andrewlb.com · essays

Fog, Friction, and the Dark Forest

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When I read Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest (the sequel to Three Body Problem) some years ago, I found myself “depressed.” Not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of feeling smaller, scared, dampened.

The Dark Forest states that we humans exist in a dark, enormous environment called space with high informational entropy, asymmetry, and massive lag (on account of distance and physics). In that environment, predators lurk. A species realizing its state as surviving not by prowess or power, but by lieu of simply not being noticed, must by necessity go very, very quiet. In the Three Body Problem, we don’t realize this and send out a brief beacon instead. That beacon is picked up and fate comes for us (some flattening is involved).

Recently, a book inspired by Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet had its second printing, and I eagerly hopped on. I encourage you to as well. Broadly, it takes the idea of the Dark Forest and applies it to our interactions online today. We glom onto social platforms that cast us as resources, and become encircled by predators in the form of bots, influencers, and ad-tech. The various authors present solutions, ideas, and trend speculation (cozyweb is everyone’s favourite, myself included as I have a few instantiations of that in my life, this newsletter arguably included): but reading the collection of essays, I found myself wondering what getting ahead of these platforms might look like?

Fog and the Forest

I’ve often written about Boyd, but in my academic writing, I found myself writing a LOT about Clausewitz. Very short version: Clausewitz was a Prussian general who saw the insanity of Napoleon’s conquest of Europe, and it gave him some ideas. Those ideas were developed through the redevelopment of the Prussian officer corp, and synthesized and captured in his book On War, which was posthumously published (and likely completed) by his wife. Clausewitz’ theories of war, uncertainty, and decision-making serve as the foundation of modern military strategy, and uncertainty is at its core.

The Fog of War was introduced by Clausewitz (the idea anyway) to describe the uncertainty a commander experiences when in the field with the imperative to make decisions. Planning is great, but even with perfect knowledge of an enemy’s capabilities and position, things change quickly on the battlefield.

The idea of the Dark Forest isn’t quite the “fog of war.” Clausewitz’ idea is situated in ones capacity of plan from the outset — something is known of the enemy, something is known of the territory. Whereas the Dark Forest is intrinsically unknown. Using space and the likelihood of other intelligences (or some alternatives), we might be entirely alone in the cosmos, or we might not. Our eyes are slowly adjusting to the dark, and where we have awareness of the landscape but not awareness of the evolving state of that landscape — that’s where the fog comes into place.

There’s a story in qtmn’s excellent book, Valuable Humans in Transit that discusses a “grey goo” scenario. You should read it, but basically: humanity has space travel and a team discovers as “dead” planet. They investigate the planet, but doesn’t realize the planet is investigating them in turn — learning from their capabilities. As the situation becomes clear to the captain (too late), they flee back to earth to try and warn the humanity before it’s too late. In this story, the unknowable unknowns of the Dark Forest give way to the known unknowns of the fog of war — creating a context around which actions and decisions can be taken.

Unfortunately while the fog of war is an intrinsic characteristic of any situation where adversaries meet in time and space, its effects are not symmetrically applied.

Asymmetric Forest Bathing

The problem with inhabiting the dark forest is that we basically can’t know what is out there. Liu Cixin argues in the Dark Forest:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

In both the universe of the Three Body Problem and in qtmn’s story, the moment of realization that another hunter has been spotted or has spotted us can become “the end” immediately. In the Three Body Problem, the San Ti are massively our technological superiors, and yet they themselves live in fear of even greater powers. The delicate infant and tottering old man metaphorically represent different stages of technological advancement, so our species that may have embraced pacifism or struggle to escape our galaxy might be an infant compared to the species with capabilities entirely outside our ken.

The landscape of the internet isn’t far from this metaphor. Centralization of wealth within the tech giants, the business incentive to establish and protect moats, undermine regulators, and leverage network effects all drive these actors towards ever-increasing advancement. The result is that individually we are ridiculously, absurdly, helplessly under equipped as individuals to protect ourselves in the current internet landscape.

Maybe our only hope is to become as hard as possible to spot.

Wading Boots

Clausewitz has another critical concept in On War, which is Friction. Broadly, friction in Clausewitzian theory is a state of taking action under negative circumstances. A simple example might be planning a straight line course and encountering a muddy field and a mountain you need to climb. A more complex example might be starting at a new company with a “clear” hierarchy, and then running head first into the Dark Matter of the organization.

Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk.

In the Clauswitzian model, Friction is an equal opportunity irritant. It can’t be eliminated, it is variable with context, and it just happens to you. Hence the idea that only an experienced swimmer can effectively theorize about swimming. To operate in that environment means engaging with that modality of friction.

But according to Clausewitz, YOU aren’t a source of Friction. Friction is purely PvE, and not something that any individual actor imposes on others. Except I don’t think this entirely applies in the Dark Forest-y internet context. We’ve seen the internet’s friction systematically “managed” by and to the benefit of the apex predators of the internet (the FAANGs), either by lieu of evolution or simply because they are “born” to the network and we aren’t. In exchange, we are forced to give up bits of ourselves to continue within this environment.

Take Email. One, you needed a computer that was always on, configured as a server, with that server kept online, mostly at a static address with a domain, that had some sense of authentication and privacy, that could receive emails via a broadly published and open protocol like POP3 or IMAP. You nrequired some way of storing what you received, and if you wanted to get very fancy, you needed some way of writing emails, formatting them correctly, and then broadcasting them to another server that you knew the address of via a protocol like SMTP.

Or you would use Google’s Gmail. And you would be associated with Gmail. And your messages on gmail (sent and received) could be used to sell you things because your preferences became more transparent to Google, who runs the largest advertising platform on earth.

Now, there are benefits. Setting up your own server and figuring all that out is a pain, and Google’s encapsulating that friction into a clean and easy service for someone who has never heard of SMTP is useful. But by opting into those systems, you light up as a beacon with a known coordinate, value, and behavioural pattern to any others who might be swimming about.

Unfortunately for us, this use of reduced friction at the expense of being observed extends pretty far down. Obvious ones like signing in to an account, using chrome as a browser, and similar cause us to broadcast in the forest, but even things like using your modem’s default and incredibly reliable DNS server (Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4) undermine that imperative as a denizen of the dark forest: to not be seen because you don’t know what is witnessing you. But with actors whose entire survival is predicated on finding, identifying, observing, and extracting targets on the internet for ad revenues, it’s gotten to the point where the whole forest seems haunted.

Burrows

So let’s figure some way around it. I’ve shared this drawing by Maggie Appleton before which visualizes the relationship between the Dark Forest and Venkat’s description of the Cozy Web. She significantly puts an interface layer in-between the Dark Forest and the Cozy Web: namely the digital garden, communication, and anonymous stream following interface layer.

I think the rendering of Cozy Web as a network of warrens and burrows is an apt one: it isn’t that the cozyweb isn’t interconnected, but rather that its connections are controlled, finite, and only really observable from within.

Thinking in terms of the Clausewitzian ideas of Fog of War and Friction though, these burrows do four significant things:

They reduce the surface area for initial visibility, i.e. its less likely for the predators to see you in the first place (eg. Specific domains, closed content, word-of-mouth sharing of access)
They increase control over the terms of that visibility, i.e. the fog of war acts in your favour to manoeuvre around them (eg. access to logs, authentication, non-public content)
They eliminate the “low friction lure” that the apex predators leverage when searching for prey (eg. self hosting solutions, reliance on a technical person as guide vs. platforms to navigate infrastructure)
They present an opportunity to change the script on the “familiar friction” to which our World Wide Web predators are native. i.e. make it hard for these predators to move, breath, and hunt. (eg. leverage new protocols as in web3 world, self-host key tools like storage and communication, anonymize or use burner accounts)

By selecting the terrain we operate within (the burrows), we suddenly have some choice over how we engage with these predators. Obviously we might still need to zip out from time to time. In Denmark, Facebook utterly dominates for community organization, so if I want to know when events are held or leverage marketplace, I’ve no choice but to use facebook.

But for friends and family, I’ve actually started using Letterloop. I run a newsletter for myself, brothers, and cousins, and we’ve been using it to keep up with each other while living in different countries and parts of Canada. My wife does the same with her family back in British Columbia. It’s still a hosted platform on firebase with google analytics with a social sign-on… but it’s still pretty good.

There are other situations where we can’t uncouple our burrows from the forest. Twenty years ago, Malcom Mccullough spoke at length about the role of the network, sensing, and data and we live that now. Entering an apartment complex via rfid key fob gives the building owner a fantastic understanding of the comings and going within their developments, and the same can be said for cars, public transit, etc. These are aren’t really things we can do much about. But allowing a google home or an Alexa device into the house within any degree of control is a decision one should make very carefully.

For my part, I self host the open source Home Assistant platform and self-host a DNS server that gives me agency over what gets in and what gets out. This completely blocks ads from appearing on my home network, and also gives me a heads up on certain devices behaving badly. Admittedly this also makes me the house technician, and when I’m negligent in upkeep… well, a glitching smart home is basically a haunted house. But at least my family and I are haunted by ghosts of our own making.

Fog, Friction, and Favour

Returning to the original question, what would it mean to get ahead of these platforms? I think an answer lies in triangulating across a few observations:

The Internet is a Dark Forest and the apex predators within it are native to it. In other words, the Dark Forest is what the Dark Forest is.
The internet dark forest isn’t instantly fatal like Cixin’s Dark Forest. Instead, it is parasitic and once tracked, escape is incredibly difficult.
Predation on the internet relies on reduced friction to incentivize discovery of prey. The internet is filled with Anglerfish, dangling an attractive lure.
We are not the predators.

Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that the internet that’s emerged today was inevitable given the parameters that were established. Platforms emerged naturally because platforms enabled consolidation of resources, moat building, and monopolization over user information and attention. It’s not a mistake that advertising revenues are the fuel that drives these predatory platforms. It’s also not a mistake that user experience design has becoming such a competitive focus for these platforms: we’ve been the light they’ve dangled in-front of the unwary.

Believing this then, getting ahead becomes a function of building the burrows we want under the current forest for the lives we live today, and then investing in seeding the forest we want to live in tomorrow.

The first means finding privacy and community in smaller places, and engaging in activities that might look a bit like digital homesteading.

The second means taking things like Web3 and other protocol innovations seriously. The internet we got doesn’t need to be the internet that we are stuck with. Evolutions and replacements do occur, and maybe the forest of the future doesn’t need to leave us feeling quite so drained.

Of course, predicting what kind of apex predators might emerge in any new forest that springs up might be impossible. But perhaps then we can lean on Clausewitz a bit to help navigate those unknowns.

Notes

If you’re interested to learn more about Clausewitz, I’d suggest giving this a listen. https://librivox.org/on-war-by-carl-von-clausewitz/ Low stakes, podcast based reading of the book. The Art of Action is a good look at his theories from a business lens (along with his contemporary, Jomini), and if you’re up for a really interesting look at its application in modern militaries, give this paper a look: https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Watts-Friction3.pdf

No Such Journey

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

What is a journey?

An common refrain in internet writing is to announce the start of — or denote progress along — an individual’s journey around … something. This something is often a virtuous signal of some sort when self imposed: starting their weight loss journey, progress along a running journey, the end of my guitar journey, and unfortunately one of the most frequent, finding themselves along a cancer journey.

What Makes a Journey?

A journey is some combination of the following:

An internal state change (I’m going somewhere emotionally or intellectually)
An external state change (I’m going somewhere physically)
Always has “steps” along the way
Always has a start point
Sometimes has an end point
Usually self-imposed (Cancer being a critical exception here)

Being on a journey is a bit of a post-modern phenomenon though, and for some interesting reasons I think.

With the preface that Ngram’s are a pretty weak signal, we can witness an uptick in this reference to journeys (writing, life, leadership, cancer, grief) starting in the 90s but really kicking off with mass adoption of the internet in the western world in the early 2000s. A good example of this is the dramatic upward spike in describing ones “writing journey” and “healing journey.”

This language is fundamentally tied to the idea of self-improvement though, and the insane rise of self-help phenomena in the 1990s. According to sociologist Micki McGee, the self-help industry saw a dramatic rise in the early 90s, serving to shore up a decline in almost all other publishing realms — with 1/3rd of Americans owning one or more self help books by 2005. Today, self-help is a 13bil+ USD market (some interesting stats here, though I wouldn’t take the data is reliable per se). The idea of self-help is at its core tied to this idea that one can re-invent the self with some combination of willpower and guided steps. The only thing standing between you and the you of your imagination is a journey.

The Best Journey

Ultimately, this is bullshit. Our capacity to construct ourselves is incredibly contingent on our environments. We have a perception that we can “self-fashion” (McGee writes about it here) our identities independent of the communities and context that brought us about (i.e. we didn’t fall out of a coconut tree). The internet reinforces this perception through the shared experiences and cyclical user-generated marketing of many consumption communities — and that is good business. Hell, it’s a foundation of the coaching and self-help industry generally, and central to a core tenant of self-help: that there is a “best” journey that you can pick.

A promise of “The Best” is a red herring, however. Websites like Wirecutter, outdoor gear lab, etc. are all predicated on this idea that there is a “best” product out there for your needs, and we happen to have some experts to tell us what works. The self-help ecosystem does a similar thing: the idea that there is a best way to approach a particular way of being, a particular life — usually from a lens of efficiency and time-to-acquisition. This approach becomes the prescriptive journey.

There are some very positive examples of this journey-based self help working: For example, Alcoholic’s Anonymous describes an explicit journey towards sobriety via its steps, but creates a context for supporting that transformation through community, accountability, and acknowledgement of an identity that already (and will always) exists — that one is an alcoholic —, but that is engaged with each day through choosing sobriety. In this case, three qualities exist:

The self and its identity already exist in a state
The journey is to control an existing state
The stages of the journey are connected and self-reinforcing

Unfortunately, we more frequently see negative examples. The most egregious examples are centered around consumption communities where purchasing better gear or a particular course becomes the pathway to mastery.

Fitness communities often discuss supplement and purchases as core to a “journey” (/r/weightlifting and /r/running)
Music communities emphasize purchased products over created output, a journey starts with a purchase (/r/guitar or /r/synthesizer)
Fan communities emphasize “rare purchases” and belong through acquisition (For some reason /r/thinkpad is the epitome of this)

In each of these more negative cases, there’s a different dynamic than the AA model we saw:

The self is moving towards another self — with a paywall in-between
The journey is to get to the you-who-does-a-thing from the you-who-does-not
The stages of the journey are ambiguous and individual for those who made the journey

Narrative

Why do some journeys feel “noble” while others feel “icky”? What I’ve landed on is that the journeys that feel “noble” are the ones that have already happened. A journey is descriptive. It’s something that happens to someone through some combination of circumstance, context, and self-determination within those bounds. A journey is highly individual and contingent, and as defined by its disruptions as much as anything else.

As a designer, a successful journey is framed as a description of someone’s actual experience — with hypothesized interventions introduced along the way. We start from people’s experience, and experiment with what might be from there. A prescriptive journey is destined to fail, with the designer designing for no one.

What if we want to embark on a journey for whatever reason? The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson comes to mind. In that series, he maps the story of many characters coming together and overcoming particular trials that cause a “snap” — a realization that of self and place that unlocks special powers and forwards an increasingly supernatural plot-line. Unlocking those powers involves an oath: “Life before Death; Strength before Weakness; Journey before Destination.” That last is a continuous and effective reminder for those characters — all of whom are explicitly on the hero’s journey — that they are incomplete. And at very stage, the journey splits, recurses, reverts. Part of what makes the journeys in that book relatable (and why it’s several monster books long) is that the journey we EXPECT from that character is rarely how it turns out (for us or them).

If we project others’ reflective narratives on our own path, we doom ourselves from the start. Perhaps one of the reasons the AA 12-step journey works so well is that there is no capacity for project — rather each step can only be personal and is taken alongside a intrinsically inclusive community. The “destination” is to continue living with yourself, and the journey is doing that every day. The analytics are how many days of sobriety exist between the start of the journey and now.

So how do we forge our own journeys? I think there are two paths:

The Emergent Journey
The Attrition Journey

An Emergent Journey is one that happens: you arrive at the destination. It happens naturally: the context and the circumstance side of things. My accidentally becoming a programmer while I was studied political science and eventually landing at IDEO: emergent journey and narrative. It works in retrospect, but good god don’t follow my example. In some ways this is useless to reflect on because its one where — at best — our mechanism of controlling it is to put ourselves in the way of opportunity (or disaster). Right place, right time, and someone who becomes the right person.

An Attrition Journey is one where you have a destination you sought after. It will be absolutely painful to get to, but the reward seems worth it. This journey is measured in protracted efforts, small goals accumulating, and eventual shock when you emerge out the other side a different person. Many of those who have transitioned careers effectively experience this, eg. two Canadian friends who transitioned into software development did exactly this with brilliant results. I suspect this is also the experience of folk who go through AA.

The thing to realize about the attrition journey is that it feels linear when you describe it, but living it is like life as a shephard’s tone. Continuously moving but never getting anywhere. The salvation only occurs at the inflection points: if you’ve ever practiced a piano piece and suddenly got that chord sequence to work and sound like you imagined; or suddenly figured out why R-squared works the way it does (I weirdly struggled with this); or threw the perfect pot after countless collapses and minor adjustments. That’s the inflection point. And that’s the part of the attrition journey that gets told.

So what makes this attrition journey work? I’d suggest the following:

Find a community that can reinforce you as you becoming something that is You Plus (as opposed to someone else). Part of this is learning to spot the consumption communities and avoid them.
Find a macro-motivator that makes the journey somewhat organic to serve as a bulwark if a localized motivator falls apart. This might be habit stacking for music practice; a study partner commitment; or taking on a paid gig that throws you outside your comfort zone.
Understand the incremental steps and sequencing without being dogmatic (and be careful about eternal skill stacking). Reading biographies and then breaking those out into postit notes (instead of linear notes) can help here, i.e. they become tools to unblock, instead of prescriptive journeys.
Do some kind of tracking. This can be a daily journal, a todo list you check off, or some public commitment. Whatever it is, the key part of attrition strategy is to continuously wear away at the problem — and tracking holds you accountable.

Odysseus just knew he had to get home. The Sirens, the Witch, the Cyclops, the Suitors — they’re just part of the story that gets told after he set down his oar.

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.

Parasites, Symbionts, and the Scabs

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

What happens when a product doesn’t co-exist with others in its ecosystem? When products are static but exist within a mutable world? When the products encourage replacement over renewal or repair? What opportunities does that present to other ecosystem actors?

Following on from last week’s writing on building within an open source ecosystem and working on the rehype-jsoncanvas project, it feels like maybe an opportune time to finish. That project is one where the ecosystem invites incremental, open, and unexpected additions. Most product ecosystems aren’t like that.

Late last summer and in the fall, I was investing some time in relearning and updating my electronics skills. Like many, I’m pretty capable when it comes to arduino and pi projects, but had never gone beyond the perfboard stage. So I decided to learn how to design a PCB. This introduced the opportunity for a parasitic product. I’ve written a bit about that unfinished project here, which was originally part of this post but got edited out.

Anyway, theres a helpful definition of inter-species relationships captured by 19th century mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary, which frames interactions from a few different angles:

Open: 2024-parasite-post.png

This idea that there are six types of relationships along a spectrum of positive, neutral, negative is a helpful way to frame things. But then, if we take this from the perspective of a two by two, we end up with something like this. Open: 2024-parasite-2x2.png So symbiosis (Positive x Positive) becomes the likely ideal, but ultimately parasitism isn’t that bad — is it? The spectrum down to competition seems like a valuable threshold.

Parasite, Symbionts, Scavenger, Scab

So where does my little project rest its hat.

Parasites (Positive/Neutral-Negative)

Parasites play a selfish survival role in an ecosystem, where they subvert an existing system for their own ends. This selfish motivation can result in a positive, for example, round worms (a parasite) can apparently boot immune response in a host — albeit with the motivation of making the host a more respective environment for reproduction.

In my little project’s case, parasite is probably still an appropriate term. It replaces the brain of the system and leverages the resources around it — maybe closer to the zombie-fungus that the Last of Us game/show reminded us all of. It extends the utility of the object as well, and in my version of the board, I was designing it explicitly to fit into the zigbee-powered smart home ecosystem.

Symbiont (Positive/Positive)

Symbiotic creatures have some positive or net-neutral interaction with the species they’re bonded with. The classic examples are clown fish being cleaned by sea anemone (and feeding those creatures in the process), or fish hitching a ride on larger fauna like sea turtles or sharks.

Apart from the excising of that little green board, my project feels a fair bit like this as well. It saps a bit of power and presents a risk to the product (swapping out the attached PCB can kill the existing board, after all), but in exchange opens it up to a wider ecosystem and extends its potential shelf-life. It turns a superfluous toy into a tool.

Scavenger (Negative/Neutral)

What about the product lifecycle itself? Scavengers are creatures that consume the dead — basically left overs within the ecosystem. This isn’t just the classic hyenas and vulture carrion eaters either. Termites are scavengers of dead plan materials, and creatures like worms and mites are a form of scavenger called detritivores. Electronics projects have a lovely history with this activity, with a classic example being folk modernizing old A/V enclosures, from midcentury modern consoles to this unbelievably cool raspberry-pi powered VFD display.

This is a classic “decay of digital things” kind of tech, which I actually argue projects like Littleprinter.club belong to, in a “software scavenger” mode. The Little Printer is dead tech because its server strings were cut. Connected objects like that can’t live without their cloud, so they died. Any attempts to reuse the corpse left behind becomes a scavenger activity, but a positive one. It’s not subverting something that lives, but rather leveraging something that has died.

Scab (Negative/Negative)

Then there’s something outside of the animal kingdom which came to mind. The Scab, or a strike breaker. Scabs are labourers who come in to work in a circumstance when organized labour (usually a union) is participating in a work stoppage. Scabs are usually people who are hired in after a labour dispute starts, and go into work at pretty significant risk to themselves. They are a very distinct NEGATIVE/NEGATIVE class — they risk themselves within the ecosystem because scabs are normally retaliated against, and they usually are negative to the ecosystem in they are deleterious to improving labour relations. The only beneficiary is usually the management class, though even that is often temporary.

You could frame up the scab in invasive species terms in the most negative way: one that comes in, clears out an existing ecosystem, and then dies itself in the process. But more realistically, that relationship results in the species adapting to that environment and the constituent members of the ecosystem adapting in turn. The Cane Toad’s introduction to Australia is an example of this.

Scabs in the product world are a pervasive venture capital practice. Take Uber and Lyft. Their core strategies were to undercut existing services in any local they entered into, kill those businesses and acclimate users to their service model, and then hike up their own prices. This has been joking referred to as the Millennial lifestyle subsidy , but its directly responsible for a lot of the big-tech capture of industries that we’re experiencing now. Everything is a subscription, we own less that is useful, we spend more.

Revisiting the 2x2

Given the framing above, I think this picture ends up being one of gradations. Open: 2024-parasite-2x2-2.png

Let’s take the open source ecosystem as a whole: that’s one of net-positive mutual good for consumers and the ecosystem. It fosters new product creation, it’s good for consumers from a transparency and accessibility standpoint, it encourages new products, etc.

A new product category is almost always positive for consumers given it introduces choice, but it can go two ways from there: waste generation if the product category isn’t received, or potentially market generation as new players enter the field (and capture occurs).

SaaS businesses are generally not good for consumers, acting as long-term leeches on personal capital that are incentivized to reduce churn. A healthy SaaS business is self-sustaining in revenue and its ability to generate revenue is based on the value that it creates to the user. An anti-competitive SaaS business locks users in and that value is dissipated — so its ability to exist in an ecosystem isn’t contingent on its value creation but its capture of potential resources that competitors might be able to access

Consumer Subsidies (eg. the millennial lifestyle subsidy) from VC-backed corporations seeking market capture are similarly terrible. They start off as positive for consumers (greater services and access, less cost), but this subsidy is directly created to capture a market — clear cutting an ecosystem to prepare it for replacement.

The thing that I found interesting sketching this out is the clear bias in movement towards capture — which ends up being dangerous for the ecosystem and poisonous to consumers. Returning to the Australian Cane Toad example, the Cane Toad was introduced with one purposes and ended up being an utter blight on the native wildlife as it tried to consume this new animal and ended up dead as a result.

Scott Fitzgerald’s Seeing Like a State is a favourite book of mine for its description of how our “ecosystem eyes” are fundamentally lacking when it comes to making structural decisions within a system relative to that system’s capacity for emergence. Trying to force legibility on top of an ecosystem often doesn’t work because so many of the interactions within a system are contingent.

Making this little parasitic 2x2 was a helpful activity to frame up SOME of those interactions, and while I mapped the “species A” and “species B” onto Ecosystem +/- vs. Consumer +/-, this frame on modeling interactions between symbionts and scabs seems a useful tool for approaching ones own work.

Ultimately, what do we want to make, and how do we want it to affect the ecosystem we inhabit? We might not have ultimate control over the outcomes of our designs, but we can map out the potential interactions between our creations and the environment, and make decisions accordingly.

Building within an Ecosystem

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

This will be a bit of an unusual one. I want to share a vernacular (and ongoing) story of building rehype-jsoncanvas. I’ve never built something like this before, and a loose record of the process feels justified.

If I got the plugin working for nextjS, it’ll render below this text!

STATUS: Published on NPM and working (as seen above). It mostly works, but there’s a bunch of edge cases I need to capture.

The idea

I mentioned two weeks ago that I was working on a small open source project to address a need I have with my obsidian.md to NextJS blog pipeline, and this was around my use of obsidian canvas. I love it, but there aren’t clear ways of getting it to work.

After fiddling around with my markdown rendering tool (see below), I had figured out how to render out different treatments for things like images, and the same approach could apply to the canvas element. Surely salvation was close at hand. I just needed to figure out how this whole rehype/remark thing.

 <ReactMarkdown
	className={markdownStyles["markdown"]}
	rehypePlugins={[rehypeRaw]}
	remarkPlugins={[remarkGfm]}
	components={{
	  img: (props) => {
	  // This is where the idea came from
		if (props.src?.includes(".canvas")) {
		  return (
			<p className="p-3 bg-gray-100">
			  NOTE! Unsupported Json-canvas element.
			</p>
		  );
		  // return (<Canvas content={props.src as CanvasContent} />)
		}
		
		return typeof props.src === "string" ? (
		  <Link href={props.src} target="_blank">
			<Image
			  src={props.src}
			  alt={props.alt ? props.alt : ""}
			  width="500"
			  height="300"
			/>
		  </Link>
		) : (
		  ""
		);
	  },
	}}>
	{content}
</ReactMarkdown>

A tiny bit of research

Most of the markdown tools I’ve seen revolve around two things called Remark and Rehype. Previously, I’ve pumped my markdown files into these libraries while leveraging plugins from their ecosystem, but hadn’t investigated too deeply.

Remark and Rehype are two parts of the UnifiedJS ecosystem, which is essentially a toolkit for manipulating different modes of content. They allow you to break a block of text data down into its individual components, and perform operations on those individual components. These bits get represented as syntax trees, and the unifiedJS ecosystem consists of tons of different tools to parse, filter, transform, traverse, and otherwise manipulate those trees and their nodes.

This was not apparent to me when I got started, so when I dove into the existing plugin ecosystem to look at code examples, I got pretty confused pretty quickly. This process of reading prior work is critical, because it roughs out the silhouette of your own work.

One example I looked at early on was rehype-inline-svg, which give me some inspiration on what kind of libraries I might want to use to get a tool like this going. Ultimately, I used it and a few other references (listed in the readme) to approach making the plugin.

Project Scaffolding

Since my goal with this project was to create a maintainable, opensource NPM package that folk could easily import into their package via import rehypeJsonCanvas from "rehype-jsoncanvas", I needed to approach this kind of project in a different way than my norm. Unfortunately I had no idea what I was doing, and really, I still don’t. I know more now having made the effort, but this post is as much a cry for help as it is a how-to.

First, I wanted to make an example project that would let me develop in a project context while building something generalized. This proved to be both a great and terrible idea, which we’ll see in the “wrong tools” section.

First, I landed on a tool called Yalc which lets to make a local NPM-like store. I could pretend that my project was already an NPM package and import it as needed, and make the project look like it was importing the npm module. This let me create a really quick demo react app which I called a “shim” that imported the project as you would in the real world, and render the markdown using the unified toolkit.


// this is an example string of remark and rehype plugins
// within which jsonCanvas would exist.
async function renderMarkdown(markdown) {
  const md = await unified()
	.use(parser)
	.use(mdast2hast)
	.use(remarkGfm)
	.use(remarkRehype)
	.use(rehypeJsonCanvas)
	.use(compiler, production)
	.process(markdown);

  return md;
}

This ended up working well, though you might notice this in the package.json scripts: "devpub": "yalc push --scripts --update --replace"

This seems to be the workaround for using yalc as a “live development” tool, i.e. not live but quick manual push with a full build process as an npm package. If you have any suggestions on how to improve this, PLEASE let me know.

For the plugin itself: I loosely knew the bounds of what I wanted to do, but didn’t really understand the means. If you were to stumble back through my commit history for this project, you would see the project scaffolding change perhaps three times before I landed on a tool called microbundle.

This occurred because I was exploring the rehype-graphviz repo, and just found their approach quite readable and well considered. Interestingly, they didn’t use microbundle themselves, but the collection of tools eventually led me to this microbundle template which became the current foundation of the project.

The reality is, I don’t understand everything happening under the hood with this template, and am using it as an opportunity to learn as I go. The big things I’m hoping to take away from it are around testing with Vite, using github actions for dependencies and deploy(hat tip to my buddy Myles Borins here) via renovate and lefthook, and general build hygiene via biome. Again, trying to figure out the ecosystem.

The Plugin

Most everything up until now has just been setting up the project so that I could actually do work. I saw that initial bit of code on my blog as the proof of concept (even though no canvas was rendered), but it introduced the way I saw the process unfolding.

For the majority of the plugin code, I worked in stages to get incremental bits clearly working.

First was the decision to work with a REHYPE plugin instead of a Remark one, even though my primary use case was markdown.

IRehype is used for transforming html, REMARK is used for transforming markdown. Both tools work by taking the constituant bits of content and breaking them down into a HAST (Hypertext Abstract Syntax Tree) for Rehype and an MDast for Markdown. So working within this ecosystem comes down to working with this HAST structure, and chaining different plugins to figuring out where in the rendered HTML you want your transformation to run.

Here’s a helpful json-canvas to explain it (I’ll replace it with a live one when it’s ready)

With that in mind, I divided the work into two sections: the plugin part to figure out WHERE to put the canvas and handle that log, and then the jsoncanvas part to figure out WHAT gets slotted into that section.

This ended up working well, since I was able to use the plugin part to render dummy data and understand the unifiedJS ecosystem first, before diving into working on the jsoncanvas rendering side of things.

Once I’d wrapped my head around the Unifiedjs way of doing things, the plugin part clicked quite quickly. Obsidian generates the canvases as separate .canvas files which are embedded like images ![canvas](example.canvas) or embeds ![[example.canvas]]. The tool I use to publish Markdown to my blog converts these embeds into images, so for my purposes, the shortcut of referencing just the imgtag let me parse the unifiedjs tree easily. Then I had to swap out the image tag with an appropriate HTMLcanvas, image, or svg element.

Unfortunately, this is where things got a bit unhinged.

Picking the Wrong Tool

I ended up picking the wrong rendering tool for the purpose.

I wanted something that could be used both client side (your browser does the rendering, say on a react app) and server side (my server does the rendering, like on a nextjs or gatsby static site).

Because of this, I had an idea to use the HTML Canvas API, which is responsible for many of the interactive graphics you’ll see in browsers today. From charts to animations to 3D, its a fantastic toolkit and well supported. It’s browser only though, so I went with node-canvas, a tool that replicates most of the html canvas API so it can be used both in browser and server-side. Its well documented, mature, and I’ve used it before. Plus, I trust the Automattic team who supports it.

Two issues came up though: First, I wasted a ton of time trying to figure out the issue of embedding. Json-canvas allows you to embed media files and markdown into your canvas, and in obsidian, it looks like with this example.

Take the markdown embed, which shows “rethinking-this-blog” as an embed. In the canvas, it appears as this object:

    {
      "id": "bc2ba4067167b9a9",
      "type": "file",
      "file": "example.md",
      "x": 300,
      "y": -260,
      "width": 400,
      "height": 400
    },

So you don’t have any data, just a relative link to the filetype and some data that you can parse to render it in the right way. No problem, one would think.

I ended up wasting a fair bit of time trying to get those two objects (image and markdown) to render respectively, including this utterly psychotic recursive functions written in the hope that maybe I just wasn’t letting the images load.

export function checkImagesLoaded(callback: Function) {
	let allLoaded = imagesLoaded.every((el) => el.complete);
	if (imagesLoaded.length < 1) return callback();
	
	if (allLoaded) callback();
	else checkImagesLoaded(callback);
}

Thankfully, I was saved from this by my second mistake.

Mistake Number 2. I misinterpreted some of the node-canvas documentation, which made me think that it would work in next. This wasn’t the case, as I discovered pretty quickly when I spun up a NextJS application to test the seemingly working plugin (with the below rendering in the react app)

Yep, not next friendly. Which I could have figured out had I only searched for the specific framework. Goddamnit.

Anyway, the lesson here isn’t that node-canvas is bad, but rather that I prematurely dove into implementing the rendering functions with a tool that I hadn’t tested for the use case. To be honest, I’ve not needed to use shims like this before. I usually have the application itself and then build things around the main application. For me, the focus is on building something I can get in front of a person as quickly as possible.

But here, my user is a developer (or developer adjacent) who needs to slot this into their application and get on with their life. The point of this tool is to serve a function and disappear. And to do that, my process needs to be one of investigating the environments this will disappear into. This is what tests do, and its also what building testing jigs can facilitate.

Next steps

So, as of writing this on Tuesday before it goes out on the newsletter (and I’ll be updating as I go and going forward), my rendering context doesn’t work. I need to rip that out and redo it. The nice bit is that a LOT of the logic will translate over to whatever I decide on, and that was the majority of the thinking. All the data parsing, placement, sizing, looping, etc. works well, and I think I have a decent division of functions for now (I’ll refactor after I get the core list done).

So far I’ve been able to replace most of the core rendering context with SVG using hastscript directly, so getting the proof of concept up to test across the two react and next ssr shims shouldn’t take long.

Once that is in place, the next big hurdle will be reducing its package size, writing tests, and deploying it to NPM for others to use.

When it’s up, I’m hoping some of my friends who are Obsidian users (I’m looking at Justin and Andrew here) will be able to give it a test with their own projects, and I’ll be sending a request for feedback from the Obsidian community. I’ll also be opening it up to PRs and issues.

As I mentioned, this is a first for me in building a real open source project, and so I’m expecting a big learning curve. But I believe the usage base for this is sufficient to warrant the effort, and I know I’ll get some good use out of it for my writing as well.

If you have any advice for me from reading this, please send me a note, submit a PR, or otherwise send up signals. I’m eager to learn.

Main Personal Takeaway

The big thing I’ve glimpsed with this project is how interconnected even a solitary project like this might be. When you’re building an application, you’re thinking about its dependencies more from a risk and effort perspective vs. as someone seeking to reside within and be apart. But building something that consciously contributes to an existing ecosystem forces you to re-frame that thinking.

Two quotes come to mind:

“The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body— has a spirit— is organic— and fluid to the influence of its spirit— and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me” - Thoreau

“The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.” - Donella Meadows

I find the modern internet a bit sad and alienating. But building something on the internet that requires you to cut into the drywall, open up the utility closet, and short a few breakers. Well, I suddenly found myself a bit more at ease.

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.

Systems Decay When Shared

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT

We’re terrible at adopting the systems of others. A “defined” system should always be approached with skepticism and curiosity — and systems of the self most of all. Some of these might be in your life: Productivity has everything from GTD to Pomodoro; Knowledge has Zettlekasten to Cornell; Decision making has everything from negotiating frames (eg. ZOPA and BATNA) to niche domain-specific algorithms (like the Konmari method).

To frame up my belief here: systems are always interventions and contingent — nested within some broader experience. This means that barring what we can observe of the physical world, we’re always shipping a derivative product when we talk about systems design.

Let’s give a specific example. The control system a pilot uses to control a helicopter is a legible human interface for a human being to influence and control a complex mechanical system. The helicopter uses pressure and rotational control (and a bunch of other things) to generate lift and move around with the fluid properties of air. A pilot primarily uses a system of pedals, stick, and collective to control how the power exerted by the helicopter acts within that environment. The helicopter exists within a Newtonian system which defines its constraints, and the helicopter as a system is defined by the individual mechanical systems (thrust, weight, aerodynamic potential). The control system exists relative to those constraints, and is shaped by the physical characteristics and ergonomics of the human body.

The nice bit is that this nested set of dependencies also makes for some great characteristics we can exploit. The fluid properties of air allow for lift to be generated; the ability to independently control rotation (anti-rotation) from lift (rotor); and the design of the control system translates our physical qualities — and our capacity for kinetic learning — into something that can control a spinning top swimming through the sky. (I’m terrified of helicopters fwiw)

Derivative Bias

Intervening systems are a great thing because it makes things tangible. The problem is always understanding the system we’re intervening in, and whether we’re intervening in the way we intended. Going back to the previous helicopter example, a test pilot is someone who’s highly skilled at interfacing with the systems in question — and understanding IMMEDIATELY if the system they find themselves strapped into is misaligned with its dependencies. Those that don’t tend to find themselves as ex-pilots pretty quickly.

The problem with taking on an external system of self is that it’s rarely… right. Take the modern Zettelkasten system. High level, it’s a knowledge pipeline that filters reading notes and observations through a three step process of summary and synthesis into a kind of informational “node.” The idea is that these nodes of knowledge accumulate and connect over time, so that when it comes to write or use that knowledge, you have a pre-made and searchable body of work to draw from. It’s a great idea. Except, I invite you on a journey of folks’ failed attempts at adopting a zettelkasten system by just googling “about my digital garden”.

Unlike the test pilot, few of us are particularly adept at recognizing when we’re engaged in a system that doesn’t fit our needs. Zettelkasten works brilliantly for academics and writers who have a project in mind — and slows down the process of consumption and synthesis for the rest of us. Instead of facilitating recall, it distracts and undermines discovery. The Konmari system is a lovely approach to decluttering that’s literally just a systematic cluster-and-sort of your domestic life, with an emotionally arduous step of engaging with each item in turn. It works fantastically for some, but catalyzes conflict and depression in other settings — where family is involved, where anxiety exists, etc.

Each of these systems emerges from the web of dependencies surrounding their originating systems and structures. Today’s Zettelkasten has its roots in Enlightenment era interest in epistemology, just as the GTD framework emerged from the early internet and found its greatest adoption in the highly-tracked software dev world. These “systems” usually EMERGE first within a team or for an individual, and then become observed, described, packaged, and published to the rest of us. 37Signals is a good company to pay attention to when it comes to their domain-specific self-awareness around packaged productivity and process — whether its writing or products like basecamp.

The issue is that we often don’t have the same dependency when we unwrap this newly packaged system. What needs to be acknowledged with this process of “adopting a system” is that we’re not actually adopting that system. Something else is going on.

Compression Artifacts

Mostly, I think what’s happening on the “failure to adopt” side isn’t on the adoptee — it’s shitty compression. I have a distinct memory as a kid seeing bootlegged Evangelion a friend had downloaded from IRC. 24mb and in a realMedia format, these little .rm files did a lot to bootstrap my high school nerd-ery and introduced me to a whole world of ideas. They also were barely legible, chunky, and had many scenes that disappeared into a cloud of 56k-facilitated data corruption.

Corrupt, illegible media can still be formative — but perhaps not in the way that it was intended. When a system like GTD, Zettelkasten, 37Signals 6-week sprints, etc. gets packaged for dissemination, that packaging necessarily compresses lived experience into something that can be meaningfully communicated.

Sometimes you get a system whose medium compresses brilliantly. Pomodoro is one of those: 25 minute work cycles with 5 min breaks, using a kitchen timer (the tomato clock). The idea and structure is simple to understand, simple branding, recursive, and has low dependencies.

Sometimes you get a systems communicator who is unusually effective at compression. John Boyd was one of those people, I think. Ideas like the OODA Loop are efficient abstractions of a very complex theory of decision making that can be built into broader theories of action.

But mostly, the compression algorithms fail. The system as outputted is not the system that served as the input. Take Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint. Targeted at a broad market of product and leadership types, it is a fantastic design-driven, critically scoped, inclusive-to-stakeholders take on feature discovery and iteration that NO ONE actually implements. Why? Well, partially because its compression mechanism was a business productivity book. And partially because the system didn’t need to be adopted effectively for the idea of it to spread. For the Design Sprint, these compression artifacts manifest as skipped steps, compressed timelines, and half-committed senior participants. For Konmari, its failing to unpack everything, failure of will, and misalignment of intent.

I think that all systems communication suffers from this fundamental risk, and its part of why all systems communication should be approached with skepticism and curiosity. So let me try to compress one of mine.

Case: Hydrologic Cycles

Energy, effort, and attention are cyclical, I think. But not all at once. And reflecting on my last few years of work — in startups as a contributor, in big enterprises as a consultant, as a solo SaaS founder, and as a writer of sorts — I’ve realized that I don’t have a lot of control over the cycles themselves (my old essay on Sponge Cycles hits at this a bit). What I do have agency over is how I cultivate, exploit, and recover within my personal ecosystem. In a way, it feels like the grade-school drawing of the water precipitation cycle.

Let me to try to “compress” this and we’ll see what happens.

Evaporation: As a quintessential generalist, my experiences and projects are represented by water that is continuously evaporating.
Convection: This evaporation is entropic (projects decay and get outdated) and productive (past experience opens up new experience) — eventually condensing into visible work through portfolio creation, social sharing, talks, media, etc. These are the convective forces that form our clouds.
Precipitation: Generally, this kind of work generates more work, with some sense of value having being communicated and interpreted. The weight of that work makes opportunity, and that opportunity is represented hear by rain or snow.
Collection: Work done and experiences had HAVE to be interpreted — hopefully in a generative way. Case studies, new methods, as well as new products emerge from THIS stage of the process.

Very tangibly, a past precipitation cycle for me was (descriptive):

Portfolio and networking to find consulting clients
Writing my newsletter, essays, and giving talks as a primary tool of sense making
Lots of consulting clients who were “design adjacent” and where my work was legible.
Reflection of these experiences resulted in the prototype of Knowsi, a tool for design researchers. Future cycles would become overly Knowsi focused, and would end up painting me a bit too-heavily as a researcher, and an increasing volume of research work.

Using this to “describe” through the cycle, I’m wondering if I can use this system to be a bit more intentional about what happens downstream.

Evaporation = Marketing/Community: I need some way to be exposed to new communities and people, both from the professional “finding clients” side of things, but fundamentally to keep MY attention focused. I am motivated by the expectations of others, and my construction of that expectation
Convection = Sensemaking: Sensemaking and synthesis is the key here. I need a way to go fairly deep on a topic or idea, and cultivate a specific opinion about it beyond guy feeling. The way to do this for me is prototyping, and one of the ways (though not exclusively) I can “prototype” a theory is through writing.
Precipitation = Income-generating Work: Income. I need some way of making money — doing work that is trans-disciplinary, involves some complexity, has some urgency tied to it, and probably NDA’ed into oblivion. This makes it sustainable and realistic, since doing really interesting work in the open often doesn’t happen in real-time.
Collection = Projects: The previous stages have taken me on a journey, and the water returned to the reservoir is perhaps not the same water that left. The opportunity here is to cultivate something meaningful — but maybe not permanent — that serves as a foundation for a healthy ecosystem. What evaporates tomorrow needs to be of substance and value, basically.

This system then becomes the way that I weigh and assess what kind of work I do, when. It’s basically a decision-making/effort-categorization heuristic that helps me think of my efforts in functional isolation, but structural co-dependence. Aspects can overlap, and occur at different tempos. It’s also veryyyy specifically directional. Convection doesn’t go straight to Collection — Rule 4: never get high on your own supply. Precipitation doesn’t go straight to Evaporation — respect the NDA.

So how am I acting on this system? You’re engaged with the evaporation (the newsletter) and convection (this essay) part of things right now. The main way I’m using it is as a mechanism for work estimation (how much client work can I take on) and project scoping (what projects can I realistically do and what has the maximum value for seeding other parts of the ecosystem?).

The biggest immediate effector has been rebooting this newsletter, or rather recognizing (as discussed two weeks ago) that I was missing something important to me. The biggest near-term effector is with regards to project selection: basically I’m on the cusp of committing a bunch of time to one of three projects, and this framing is helping me break down how each project might add value or extract focus from each other stage.

System, Interrupted

I don’t think I did a particularly good job “compressing” that system, but assuming that it’s about standard. A few things I noticed:

I relied heavily on metaphor. It reduced the dimensionality, and introduced some core ideas like directionality, visual language, and relative states.
I used concrete framing (examples and cases) to flush out the metaphor, since the metaphors stages aren’t 1:1 to the experience
I considered it with two different functions (introspective and prospective), which helped to answer a bit of the so-what.
I relied on diagraming (both a known descriptive reference core to the metaphor, and an actual one) to frame up the communication of the system I’m using.

So, common systems communication is metaphor-based, provides concrete examples, is functional, and is visual. There’s a lot more to look at here in terms of understanding what makes for effective systems communication. Considering figures like John Boyd (as mentioned), Dona Meadows, Heinz von Foerster, Richard Feynman, Abraham Maslow, to name a few. Also more contemporary systems communicators like Randall Munroe, Venkat Rao, Simon Wardley, etc.

Belief-based Planning

Wed, 15 May 2024 12:00:00 GMT

TL;DR

A quick caveat on this post. This is a “thinking document” (i.e. pretty long) for me as I’ve been working on a workshop tool, Belief-Casting. You can skip the long-winded thinking process by jumping ahead to the “Values vs. Ego. vs. Reality” section, which has some illustrated steps. If you try this planning technique (or need some help with it), please let me know!

Figuring out how to do something new is hard.

Our own mechanisms to sense the world are rarely consistent: physical, neurological, and experiential differences make themselves known here. Our own sensors are what they are: that physical, neurological, or experiential context that we bring to the table. We can augment this (doctrinal decision making a-la OODA loop; chemical augmentation like adderall, fitness, education in technique and philosophy) but we are our own bricolage.

We have to navigate the realities of structural circumstances (eg. markets), individual circumstances (eg. capital and network), temporal circumstances (eg. interest rates and trends), etc. We have our own internal worlds to navigate: our influences, past ideas, traumas and triumphs. These things construct our beliefs and narratives over time — accumulating and ossifying.

And then the environment and its climates step in to affect us. It shapes not just how we navigate the terrain, but also how we perceive it.

A lot can go on in our little societal troposphere.

Economic Systems: Interest rates are skyrocketing and all the previous patterns simply don’t work anymore. The tools you used in the past to see “value” just don’t make sense in this environment. A key resource you depended on (cheap debt) is no longer available.
Market Dynamic: Everyone is being laid off, and the supply/demand environment your skillset has existed within simply doesn’t apply anymore. Regardless of your own experience, the “map” you used is no longer credible.
Global Social Tsunami: You are constantly bombarded with credible threat and opportunity signals, even though those signals don’t apply to you locality or timeline. Your sensory model for stress response is going haywire. Social media carries a lot of water here.

We make a decision based off of what we believe (or want to believe) we sense in front of us — knowing that we are percieving the world through our own sensory limits, our contextual limits, and the heat haze the world spits up.

The Belief before the Storm

Lacking sensory data, narratives and beliefs become our navigation tools.

Narratives give a structure and a degree of continuity to the experiences we are trying to parse — as well as painting experiences with the nuance of values, social constructs, risk, etc. Narcissus’ grim curse puts the negative frame around self obsession; as well as Penelope’s cleverness and patience share the values of that culture alongside construct of a gendered heroism.

Beliefs are the interpretation and action that we bring to experience and anticipation. Systemic beliefs are macro-effectors on the way that we navigate our world. We might hold a systemic value-driven belief like “gambling is morally wrong and corrupting” or “design thinking results in better product/service outcomes.” Systemic beliefs carry across the subject’s experiences and world view — such that they usually must be accounted for in your interactions with them.

Localized beliefs are trigger-specific beliefs that are basically weird modifiers on our perception: “I got sick when I ate hotpot therefore hotpot is the devil”, or “I was weird that one time so Joan thinks I’m weird”, or “I was successful in my last project, and so future projects have to create outcomes that LOOK like that project” The trigger for a localized belief can be people, places, experiences, etc. But they tend to be a bit unexpected: an otherwise critical leader with a specific phobia, ritual, or bias.

Narratives structure these systemic and localized beliefs into a frame that is legible (though not always reasonable). A common designer trope is the young designer holding a semi-heroic narrative around their role in a process: they structurally believe in individual exceptionalism reinforced through macro-narratives like 21st century software entrepreneurialism and nationalist rhetoric. This systemic belief is reinforced and contextualized by their localized beliefs, such as experiences carrying a group project at school (“I always get the job done, with or without others”), filtered work experiences (“I’m chosen over others for this type of work”), and idiosyncratic expertise (“My experience as a printmaker means I understand process in a unique way”). This bundling of systemic and localized beliefs constructs a specific narrative which serve to obfuscate root cause and rationale — making it all incredibly difficult to untangle.

Because of this tangle, personal narratives and beliefs are excruciating difficult to change. But it’s not impossible. The start of of the process is to make internal narratives and beliefs legible. This becomes the baseline for introspecting our interpretation of the environment, and it empowers us to share our newly legible narratives with others.

Belief Casting

Let’s make this legibility useful.

Backcasting (a tool by John Robinson) is my go-to planning tool for making sense of work that needs to exist in the future. You start with where you’re currently at, project forward to where you want to be (perhaps with a few variations of where you want to be), and work backwards from that point. What needs to be true? Who needs to be involved? What needs to exist or be eliminated? Backcasting creates todo list to get to the future, with opportunities to “diverge” along unknown continuums.

It’s an effective tool because of three qualities: mapping actions across the dimension of time; allowing for forks in the timeline; and that you start from the outcomes.

Belief-casting takes the same core tenant of backcasting, but adds the dimensions of belief and narrative to action and logistics. It directly acknowledge our limits in sensory capacity; our experience-born beliefs; and the narrative entanglements these entail.

This can be used in a simple way to interrogate our known biases around a scenario: If I believe that that serverless is the best approach for a project and I KNOW that I believe this, that belief becomes a pivot point. Then, working backwards from project completion, one lane becomes backcasting along the serverless dimension, another along more traditional infrastructure.

Belief-casting becomes a lot more interesting if you apply it to your overriding narratives. Let’s say I adhere to an employee-centric narrative around wellbeing and work-life balance (eg. working hours, location, paternity leave, etc). Does the backcast-ed plan I created align with that narrative? What else must be true for my narrative and my plan to align? What risks are incurred to the plan by my internal narrative?

Let’s imagine a startup building in the post-covid world: Its founders share a (laudable) narrative of worker-centric team culture, but also buy into the the systemic beliefs of the venture capital ecosystem (high pre-revenue capex; intense effort and risk around product-market-fit pivots; high overall risk to both product and employee). These two beliefs aren’t exclusive, but there are situations where they come into conflict. For example: what happens when this company encounters the unexpected? What happens when productivity lags, or directions are ambiguous? What happens when a team accustom to being present in the evening with their family hits a series of pre-raise pivot or another unexpected crunch?

Belief-casting generates a structure to interrogate those questions directly by overlaying these conflicts directly overtop of the plan. This creates artefacts that invite iteration as time and work roll onwards.

Values vs. Ego vs. Reality

Let’s do a dead simple example. I’m going to skip a LOT of steps, so if you have any questions just send me a note and I’ll update this post!

First step! The easiest way to run a belief casting activity is to run a backcasting activity first. I’ve shared some references at the end of this post, so you can view that there.

Start with the dates and work backwards from there. Map out the current state (now), and then the state you’re trying to get to (Series A in this case). You’ll get usually get a pretty idealized path like this.

Make sure to take that and break it off into some potential “risk” pathways. There’s never one path. What are some alternative paths that might occur? In this scenario we are looking at time for an outcome we know, but this might be an opportunity to look at alternative preferable outcomes. In this example, we just have some alternative outcomes from testing that results in a pushed timeline.

With the basic project skeleton in place, take a step back and try to interrogate some of the core beliefs or values you have about your startup. The best case scenario here is that founders have worked with a coach or therapist, and have a kind of legibility to their own belief system. Worst case, use the startup as a foil for which to embed beliefs and treat this like a brand-building or value-identifying activity. I’m posting examples of these kinds of activities on instagram, and will link to specifics when they’re up.

You’ll want to sort and categorize these beliefs somehow. This should give you a handful of categories that you can start applying to “points” along your backcast journey. It should be rough, critical, and argumentative at this stage. This is where things will get a bit messy as you highlight, markup, and add notes to the document.

My personal favourite approach is it have postits on a whiteboard, so information can be moved, but also marked up.

As you go through this process, you’ll start to surface some pretty clear tradeoffs between these beliefs. For our intrepid founders, we’re starting to see that the employee-centric and ego-centric values suffer as soon as they come across the user-centric events.

We can see from this example that while the plan and pivot points themselves are logical relative to the structural dogma of this type business, the results are counter to their professed beliefs (employee and ) EVEN when they get lucky.

In the middle “ideal” scenario, founder taste-making (ego-centrism) raises an initial round, and magically aligns with user needs (user-centrism). The team is stressed leading into launch, but overall the outcome is good with customer demand leading the next round.

In the more likely scenario (top), founder taste-making raises a round and defines the core product, but it doesn’t meet the customer need. Testing becomes delayed by the “taste making” belief — and by the time the product meets the user a substantial portion of the company’s runway has been utilized. What results is a user-centric win for the product — purchased with a sacrifice of employee-centric and ego-centric initiatives.

This example shows a set of beliefs being front-loaded into the company’s inception which don’t map onto the real needs of the business. If you hire based on one set of beliefs, but you structurally REQUIRE a different set of beliefs to get to the outcome you describe, then these actibities will come into natural conflict.

Finding Shelter

This kind of belief casting map presents a dilemma. If we’re risking this much in venturing out, why do so at all?

Venturing out also means looking ahead: keeping an eye open for conflict and hypothesizing about opportunity. We can get further along this path by applying a layer of belief-based interrogation. It brings the subjectivity of our experience into the planning process, and gives us some basis for calculating error.

Here’s one alternative that might emerge from this interrogation of the previous The series A raise is based on some level of customer demand and PMF, so we orient the early activities around that more relevant belief.

We must be able to MIX and ALIGN beliefs to get us to better outcomes. Early user-centric activities can be mixed with employee-centric activities and ego-centric activities. Instead of aggressively hiring a full team, hire a handful of early employees and involve all of them in customer research while assessing them as future management. This plurality of experience has the opportunity to augment the founders’ strongly held opinions (ego-centrism), de-risks future hiring processes, and it gives the early employees clarity around their advancement in the company (employee-centrism).

This redefined map isn’t the culmination of this activity however: it will require a lot more interrogation and a return to more detailed back-casting and scenario planning — especially because we default to an idealized single scenario after doing the “refinement.” Functionally, we’ve converged on a solution through a belief-driven filtering process, and the smart next step is to diverge again and run the new plan through a gauntlet.

As a reminder, the categories identified in this example (user-centrism, ego-centrism, employee-centrism) sound generic, but are specific to this example. Running this kind of activity without doing the work to surface the beliefs that drive the starting plan will result in mush.

But whatever needs to happen next, with this approach we’ve explicitly integrated our beliefs and narratives into our planning activities. When hard decisions come down the road, we’ll be equipped to balance those decisions against the choice and circumstance that got us there. We can’t control our environments, but when we do head out into inclement weather, we have agency over our attitudes and our preparedness. Belief-casting is a shortcut to both.

– Big thank you to Justin Pickard for the feedback,

I learned Backcasting when I was at Normative from Matthew Milan. Here’s one of his presentations on the topic

One of the original backcasting essays by John Robinson is here: Future under Glass

Blocking the Entrance to the Rabbit Hole

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 12:00:00 GMT

*Note: I started this blog post 06/2023, and finished it 11/2023. A few things changed inbetween in terms of process, employment, etc. The final paragraph is the big addition.*

Last year, I took an extended break from blog writing after submitting my masters thesis in March 2022. It was an intentional break to figure out a different focus, but not one I had intended to go on quite so long.

When I went silent in December of 2021, my intent was to restart the blog and newsletter with a focus on work spaces. That might still happen, but it isn’t my focus right now. Currently, I am running research for a startup called Keel, and got more than my fill of daily interviews about how people work as engineers and operations professionals. I’ll be writing about that for Keel, but it isn’t where my “hobby heart” is right now.

What I do want to write about is personal project work. There has been a few things I’ve been fiddling with: in electronics, in software, and to a lesser extent with music. I’ll get to all that eventually.

A New Type

Right now, I want to tell you about the absurdity of learning to type again.

In mid 2021, I was solidly down the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards and shifting away from the staggered layouts most of us use. My reasons for this were two fold: I had back pain which had resolved mostly when I switched to a split keyboard, and I am really don’t think through how disruptive subtle changes to a core tool’s ergonomics can be. By the time I DID realize this (having switched to a column-based layout), it was already too late and I could barely use a staggered keyboard anymore. The rabbit hole’s entrance firmly blocked by my own hubris, I naturally descended even further.

The custom keyboard world seems divided into a few types: those who are in it for a particular diy or be-netted aesthetic (streamers being a key cohort here). Often these won’t have a noticeably different layout, but led lighting, resin or custom keycaps, and themed keys are central here. image ref

There are those who see an ergonomic rationale to switching away from staggered qwerty normality. Arguments around dvorak and colemak reign supreme here, as does distinguishing between certain types of layout like ortholinear (a grid of keys) vs columnar (column-based layouts that stagger vertically to match the ergonomics of one’s hands). You will hear the term home row (where your fingers sit), movement from the homerow, and invariably hear about Ergogen, a tool to generate design files for your own totally custom keyboard PCB. This is a very good essay that reflects this thinking.

and then there are those of us with poor impulse control who just want to try something out, and again, find the rabbit hole blocked behind us.

This leads me to the keyboard I am writing this post on: a 34 key split board I build myself from a kit, called a Ferris Sweep using a layout I’ve grown to love called Miryoku laid out in colemak dh. Oh no.

Damn it, Andrew

Okay. Yes. I fell down the rabbit hole. I also learned a few interesting things while I was down there, though I would certainly not recommend this for most. Let me share a few things I discovered.

More with Less

As an interaction designer who works mostly with screens, discovering the power of chords and layers has been revelatory.

Chords are combinations of keys that invoke certain actions. The one you likely use most frequently is command-C and V to copy and paste, or Z to undo. But most programs have greater capacities that you can find in their documentation. For example, a research tool I have used frequently called Descript has a highlighting chord of command shift H, which I internalized while transcribing interviews.

Layers are the idea that you can shift your keyboard’s state and change the use of certain keys. An example in Miryoku is the numpad layer. Hold down or double tap the layer key and the left half of your keyboard becomes a numberpad.

This feels pretty clunky in theory: why have memorize these different layers when you can have a dedicated numpad or numbers running above the alphabetic row. Except it isn’t about memorization. When using layers, you really do just come to internalize them by muscle memory, to the point where after some initial failures and needing a reference like the image above, you just type. And you type faster with less movement. It also opens the door to adding more functionality as you internalize things. I’ve read about folk adding gaming layers or shortcut layers to accomplish automation tasks or use a particular program like final cut or ableton more effectively, but I digress.

The point is that these concepts of chording and layering dramatically increase the potential for a single device with a limited interactive surface area. The best device type that I can think of that mimics this is the Elektron style of electronic groove box. They have a relatively small screen and few interface elements, yet are lauded as one of the most ‘instrument like’ of all the electronic music tools. Being a user of the Octatrack myself, I personally believe this comes from Elektron’s use of chords and layers as a conceptual frame for music making and performance.

Right now, using 34 keys I personally believe I am at the edge of reasonable when it comes to this principle. I, for example, don’t have an escape button: but chord together my two buttons to create the escape key press. I also can’t hold down backspace to delete words, and so had to learn to internalize character (backspace), word (command+backspace), and line (command+shift+backspace) deletion. This has ended up being a lot faster, but that wasn’t immediately a great experience.

Lock-in

Skill-based Tool lockin is nothing new. We’ve seen this in the design world where a lot of senior or director level designers were slow to take up Figma (myself included) because of all the time we had spent in other programs. The web dev world experienced the same thing with the rise of VS Code in the past years, with a few firm holdouts sticking with Sublime or IntelliJ depending on their focus.

Keyboards, mice, and our various peripherals have the same effect: we learn to use a particular thing early on and we don’t end up questioning it as we move along a path towards whatever we are trying to do. This applies when we write software, edit a spreadsheet, write an essay.

This path dependence has ended up making designing peripherals for lock-in obvious. If you’re designing a laptop and need to sell X units to justify the cost of development, then you’re obviously going to go the way of a staggered qwerty layout.

Now, this is starting to change, but only because laptops are becoming a bit more modular on the periphery. Companies like Framework and MNT are doing some interesting things in this space, but imo we won’t ever see an alternative keyboard for a mac laptop. Not without a broader cultural change around how we interact with computers.

This might come if mixed reality ever gets off the ground, but it will be competing with voice as an interaction paradigm for text input. Experiments around the wrist-based MR keyboard, with muscle movements being mapped on to a virtual interface localized around our wrists’ movement, for example, mean that the physicality of the interface maps on to our own. Ultimately having interfaces that match our ergonomic needs is better, and so the principles inherent in columnar based keyboards (as well as other ergonomically oriented key configurations like this monstrosity or this one) are “better for us” even if we’ve fit our typing patterns to a mechanically-initiated, and now market driven norm.

Skill Trees

Another piece that was interesting experience wise was the layers of skill required to actually use this thing successfully and fluidly. Like, being able to tap type on a tiny keyboard you made yourself is great, but how do you get there? Like in a video game, getting to the big move requires unlocking some other things first and making some decisions, and that skill tree metaphor maps well to this kind of custom keyboard.

The minimal layer is jumping from laptop keys to mechanical, because you can’t functionally diy a laptop keyboard (though someone is working on one for the framework laptop). Then when you’ve acclimated to that, reducing the number of keys you use into layers tends to take place. For me, getting the Planck board and using layers to access number keys was that bit transition. You might also try a split keyboard: which tends to shift your posture and require you to separate your visual model of the keyboard from the repetitive act of typing. That split route is its own tree. From there, you might explore details around mechanical keyboards: the sound, what kind of switch, etc. I didn’t really care that much about that to be honest, and skipped that whole step.

The biggest leap is going from qwerty to a different keyboard layout, which ends up unlocking different patterns of typing but also introduces a lot of noise.

UPDATE: Blocking the Entrance to the Rabbit Hole

There’s a lot to write about all this. Since writing this originally (while my blog lay somewhat fallow), I’ve actually jumped back to qwerty out of the sheer necessity of needing to type on a laptop. Also, working with different shortcuts for technical programs like Figma, Fusion, Plasticity, KiCad, etc. is absolutely impossible with a non traditional keyboard. It just presents as a massive pain and yet one more thing to learn. Ad

I HAVE discovered that I can shift between the keyboard types pretty quickly, and that this ability to shift ends up killing any of the pain that I had developed wrist/hand wise anyway. So there you go.

I love this ability to jump between these different modes though. I end up thinking a bit differently, and particularly with the the colemak dh 34 key setup which I’ve landed on, I can get into a bit of a flow with that writing that I really enjoy. It means that I have to go back and edit later, but there is something there. I am also now very accustom to the block level keyboard only text editing that the colemak format encourages, but I don’t yet feel good using that on qwerty mode.

Hopefully this can be an interesting glimpse into a rabbit hole I encountered with my

An Old Kind of New

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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 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. 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), 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.

Renewing Spaces

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

Skill Spalling

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Learning with Pressure, Time, and Surface Area

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

This brings us to learning 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.

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.

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, 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, 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).

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!

Avoiding Kits

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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), 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 (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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Homeric Design Strategy

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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 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).

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, we visualize entrapment and confusion with the Minotaur holding Labyrinth of Crete, or one’s contradictory nature with the “two-face” preface — referencing the Roman deity 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 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 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.

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, as an aside)

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

▶ Watch on YouTube

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!” meme, and beyond. Personally, I accidentally fell down the rabbit hole on the narrative side with the Horus Heresy books — Horus Rising in particular (send help).

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), 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.

Kitbashing Experience

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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 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):

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.

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, or Twitter’s Bootstrap, or the US Government’s Web Design Standards 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. 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:

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 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.

Another example might be the game (which I’ve yet to try, but sounds incredible) 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?

▶ Watch on YouTube

Finally on the web side, I might point to a weekend project I did two years ago called Fit Faj. 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.

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, 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.

Functional Immersion

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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 — which see whole economies built around content creation and realization in the virtual. I’m sure this is what Zuckerberg is imagining — 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 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. And, of course, there’s this. (Seriously)

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?), 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.”

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. Of course, we still manage to make things. Watching the “speed runs” of people modelling complex objects in Blender 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 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.

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.

Tried the new #OculusQuest2 passthrough API in Gravity Lab#VR #AR pic.twitter.com/rrONObVubC
— Mark Schramm 🕹️ #VR #AR (@MarkSchrammVR) August 15, 2021

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 through holograms. It’s the kind of world that Malcolm McCullough describes in 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).

▶ Watch on YouTube

YouTube

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

▶ Watch on YouTube

YouTube

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

Visceral Control

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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:

Or US Navy pilots going through G-force training (also wtf):

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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, and you’ll find tons of other blogs trying to think through it, like this one.

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?

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.

Peripherals

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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), 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 (I own two and use them manically), to eye tracking bars that sits under our monitor, to the six degree of freedom Space Mouse 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 about automation recently, 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 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 (yet), or you might explicitly be building a system with the human in the loop. The disgruntled drone pilots 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.

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 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 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. 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.

▶ Watch on YouTube

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. So when you’re interacting with the game through a joystick and throttle (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.

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 or find a time to chat during office hours!

Thinking through Research Automation

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:00:00 GMT

(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

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

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.

Migration and Circumstance

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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, 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.

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.

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 or the recent narrowing of English language education opportunities, 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.

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.

Designers in the Military

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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 — 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 (I really recommend the book reviewed here, actually) to McCrystal, Jomini to Naveh — have also served to decorate the language that I use to transition the ambiguous into the impactful, and the intangible into the real.

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, 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 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 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.

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, 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.

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 for future such events, and can’t wait to see what comes next.

Professional Warning People

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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). 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.

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 as a million Rwandans of Tutsi ethnicity were massacred by fellow Rwandans of the majority Hutu ethnic group.

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, 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)

Cynthia Grabo’s Anticipating Surprise

Strategic Warning Intelligence

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.

Covid Anxiety: A Foresight Game

Sun, 16 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

(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 (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.

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: 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:

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

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

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.

Looking at the first scenario

The First Assessment

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

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.

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

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

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)

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. We didn’t play with the wildcards initially, so didn’t include that on the canvas.

First Round

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.
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.
Then roll a dice or select a catastrophe card at random. Put it in the catastrophe slot.
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.
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

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.

Hidden in the Shallows

Sun, 02 May 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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, 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.

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 set to the opening theme of Twin Peaks, 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: “LOUD AND DUMB CAN ALSO BE CONCISE AND ELEGANT.” (He apparently only writes emails in caps lock because — of course he does)

Rei Kawakubo’s Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body (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.

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.

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.

Wearing Technology

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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

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

(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. Leather — also ancient in its use as a fit-for-purpose technical material —has a place in the “tech wear” world, 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 — 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.

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).

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 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).

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.

The Problem with Validity

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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

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

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 Decay of Digital Things

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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 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 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. _

References

http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/03/patina/

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

Designing Participant Experiences

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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:

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.
Recruit and contact those people, either on the team or through a recruiting firm.
Deal with the responses and concerns of the participant. Often this part would involve a screener or some other filtering mechanism.
Manage consent and any legal requirements for engaging with the study.
Schedule the participants and the team, with any final checks or discussions around incentives.
Engage in the interview or experience with the participant. Basically data collection.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

All Quiet on the Productivity Front

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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

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. 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

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, 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), 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

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 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 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

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 — 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?

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:

“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.

Sponge Cycles

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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, 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

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 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 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

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.

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 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. 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 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

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, 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, 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

Every sound has what’s called an envelope, 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…). 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.

Speculative Surplus

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

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 or the rollout of new Army Greens to American service members, 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 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.

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 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.

This is not so great. I’d more readily frame this as maximalist cosplay with a fascistic bent.

There’s a character in William Gibson’s Zero History 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, 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.

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 fit is identifiable from a gorpcore fit or a 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 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 experiment (which turned into Stupid Fits) 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 for simulating different scenarios — games for getting participants thinking with constraints. Sometimes those constraints are pretty wild, other times they reveal some anxiety-inducing combination.

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 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, 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.

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.

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 to the insanity of Mine Resistant Ambush Protector vehicles 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.

The costume design by Craig Green in Alien: Covenant 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.

The post-collapse, counter-surveillance styles of the Italian brand GALL clothing 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 or the domestic-utility, tactical-aesthetics of microbrands like AMDUS Project? 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 — tirelessly reconstructing and reimagining the conflict garments of the past into something softer, more critical, more peaceful?

Much beloved by security scholars and military theorists, 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, Sam Sundberg, and Quantius for feedback that made this a slightly more coherent starting point.

This essay was also published on Tchwr.com

Full Hamcus: Finding the Spark in Sci-fi Workwear

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 12:00:00 GMT

This essay was originally published on the** TCHWR blog.**

Hamcus 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: 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 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” 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 jumpsuit is an example of this.

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;

The nomadic ADAM faction with more radical colours and frayed edges;

The mysterious RVEN and their collaborators;

The Atheist faction;

And various other groups along the way, from Arctic Mantas to Space Cowboys.

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 — 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

As people like Quantius, Tyler Wood, and hopefully me on my better days 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, their Duszeneration show, 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 for the original essay and more on high-tech, functional, utilitarian fashion._

Reflecting on 2020

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 12:00:00 GMT

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, 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

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, 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

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 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 or hobby-reinforcing technology explorations like Stupid Fits, 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

Last year, I started a distance master’s degree in the UK. I had worked at the Pentagon for a while as part of the US Digital Service, 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 or Divergent Options. 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, 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.

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 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. 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

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.

What Didn’t Work

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. 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.
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

Photography became a driver for getting outside. I posted a bunch of it on my main Instagram. A lot of it was used in research and consulting. Got a lot of inspiration from Jane’s Thoughtless Acts as well as Hans Eijkelboom’s incredible People of the Twenty-First Century.
Lockdown was a terrarium for my wardrobe. I made a pretty fun prototype in Notion for a digital closet, which I wrote about here. This eventually led to Stupid Fits and its Instagram account. 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.
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

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. 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, 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.

Diverge Weekly Issue 9 The Dependencies Issue

Tue, 05 May 2020 12:00:00 GMT

First, thank you and welcome to all the new subscribers, and to Hillary Predko for sharing Diverge in The Prepared. 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. And it sets tempo to the increasingly stressed network of labour that empowers my own specialization.

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 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 — 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.

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.

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 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. Liquid assets can scarcely be accumulated without a market that values your labour, or fails to compensate you fairly for it.

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. 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, 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

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.

A More Intentional Wardrobe

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 12:00:00 GMT

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 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. 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.

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.

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:

Item (with properties)
Several Collections of Items (Aggregation of properties)
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.

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.

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.

Model of an Outfit

Then, when browsing, I can view the individual outfits with a description and a focus on the jacket.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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 and FaceHunter, 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.

Reflecting on 2019

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 12:00:00 GMT

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, 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

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

Knowsi 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.

The Degree – Starting a Masters

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

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 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 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, 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. 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 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

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 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!

Benadryl and Parachord

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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.

Through IDEO, I learned from work my colleagues did with Team Rubicon; had contributed towards the open source development of City72 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. 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.

It’s a world that I’d like to be able to contribute more meaningfully to, and so this course, getting ICS certifications, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To paraphrase my friend Paul Bell — 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.

This essay was originally published in Medium.

Bureaucratic Mysteries

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 12:00:00 GMT

These tools were taught as a workshop to the first Code for Canada fellowship *team in November 2017. Article originally published in Medium*.

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

Example Scenario

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

Example Scenario

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

Example Scenario

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

Example Scenario

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 and we can chat about how this approach might work for your specific challenge.

Originally published at pit.andrewlb.com on February 1, 2018.