Colophon
Colophon
This site is deliberately built as both an archive and a working surface.
Ideas are revised as my understanding changes. Publication therefore does not necessarily mean completion.
Pages that materially change should show their latest revision date.
Where evidence matters, I try to distinguish external findings from my own interpretation and practice-derived judgement.
Reading the labels
Status and evidence
How sure a page is
- Status Established — Strongly supported by evidence or consensus.
- Status Position — My considered reading, based on evidence and practice.
- Status Practice-derived — Learned mainly by doing it many times.
- Status Working proposition — Promising, and still being tested.
- Status Open question — Deliberately unresolved.
- Status Speculation — Exploratory thought with little evidence behind it yet.
What kind of claim a passage makes
Research suggests
My interpretation
In practice
Open question
The name
Two halves of one practice
This site is built on a design system I call Atlas & Loom. The name is not decoration. The two halves are the two halves of how I actually work, and the whole site is coloured by them — blue for the map, orange for the thread.
Atlas
Maps · terrain · contours · scale
I trained as a geography educator, and it remains the most useful thing about me. Geography teaches you to read a place — to treat terrain, scale, and interdependence as causes rather than background. It is why I start with the room and not the furniture, and why I think a learning space is already an argument about what people are allowed to do in it.
Loom
Weaving · networks · threads
The other half is what I am building now. Complexity, systems, and making are all about how things hold together — and about how a change in one thread turns up somewhere nobody was looking. That is the toolkit: futuring, complexity, and ways of thinking, braided tightly enough that a school team can pick the whole thing up at once.
A map shows you the terrain. A loom shows you what it is made of, and what moves when you pull one thread. The work I find interesting needs both — and so, it turns out, do the games.
Build
How it is made
Built on Atlas & Loom. Atlas is maps, terrain, contours, and scale; Loom is weaving, networks, and threads. I trained as a geography educator and I am building a toolkit for complexity — the two halves of the system are the two halves of the practice.
Built with Next.js and prerendered, so every page is static HTML that reads without JavaScript. No CSS framework: the design system is one token layer, in two themes, with solid colours only.
The guides, talks and field guides are self-contained HTML files, each a deck and an article in one. They open in their own tab because they have their own controls.
The site runs no analytics script at present.