve created a context in recent years where I’m properly able to observe and triangulate on the work of others — nor make myself legible to them. And that is something I should change. After all, what I want from my career is to use my skills and experience to explore, expand, and discover — to have an adventure that can be life-long. And those adventures come when opportunity does.

Revisiting Cryptonomicon’s depiction of “the startup” has helped frame that up for me. Consulting is actually doing a lot to reinforce the “adventure” side of things (a safari for systems thinkers), but when it comes to making something new, there are two quotes that I made a note of that I’ll end with:

“That would be expensive.” 
Eberhard waves his hand dismissively. 
“Bandwidth is cheap.” 
“That is more an article of faith than a statement of fact,” Randy says, “but it might be true in the future.” 
“But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.”

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon (p. 283). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

and this one, which hits a bit different re-reading it as a parent:

So he picks up the boy and carries him through the compound, down semicollapsed hallways and over settling rubble-heaps and between dead Nipponese boys to that big staircase, and shows him the giant slabs of granite, tells how they were laid, one on top of the next, year by year, as the galleons full of silver came from Acapulco. Doug M. Shaftoe has been playing with blocks, so he zeroes in on the basic concept right away. Dad carries son up and down the stairway a few times. They stand at the bottom and lok up at it. The block analogy has struck deep. Without any prompting, Doug M. raises both arms over his head and hollers “Soooo big” and the sound echoes up and down the stairs. Bobby wants to explain to the boy that this is how it’s done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up—sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don’t get your slab of granite that year—but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big.
He wishes that he could also make some further point about Glory and how she’s been hard at work building her own staircase. Maybe if he was a word man like Enoch Root he would be able to explain. But he knows that this is going way over the toddler’s head, just as it went over Bobby’s head when Glory first showed him the steps. The only thing that’ll stick with Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe is the memory that his father brought him here and carried him up and down the staircase, and if he lives long enough and thinks hard enough maybe he’ll come to understand it too, the way Bobby does. That is a good enough start.

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon (pp. 774-775). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Being a Good Amateur

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

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?

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, 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, Delia Derbyshire, and Wendy Carlos, and tool makers like 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!

Craft, Catalyst, and Expertise

Mon, 24 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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. 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, O’Reilly, and a few of the Rosenfeld Media books) amounts to a weird merger of lifehacks-for-wireframers and 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?

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.

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), 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.

Legibility in Design

Sun, 09 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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)

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.

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 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.

Hans Eijkelboom’s book People of the 21st 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 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.

Reconstructive Design Process

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.