ISSUE 36 — 100100: FUTURESIGHT SCHEMA
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” Hannah Arendt
A point is a moment. Enough points, gathered over time, become a lifetime. What connects one point to another is a path. In networking, those points are called nodes; in software development, they may be called nodes or vertices, joined by edges. The names change, but the pattern remains: each connection makes another route possible.
You watch your oldest daughter leave for college and begin drawing a path of her own. Her bags are packed; the future is not. You listen as she speaks about the things she hopes to become and the things that frighten her. You offer your thoughts when she asks, but resist the urge to turn your experience into a map she must follow. Your life is not a set of instructions. It is an example, one possibility among many.
You want her to know that possibility can be within reach, and that even what seems impossible may be worth imagining. The path does not have to be visible before it is taken. Sometimes it appears only as you move.
You have been thinking about paths for years, though you did not always have that word for them. You found them in systems: in the network diagram that showed how one office depended on another, in the service map that connected an employee’s login to a chain of applications, in the small, repeated actions that turned a one-time fix into a dependable process. You found them, too, in the ways people affected one another.
Nothing exists as a point entirely by itself. Lives, ideas, and work intersect. Each connection changes the shape of what comes next.
You are drawn to schemas because they make structure visible. They define how information is arranged and the rules it must follow. While learning the backend of full-stack development, you found this idea compelling, not just as a technical tool, but as a way to think about how people and systems are shaped.
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A schema can bring order to complexity. It can ensure that a request includes the information needed to help someone, or that a knowledge base distinguishes a confirmed solution from an untested suggestion.
But structure can become a cage when people mistake it for the only acceptable form. You have seen processes that demand the same steps from everyone, even when the situation is different. You have seen a form with no field for the real problem, a ticket closed because its category says “resolved,” a policy so rigid that people learn to work around it instead of trusting it.
You want a different kind of structure: coherent enough to be useful, open enough to change. The unfinished circle becomes an image for that ambition. It has a shape, but does not claim to be complete.
At this present moment, you rest in unknown territory. The environment you are designing lives in the overlap between organic structures and digital interfaces. You imagine an interface that behaves less like a sealed container and more like a breathable habitat: navigable, responsive, able to adapt as people and patterns move through it. A schema becomes a starting pattern rather than a final verdict. It supports connections without dictating every form they must take.
In practice, that might mean designing IT operations around the work people are actually trying to do. An employee who cannot access a clinical system, a warehouse worker whose scanner has stopped syncing, and a new hire who needs basic account access all need help — but not necessarily the same process. A useful service catalog could offer clear, safe routes for each request while leaving room for a support person to recognize when the situation does not fit the menu.
The structure guides; it does not overrule judgment.
Ilnur via UnSplash)
It might also mean changing what the organization considers successful. Instead of measuring a help desk only by the number of tickets closed, you could look at whether people can get back to work, whether the same failure keeps returning, and whether the fix improved the system for everyone. If a hundred employees report the same printing issue, the achievement is not closing a hundred tickets. It is finding the shared cause, correcting it once, and communicating what changed.
That question feels urgent in a world that is almost normal, but will never return to a normal we recognize. “The new normal” may be the name people give to uncertainty when they need to keep moving through it.
Today in history: Hermann, Rorschach, born today in 1884, is a Swiss psychiatrist who devised the inkblot test that bears his name and that is widely used clinically for diagnosing psychopathology. He knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli. The subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics.
What might become possible if we treated every schema, not as a fixed blueprint, but as an unfinished path shaped by the people who move through it?
