My personal interests
Things I do for their own sake.
They’re where I get to be a beginner, and where the feedback is immediate and unsentimental. Most of what I believe about designed experience I first learnt at a table, losing.
Mahjong
Singapore mahjong is a scoring system pretending to be a tile game. A game held together almost entirely by unwritten convention is a small, complete study in tacit knowledge. It’s also a decent argument that documentation is design work.
mahjong.geraldajam.comContract bridge
The best-designed information problem I know of that you can finish in an evening. Bidding is a constrained language (a small set of legal calls, all public, all ambiguous), and both partners have to build a shared picture using only those while two opponents listen in.
Cartoons
A single panel has to carry setup, character and turn at once. That makes it the most unforgiving compression problem in visual communication, and the closest thing I know to a diagram with a sense of humour.
Trying new tech
I poke at new tools by building something small and slightly too ambitious with them, on the theory that you can’t evaluate a tool from its documentation. Most attempts don’t survive.
Making espresso
Espresso is a process-control problem you can run twice before breakfast. Everything that matters happens inside an opaque basket in twenty-five seconds. You never see the process, only its output, and only after it’s too late to change anything.
Pursuits are what I do. The library is what I point to: other people’s work I’d recommend. Mahjong, bridge, cartoons and coffee appear in both on purpose. One is the practice, the other is what taught me.
Found
Things I found, and couldn’t leave alone
Other people’s ideas after I’ve had a go at them. Each one started as something I found and admired, and ended as an instrument I could actually use. The source is named first, because the idea was never mine.
What an inspiration is here
The library holds other people’s work as it is, with one line on why it matters. That’s the right way to recommend most things. But some things I find aren’t finished with once I’ve read them. A question tree in a blog post wants to be asked one question at a time. A taxonomy in a table wants to be a map. This shelf is for those. The idea is someone else’s, the build is mine, and the useful thing is the combination.
The test for an entry is whether the rebuilt version does something the original couldn’t, without changing what the original meant. Where I’ve changed the meaning, it belongs somewhere else and says so.
Why I rebuild them
Partly because it’s the only way I know to find out whether I understood something. Reading an argument and agreeing with it is cheap. Turning it into a thing that has to work exposes every place I’d been nodding along.
And partly because a good idea in the wrong form goes unused. I poke at new tools by building something small and slightly too ambitious with them. This is where that habit meets other people’s good ideas.
A set of two
The Long Way Home
What experts in danger mostly know is a short list of instincts to override. Loose Change is tradecraft: the instincts spies, con artists and pickpockets use against you. Dry Matches is fieldcraft: the instincts that are simply wrong when the danger is physical. Twenty-one files across the two, each one rule to decide in advance, with the case behind it, a drill and a grade for the evidence. Each opens as a deck at night; press T for day and R for the reading version. A few things in each are hidden on purpose.
Loose Change
We trust a badge, repay a favour, stay consistent and act fast when frightened, and people who want something from us aim at exactly those habits. Eleven files on noticing, reading people, persuasion, cons, concealment, signals and the street, each with one rule decided in advance, the case behind it and how good the evidence is.
Open the bookDry Matches
Drinking from a clear stream, trying the door of a sinking car, rubbing a frozen hand: each feels right, and each is wrong. Ten files on what to do instead, and in what order, drawn mostly from official guidance, rescue services and medical reviews. It is not training, and says so first.
Open the bookAfter Chill Chicken Explains. Every claim was checked against the record and carries a grade for the source and a grade for the claim.
Also here
On its own
Not part of a set. One instrument, rebuilt from one source.
Others will appear when a thing I found has turned into a thing I use, not before.
To take away
Play something with rules, and watch what the rules make you do.
Mahjong and bridge decide what players notice, risk and say before anyone makes a move. Classrooms work the same way. The work pages make that argument at length, with fewer tiles.