Philosophy and Design.

I was mostly focusing on philosophy these past two years. One reason for studying analytic philosophy has been the promise of sharpening my thinking, checking on all of the gaps in my ideas and arguments. I was looking for a way to improve my thinking to talk about what I see.

How does one become a better designer? We’ve spent a lot of time in DCT debating and exploring the role of designer and at some point, I’ve decided to go out and test what I thought to be the unique way in which the design role applies to me. What quality to I bring to design? I don’t have a background in architecture, nor have I done an industrial design degree or something similar. Design it’s something I’ve scrapped through my capabilities solving complex problems that required reframing, and solutions that required re-design of products, cultures, experiences.

(BTW something to inspire you on the future and state of design that I’ve written for the community here: The state of design from the Future.)

The sharpness of thought, the depth, the coherence that contribute to understanding a problem are possibilities that I knew philosophy offers.

I tend to put real thought into something , no concept stays unturned, unquestioned. Usually there’s something hidden in there that skews perspectives, reprioritizes the value of knowledge we have, and if you don’t know what it is, it kind of goes on unsupervised. “It’s not what we wanted, but it’s how things worked out.” That’s a dangerous statement.

But when you think a lot you can also gain an awareness of what and how much thought you put into something. The articulation of that just feels innovative, because it’s less “gappy” — somehow it’s more magical to witness clear thinking, that obscure wisdom. But it’s so rarely shared…

Initially, the mind moves through an abstract fog, but then it begins to find things. You begin to stand straight, not bend fearing that you will take a fall while groping in the dark.

Before I say more about it, just a quick thing: I do metaphysics now. I’m sort of specializing in, paradoxically the most general kind of practice. It’s not just any kind of philosophy — it’s the general view on things and what they are.

Metaphysics has a bad reputation in Analytic Philosophy. Allegedly, it has been killed by the logical positivists and all the reductionistic attempts to empty out philosophy of its soul, so it looks like a science. They told her “Time to grow up — no more walking barefoot, laser out those tattoos or wear long sleeves, only. Don’t know, don’t care — just stop acting out.”

Metaphysics is often done badly, and the generalizations that follow from looking at the world in the most general ways (not restricted to any domain, not even to the laws of physics, or those of human thought), just sounds crazy in the first place. How is it different from speculation or just a strange and impractical exercise of imagination?

Smart people do a lot of other kinds of philosophy. Asking the fundamental questions just seems redundant given that we have sciences, mathematics, logic. We don’t need to throw in: but are numbers real??

But here’s the thing. Even I don’t believe asking such questions is always useful. The problem, however, is not with the questions themselves, but with their timing. It wasn’t philosophy that helped me see — It was design. The real question is: at what point is it worth asking a fundamental question about the kinds of objects there are? Asking them when you get started might not be the right time as you are simply trying to understand possibilities in an ordinary way. Let me try a practical example to show how, in a given context, this becomes relevant.

Startup? Startdown.

Talked a while ago to a startup team (before the explosive AI hits): They designed a note-taking app — you record yourself, it transcribes, and AI helps you organise and work with what you said. It distinguished between voices, so you could keep track of the transcription, and could summarize in text; it gave you options to organize your library, etc. Nothing inherently innovative and at the time I was talking to them, the AI assistants in online meetings weren’t a thing, the note-taking capabilities offered were limited. So, they had a relevant product: they were serving a kind of clients that had in-person meetings with something useful that helped in the day-to-day. With all honesty, I have no memory of what the app is called anymore, the name of the person or whatever happened after. Sorry, bad memory.

But now that frees me of what I couldn’t ask them at that time: is this app a real product? What exactly are the customers paying for? Their own voice recorded and transcribed? What needs does it connect to? The need to capture thoughts quickly before they fly of, or the need to keep track of a lot of things that are being discussed and must be followed upon later? What exactly has been created? The role of the scribe automated…?

And how did this come to be? I’d answer from their point of view: The app came to be because we are software developers (the efficient cause is the cause that moved it all). Apps scale, can be sold, investors know them, their potential can be predicted.

What kinds of relations are we looking at? Is the app the object we sell? “Well, yes, BUT it’s the experience they buy, the benefits of using it.” So what’s the distance between the use of the app and what makes customers take it as valuable? What is the relationship between the user and the app — human-as-user is already assumed, voice-as-input is already assumed, AI-as-assistant is already assumed. Three kinds of entities making up our reality. The worth of going deeper is to check the way a human is incentivized to keep coming back, and the app is a constructed experience built around that.

It can go deeper still: what is real in all of this? The spoken words? The transcription — which is already one step removed? The AI’s reordering of what you meant? The feeling of clarity the user gets, or the statistics showing how many notes were actually ever reopened? At some point, questions like these are worth asking, even if they are uncomfortable to confront because they will make us question the value of things, too.

We just want to focus on the selling benefits, the positive side of things, and the negative aspects, that there might not be the promised value there, get concealed with the hype. But think of it like an energy drink that’s been sitting open in the sun for a day. Drinking it is not pleasant. But if your product is not drinkable in that state, it might not survive. It cannot always be cold and fizzy — but once those are gone, it should still energize you. If it’s an energy drink, it better not put you to sleep. That’s a promise you can check with fundamental questions: what is the essential property of this product, and does that tie into a real need? What makes this thing the kind of thing we say it is? — we shouldn’t lose this in the process.

These questions are not things customers will see marketed. But depending on how well you answer the deep and hard questions about your own product, you will be able to tell a simpler story — one that makes sense, that knows wow factors are add-ons. The latter are how you stand out from the crowd, not what sells your product in the long run, but the illusion consumerism brings makes people think that hype sells. It does to a certain extent and, yet, at some point, the narrative collapses: it was a bad deal, a useless purchase. (NFTs, anyone?? what happened to them?)

Of course, none of this should come as a new lesson! The point is: asking yourself whether you are creating something real, and being able to define real across different ways of relating to it, physical, socially constructed, phenomenological, will teach you a lot about the actual value, not the promises made to investors, the potential that may never be. (This lesson is not applicable to startups only —” anyone who sells anything” should pay a little attention)

At what point do you need to ask fundamental questions in business?

At many points. Especially when you don’t really believe in the thing you push for, when you all of a sudden either are louder, or quieter, but not speaking at the right volume. When you say something to hide what you don’t know. I hear it a lot. Everywhere. I do it, too — I meander, waste my time and waste people’s time.

Hopefully this shows a little bit that asking these questions are not meant to distract or destroy a product. Instead, they could save it. Philosophy is a bit awkward and not a fun conversation partner because you are probably catching her speak out of turn, and from a stream of thinking you weren’t witness to. So, it takes some alignment.

Now…

I don’t know if these questions would have saved at least that startup’s name in my head, but we’ll never know. We can only try for the next batch of business ideas.

Growing list of connected articles:

the-sandwich-the-metaphysician-and-the-designer

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Who’s hungry?

Disclaimer: Some of this may be raw and not up to any sort of standards. Cross-contamination has been THE method for cooking this up.

I. The Factory

One of my earliest culture shocks in the UK was discovering that you could simply buy a sandwich.

Back home, in my village, there were small convenience shops that sometimes made them if you asked: half a bread, some salami, ketchup, cheese when you felt fancy. Microwaved. That was lunch for a lot of school kids since there wasn’t a canteen or something. Either your parents fed you or they didn’t.

But here it was — in Britain, cold sandwiches, pre-made, two perfect triangles sealed, stacked in refrigerated aisles, overly priced and taken very seriously somehow.

It took about two years of studying in the UK before I decided I could spend 3.50 on them. I mean who likes fridge cold sandwiches??

Life has a way of teaching you about things:

During my third year, I got a job in recruitment. My mission? Sending people to work in a sandwich factory. A fridge, and inside the fridge, a long conveyor belt. The gluten-free section was even cooler — in temperature and in the eyes of the operation. Night shifts, relentless, making sandwiches at the outskirts of London for hungry and busy souls who could not bear the possibility of an unstocked shelf. Well, initially I was going to work on the conveyor belt, too, but I had some luck and they made me do the whipping instead. I also didn’t have to step into the frozen hell regularly, just the occasional visit.

We got free sandwiches. The egg-mayo was edible. The rest you had to sort of close your eyes and finish in quick bites, just to appease the hunger. After the third day, I came with my own lunchbox — cooked food that I would eat defyingly while thinking I’m better than the sandwich eaters.

I once made a joke to a passing product manager about one sandwich that just made me lose my faith in the tastes of other people: a strange pulled pork, sweet onion sauce and a mysterious green leaf combo: “This sandwich tastes innovative.” Nothing on it tasted like it belonged with the rest — that should have been obvious. He stopped, lit up a little, and said: “Right? We actually had a meeting last week about how to improve it. You know, we have a whole team working on sandwich development.”

I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t. Because of course — beyond taste, a sandwich must navigate health and safety regulations, allergens, ingredient pricing, seasonal availability, shelf life. Taste is only one variable. Innovation in a constrained system is always more complicated than it looks from the outside.

I had no use for this lesson, yet.

II. Making My Own

I couldn’t eat respect sandwiches for a long time after that job. I had to reclaim the sandwich, somehow, make it mine again!

So I did. A summer of experiments: Sliced eggplant, egg, rucola and feta in wholewheat bakery bread. Grilled mushrooms with cheese, garlic and lettuce in Kartoffelbrot. Around this time I was in Germany, so at least bread seemed to have potential. Terrible failed attempts I won’t mention. Eventually, something that felt right. I began to see beyond the thing in question or rather into the thing more deeply: the nature of the sandwich. And I began stretching the possibility. It’s a rather sadistic process — to push something to its limits and see which aspects fall apart first: the material or the conceptual ones.

In the process, I accidentally became something of a sandwich theorist, but back then, I wasn’t familiar with design processes; I was just a distracted Philosophy student who always took classes outside the department to feel “balanced.”

Two conceptual forms emerged of this process:

1. The temporal sandwich happens when you’re not very hungry, and you think a slice of toast with butter will do. But as you eat, you sense something missing — so you fold in a slice of salami. Then you realise cheese would complement it. By the time you’ve assembled all of this, there’s too little bread left, so you add another slice. Now you have leftover bread, and you either eat it plain or you continue the chain. You never intended to make a sandwich. But you did, piece by piece, crave by crave. The form emerges as we do this.
2. The deconstructed sandwich is a bit different. The plate is there. The ingredients are there. But you were too lazy to cut the tomatoes. If you tried to assemble it properly, it would collapse, so instead you take a separate bite from each component in whatever order it may suit your palate. The sandwich potential exists — you just won’t make that move. It’s there but does not amount to its complete form.

Of course, some wise design lessons could be drawn:

The temporal sandwich teaches you that structure can be discovered rather than planned, before you understood your needs. Or something like that.

The deconstructed sandwich teaches you that a thing can be entirely present without being fully assembled. Dangerous to call something what it is though… because it might not be…

III. What the Philosopher Sees

There’s a reason I keep coming back to the sandwich as a thinking object.

Now, more than ever, I am a philosopher. Here, it means that I can have a very impractical position on ordinary things. I can ask good questions in the wrong order, too. What makes it a sandwich at all, and not merely a pile of ingredients?

Aristotle had a framework for this. At the risk of butchering this ancient giant that contaminated all — I mean it, ALL Philosophy — he brings up these four causes that break down what something is (at least for ordinary objects we all know):

Sandwich:

• Material cause: the ingredients. What it’s made of — bread, some fillings, etc.
• Formal cause: the configuration — the blueprint that makes it a sandwich and not a salad.
• Efficient cause: the maker. Who assembled it, and with what capabilities.
• Final cause: the purpose. Eating.

These four questions — what is it made of, what form does it take, who made it, and what is it for — are questions a designer must ask, too. Swap “sandwich” for “product” and the framework holds .No wonder, some of the design thinking methodology we have today might as well also trace back to Aristotle.

But the analytic philosopher pushes further. Consider bread. If you eat only bread, that’s eating something plain without filling. If you eat the fillings without bread, that’s eating them plain, without bread. Bread is filling, yet it is not the filling. It is the container that confers structure on everything inside it. Rice, wraps, potatoes — they occupy a structurally similar role in other culinary traditions, but you cannot make a sandwich out of them. They belong to a different category. The distinction might have metaphysical relevance.

What goes inside the sandwich is a different matter. There’s nothing concretely necessary about the filling — it’s what philosophers might call an arbitrary object. The sandwich can contain salami and/or cucumber, or many other things for that matter. What it requires is that something be present, and that it be held. But this applies to many things. Way to many things, oh god, we have lost the sandwich in the process of finding its essential properties.

But there’s at least one useful thing: This is where philosophy starts teaching design something useful:

If you strip a sandwich down past a certain point, it stops being a sandwich — not just socially, but structurally. There is a thread you should not cut. The designer’s job is to find that thread: to understand what needs to be preserved between the reality and the conventions surrounding this sandwich engineering.

But you need to know exactly how far you can go before you’ve left the thing behind entirely. And this is more Philosophy than Design — because you need a special kind of resources that hold thinking together in these exploratory phases.

An important check-up, no matter how strange it sounds at first: is the sandwich you design the same sandwich the customer will eat? How much distance is there between an idea and a consumed product?

The cold metaphysics of the production line, might be what mediocritises the taste to satisfy allergen lists and margin targets, but if we are not asking these strange quasi-philosophical questions, it can drain the thing of what made it worth making. Not because constraints are bad. Constraints are real and necessary. But if you lose the thread of what the thing is, you end up with that pulled pork and mysterious green leaf combo — technically a sandwich. But god forbid calling it that way!

IV. Why Any of This Matters

Here’s the honest version: I was twenty years old, sending people to work in a fridge. I was not doing product, but I was watching product happen. If the sandwich had a soul, it was worth asking whether the soul was surviving the optimisation phases.

Can the soul survive innovation?

That’s a philosophical question. The continental philosophers will love it more, than the analytical ones. And that’s ok. We don’t aim to please anybody with our questions. We aim to ask the right questions. That’s something philosophers and designers should have in common. But we should resist temptation of answering anything prematurely.

As I was following in the Earl of Sandwich’s footsteps (GREAT STORY, BTW), trying to make the thing work for me, iterating in my own kitchen, developing a philosophy of what the sandwich fundamentally is. Did I think in these terms, then? Well, I’ve always studied Philosophy. So, yeah, but only now as I am procrastinating on writing my thesis, I get to spill all of this out, to make room.

We get to learn things in different ways and roles because we have an ability to both switch perspectives and connect with that type of information — we are not a one-track mind.

Creativity and innovation are related, but the relation isn’t as strict as some seem to assume. Creativity cannot be radical because it then becomes destructive. It must still integrate within the fabric of things. It must still be a sandwich. You can question that constraint, you can decide to make something else entirely. But then you are switching games, and you should know it, otherwise you will be in for some surprising outcomes. The moment you innovate so hard that you forget where you started, you risk ending up with something that satisfies every metric and pleases no one.

Thinking like a metaphysician and a designer at the same time gives me a useful kind of openness, that is, the widest view on a thing, paired with a sharp sense of what it is not. You stay divergent and grounded at once, but getting that balance is the work in progress — that’s where philosophy becomes a practice that informs design-theory.

Of course, I might make all of this up. But before I started this masters, I had a goal. Strengthen my design skills in a unique way that works for me. And now, I’m in the phase of checking the connections here and there. As time goes by, I’ll try to dive deeper and develop what comes on top.

My Story

This is my story for a while now. After consciously developing a certain skill for over ten years, I find myself here, trying to articulate something I have known implicitly but have rarely spelled out clearly. There’s tension in most jobs between doing something creative and critical simultaneously; usually one mode ends up quietly supporting the other. But abstraction is special: it demands both creativity and critical thinking equally. It took me a long time to see this clearly.

I’m not a coder, a data scientist, or a systems engineer. I’m a philosopher. And, for a time, a strategic designer, though that’s paused because philosophy has become a demanding lover. I came into philosophy deliberately, knowing I needed to strengthen something in my thinking that design alone didn’t address. I wanted precision and rigour. I wanted the capacity to stop pretending I understood when I didn’t. Because there’s something crucial that clicked after a year of intense analytical philosophy: solving problems is never enough. If you can’t structure your own understanding you end up adopting other people’s stories. And once that happens, you lose clarity. You lose ownership.

On Abstraction

So what is abstraction, really?

A mental shortcut? A technical leap from the concrete to the general? Perhaps, but it seems far more interesting, and far more misunderstood. Usually, abstraction is taught weakly and practiced poorly. When it’s untrained, it simplifies: it trims reality down into categories we already know, neatly smoothing out complexity to something familiar. But done properly, abstraction doesn’t simplify, it reveals. It reveals what we are skipping over, the unnoticed assumptions hidden in our thinking. Good abstraction shows the structure behind our understanding, not the world itself, but how our minds have gripped it. It doesn’t reduce complexity, it gives us a manageable handle on it.

And it’s something critically missing in conversations about artificial intelligence, data analytics, even in strategic design. These fields are overflowing with fuzzy thinking hidden behind flashy tools and jargon. We mistake cleverness for insight, pattern-recognition for real understanding. Perhaps that’s why abstraction strikes me as the heart of machine learning, of AI itself. AI doesn’t “do” abstraction; it already begins abstracted. Humans abstract by struggling from the messy to the tangible, continuously asking: “Abstraction of what?” That’s something AI simply doesn’t have — a capacity to question and reveal from an independent point of view that starts in the real, in the now.

Yet we still treat abstraction as a minor detail, an invisible operation. We let unexamined abstractions shape our thinking, our decisions, our stories. But abstraction matters enormously, precisely because the stories we tell about success, failure, ourselves, or our companies often rest on poorly understood abstractions. Without consciously training abstraction, we end up recycling clichés, stories that are comforting but ultimately passive, dead ends for genuine understanding.

Understanding is not just a story, though, yes, ironically I’m writing one right now. The difference is that understanding involves logic, tension, structure, something you can genuinely question and refine. Stories, however beautiful, can also make your life someone else’s genre. In the Design and Critical Thinking Community discussion, we always have to state: “If you interrogate data long enough, it will confess.” Real abstraction isn’t just narrative construction — it’s narrative interrogation. It’s what allows us to ask why a story works, why it’s limited, why it doesn’t fit.

In short, I don’t abstract to build better stories. I abstract to break them — to regain authorship and agency over how I think, see, and decide.

Stake-Fear Loops Model

And now, from this ongoing struggle with abstraction and clarity, something else has emerged: a tool or model that I didn’t intend to build but couldn’t help creating. I call it the Stake-Fear Loops model.

Stake-Fear Loops appeared when I confronted my own indecision and anxiety around big life shifts: changing jobs, shifting roles, living in ambiguity. It’s not that I lacked information, skills, or even opportunity. What I lacked was clarity, not from external confusion but internal fog. Fear had amplified my confusion, making it hard to see what was really going on, keeping me trapped in a loop of avoidance. And so I started modelling this loop, not to resolve it directly but to reveal its inner structure.

What became visible was that fuzziness isn’t just inherent complexity; it’s often our categories breaking down under emotional pressure. When fear enters, it intensifies this fuzz, pushing understanding out of reach. My model doesn’t promise resolution or easy solutions. It offers something more fundamental: it lets you see the loop clearly — fear triggering fuzziness, fuzziness leading to indecision, indecision back to fear. Once the loop is explicit, the fuzziness becomes finite and manageable. Not simplified, just bounded, contained enough that you can do something about it.

This approach won’t answer everything. It won’t even provide immediate solutions. But it restores something invaluable: cognitive agency. It allows you to articulate your fog. And once articulated, it’s no longer simply fog — it’s something you can address or move around.

I intend to build a visual tool for this model, a way to share the practice I’ve developed. Not because it’s perfect, but because it might be useful to others who find themselves similarly stuck, not due to lacking information, but due to lacking clarity over the information available, not due to lacking tools, but due to lacking a way to use the tools well.

My frameworks evolve because my problems evolve, or more precisely, my understanding of problems forces the frameworks to keep up. I don’t start with a fixed model and then look for where it fits. I begin in the mess, and if I pay enough attention, the structure starts to surface.

To handle the particular kind of messy, unarticulated problems I’ve been facing, I began naming the concepts that seemed to be shaping my experience.

1. Fear-Fuzz

Fear-Fuzz isn’t a source or a trigger, it’s a state of mind. A cognitive and emotional fog that emerges when fear amplifies uncertainty. It doesn’t just block action, but also it distorts perception. You know something matters, but you can’t see it clearly. You hesitate, overthink, freeze. The moment something valuable feels threatened, vague, or out of reach, Fear-Fuzz sets in. It’s not just fear. It’s fear within a fuzzy problem, where the terms aren’t clear, the categories don’t hold, and action feels unavailable.

2. The Golden Standard

Fear-Fuzz is a reaction to something at stake: I call this the Golden Standard. It’s the thing you value but can’t quite name yet. It’s not vague or fuzzy itself; it’s obscured. You only start to see it when the fog lifts, even slightly. The Golden Standard is your why, what you’re protecting or reaching toward when the fear sets in. It might be autonomy, clarity, creative integrity, stability, dignity. It changes with context, but its function is constant: it makes the fuzz meaningful and not something inherently bad, but just a reaction to the fact that something with high stakes is threatened.

3. Anxiety Inducers

These are the forces that sustain the Fear-Fuzz. They don’t always announce themselves dramatically. Some are sharp, immediate pressures; others accumulate in the background until they quietly distort your thinking. What defines an anxiety inducer isn’t its intensity, it’s its effect: it disrupts your clarity, it unsettles your attention, it creates loops you can’t close.

They show up as external constraints (a job offer you’re unsure about, an obligation you regret saying yes to), internal conflicts (guilt, pressure to prove yourself), or persistent uncertainties (money, time, future options). They’re not just things you’re afraid of, they’re things that trigger avoidance, spiraling, or paralysis, precisely because they touch something deeper you haven’t named yet.

4. Relievers

Relievers are not solutions. They’re not “fixes” in the classic sense. They’re strategic actions — sometimes small, sometimes sharp — that interrupt the loop. They bring the anxiety-inducers into view without amplifying the fuzz. A good reliever doesn’t make you feel heroic, it just helps you think again.

Some relievers are about preparation, e.g., writing the message you’re afraid to send, drafting a plan you might not follow. Others are about confrontation, e.g., finally calling the doctor, quitting the job, naming your boundary. What matters isn’t what the reliever fixes, it’s how it shrinks the fuzz just enough to make the Golden Standard visible again.

How to Use This (Without Losing the Point)

There are a few rules for how to use this effectively. Not to get it “right,” but to get somewhere honest. I haven’t included my personal examples here. They’re too specific, and shaping them to make them presentable would already compromise the exploration. But I’ll walk you through the method I used.

Start with what you know.

1. Name your fears plainly.
   Anything that makes you jittery, resistant, tense. No need to overthink the language. Write them however they show up.
2. Notice what makes you uneasy.
   These are your anxiety inducers. The thoughts, situations, or conditions that make you want to shut down, postpone, or overthink. Sometimes you don’t label them as fear. They show up as irritation, inertia, pressure, or fatigue. That’s fine. Name them anyway.
3. Now ask yourself: what do you keep wanting to do instead?
   These are your relievers. The detours, the coping, the micro-movements toward feeling like you’re in control again. They can also be deliberate, precise actions. Not every reliever is a distraction. Some of them are incredibly smart.
4. Connect the inducers and relievers.
   Don’t list them separately. Link them. Each reliever should respond to a specific inducer. You’re not trying to suppress fear. You’re replacing one form of protection with another, one that actually works.

Example (small but real):
Inducer: “I haven’t registered with a doctor and I feel dread about it.”
Reliever: “I write a three-sentence German script ahead of time and go register quietly on Tuesday morning.”

The fear says, “this is risky.” The reliever says, “this is how we protect ourselves instead.”

Finally 5., ask the real question.
What am I trying to protect?
Why does this still make me anxious?

Inducers aren’t random discomforts. They’re signals that something matters. That’s your Golden Standard, the thing you’re trying to preserve or move toward. You may not know it right away, but if the fear is that strong, there’s something real under it. The goal isn’t to solve the problem. It’s to make the stakes visible.

Example:
You keep putting off a job application. The anxiety isn’t just about rejection. It’s about protecting your sense of competence. You don’t want to be told you’re not ready. The Golden Standard here isn’t “get the job.” It’s holding onto your belief that you’re developing at your own pace and not letting anyone rush that.

Relievers are not band-aids.
They are alternate forms of protection. Used well, they don’t suppress fear. They resolve the loop that keeps it stuck. This is why they need to be specific, not symbolic. You don’t calm fear with a motivational quote. You calm it with action that proves: we’re taking care of what matters.

Example:
You fear an upcoming academic review. The anxious impulse says: avoid, procrastinate, spiral.
The reliever says: talk to a trusted peer, rehearse your questions, and gather your thoughts into one note.

Protection still happens. But it happens through structure, not panic.

Relievers restore your sense that you’re handling what matters. That’s why they work. Not because they eliminate fear instantly, but because they shift you out of passive vigilance and back into authorship.

Of course, this kind of work requires growth and behavioural changes if taken seriously. But sometimes change brought by relievers can also be “do less,” “wait,” “pause.”

So, I don’t forget the purpose of my framework: I’m not looking to understand my fears, but to see what stakes trigger my defense mode go rampant (see the rest of it below).

Where This Leaves Me

I’ve spent over ten years honing this skill, the first half unknowingly, and the past five years developing this consciously, crafting abstraction and applying it to different business problems. It’s a skill that combines creativity and critical thinking in equal measure, a skill that’s undertrained but deeply necessary, especially in fields where complexity is too often simplified into misleading narratives. Abstraction done properly is exactly what’s missing. It’s the bridge between philosophy and strategic design, between thinking clearly and acting decisively.

And now, after a year of philosophy, clarity is emerging. Not perfectly, not tidily, but enough to say that abstraction is the heart of my craft, the skill that allows me to structure clarity where others see only fuzz.

And yes, this is still a story. But it’s one I’ve chosen consciously, questioned relentlessly, and authored fully. It’s the kind of abstraction that makes sense not by simplifying complexity, but by admitting it honestly. That’s what I’m offering, to myself first and then maybe others: abstraction as a critical, creative craft that restores clarity, authorship, and genuine understanding.

Seeing it now and looking back at my relentless aversion to compromise, I think this is the kind of “job” I want to see on the market. I simply cannot resist the temptation of creating visual tools to help myself move forward, but I’m hardly attached to what I create because they are stepping stones to understanding. Nevertheless, it’s a superpower ready to be used and shared. So here’s how this pending work looks like. Who knows how it will evolve, but I’ve already taken care of some challenges.

Anyway here’s how the pending version looks like. Feel free to make it your own.

Pro Tip: What happens when you get stuck?
You pause. You summarize what you’ve got so far. You take a break, talk to someone, and see what surfaces next. Your challenges are always bigger than any framework, so you have to leave room for those dimensions and learn to navigate them. A model is just one extension of how we solve problems — it’s a tool, not a total system.

My toolkit includes the people I trust, the ones I can test my thinking with, reflect through, and move forward alongside.

Frameworks come in all shapes and forms, or so I’d like to say.

With its popularity gained as a tech buzzword, it was bound to overflow. Personally, I love this word and I use it a lot to explain things that are probably not always meeting the criteria for them to be classified as frameworks.

Here are a couple of definitions:

Generally, we call a framework conceptual structures that can support or guide the building of something that expands the structure into something useful.

A framework is a standard set of concepts, practices, and criteria for dealing with a common type of problem.

In computer science, a software framework is a bring-your-own-code system that takes your code and runs it through its own complex code that achieves some task. But I won’t refer to software frameworks here.

What I’m interested in is the trend that it’s picking up for the past few years, especially on LinkedIn, regarding how we circulate knowledge and communicate in the digital medium. While other social media platforms share information in forms of video content, stories, sound-only, LinkedIn has developed a taste for condensed knowledge into something visual, structured and appealing to an audience that can derive insights from. Of course, we are not ruling out the appetite for carousel presentations with big fonts and short sentences that highlight the essence of the essence on a specific theme.

But for now, I want to focus on what frameworks are actually and why is, in fact, difficult to distinguish them from systems and models (mental models included).

Outside cybernetics and coding, frameworks fulfil a crucial purpose in handling complexity in areas such as healthcare, business, psychology, education, environmental science and so on. From research to development, frameworks hold structures in place when we blink or take our eyes off of them. Their value here, although not always approached properly, is to enable people to solve problems and make better decisions — hopefully in a systemic way, so the impact is achieved throughout.

Frameworks fulfil a key need: understanding in problem-solving. And for that, they are based on transparency of:

• Why — the underlying logic behind and for doing something
• What — the guidelines that need to be followed when doing it
• How — the flow that enables things to happen in various scenarios

Conceptual frameworks are combining theory and practice through Purpose, Structure, Guidelines, and possibility for Reusability.

We can’t really have a framework without fulfilling these four criteria.

Without them, we fail to understand.

Without Purpose: We may hit the target but miss the point.

Without Structure: We can’t see the forest for the trees.

Without Guidelines: We reinvent wheels because we don’t know wheels exist.

Without Reusability: We have to run twice as fast just to keep in the same place.

Frameworks are meant to support, not restrict. Their power comes from how easy it is to reuse in other contexts, and how effective their results are every time we adapt them to different scenarios. A framework that doesn’t adapt when we need to update it is a costly choice and can slow developments.

Here’s a very interesting phenomenon: Take bureaucracy, for instance. It’s not just one framework, but a set of problematic and competing frameworks that are seeking to standardize and hold together complex and often unpredictable players. A framework alone, is not necessarily rigid, but trying to control everything creates and an absurd amount of friction or rigidity. Their reusability is contested when the context suffers radical changes — Covid, Wars, Climate Change etc. If they fail to respond, they are causing more problems than they solve.

Now, let’s park that aside, since it’s a set of very boring frameworks with little to visual appeal. Visualization is extremely powerful because it can make complex chunks of knowledge to be shared. But is everything that I’ve collected while scrolling for about an hour on LinkedIn a framework?

Not quite, but who’s to say?

It’s hard to draw clear distinctions between frameworks, systems, models and even methods (although I won’t discuss these ones for this piece), because knowledge varies across different fields and the framework builders have different target audiences in mind when they build them. I’d say that as long as they fulfil Purpose, Structure, Guidelines, and Reusability we should be on the safe side.

But that’s the thing. There is no such a thing as a meta-framework (again, we don’t include the software frameworks here).

These criteria are necessary but not sufficient when it comes to validating what we call purpose, what kind of structures make sense inside a framework, what are the minimum requirement for guideline development, are there ranges for reusability, specificity, generalization, etc?

This is the distinction I got when I asked the question:

Frameworks provide the “scaffolding” for thinking and problem-solving, models offer a “blueprint” or representation of reality, and mental models serve as a “lens” through which we view the world and make decisions. (I think it’s Copilot’s genius that gave out this sentence)

But let’s look at these distinctions in slightly more detail because it sounded nice, but I still had no idea how to relate to that them meaningfully.

I’ll use DIKW pyramid to connect with this challenge because I think its elements can help us draw pretty useful distinctions between frameworks, models, systems, methods et al.

Frameworks and models

Models are representations or simulations of reality, used to understand, analyse, and make predictions about systems or concepts. They can be physical, mathematical, or conceptual and tend to be more specialized than frameworks.

Models work on the bottom of the pyramid, with data offering a platform for it to be analysed and processed towards further, more specific uses.

But it’s quite difficult to draw the hard line of when “specific” turns into a “broader” use. Let’s take the example of a data model — it goes through a rigorous vetting in order to make it to that title: scalability, complexity, performance, interpretability, robustness, etc. Up to this point, purpose, structure, guidelines are met. What about reusability?

Mental Models are also interesting to point out here. These are internal representations that individuals use to make sense of the world and carry a high-degree of raw personal, subjective data and influence how we perceive information and make decisions. They may be a lot less rigorous and highly specific, often focusing on a particular topic or problem that is unlikely to replicate in a different situation or individual.

So what is the main distinction between framework and model?

I previously wrote:

Frameworks fulfil a key need: understanding in problem-solving.

whereas,

models are used to understand and predict.

Same DIKW is a model because it “predicts” a path or a progression for data to be classified and organized as relevant information, then later refined as knoweldge. Wisdom is a bit controversial because it’s harder to pinpoint its contents and how it differs from knowledge without highlighting situations where it makes an appearence.

The condition of reusability gives us a clue on how to better approach this distinction: it’s not about the count of instances where either can be used, but in the variety of “unrelated” scenarios. We would expect models to keep a logic and linear continuity between applications. A framework can take “leaps” with more ease, and they are also more “analogy friendly” since prediction for the sake of it is not its goal.

Even mental models tend to be linear, perhaps more colourful and unregulated than a mathematical model, but they also fulfil a predictive function of a person’s behaviour.

* Also, I don’t find mental models that individual and specific, and even if they are, they are transferable through shared narratives and language, so broader application to a group or organization is not so far of a stretch.

Frameworks and systems

While systems can be frameworks, the term “framework” is broader and can refer to a variety of structured approaches. A framework can be a conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues, and it doesn’t have to be a system in the traditional sense.

Systems are not equipped by default with the ability to solve problems that may surface. It’s also not making problems visible (I might say on the contrary, systemic problems are quite hard to bring up and contain). Systems move up to the “information” level of the pyramid. They handle certain structures, levels of orders and relationships.

If we also refer to how parts interact and connect to a bigger picture, we could find a good overlap between systems and frameworks on structure, guidelines, and reusability. What about purpose?

Defining the context and the challenges that make sense in that context are good prerequisites in systems work, but it may not be enough to build practical approach to handling the system. I may map the system and the systemic problem but would I actually be able to solve it? Will the system let me?

Again,

Frameworks fulfil a key need: understanding in problem-solving.

whereas,

Systems are about how parts interact, connect and form the whole.

What sets systems apart from frameworks is that systems’ end goal is to support themselves, concerned with their own effective functioning.

Frameworks and Knowledge

In essence, frameworks provide a scaffold for organizing complex thoughts, actions, or refined information, which can be connected and applied across different fields and contexts. They can also be built on a set of ideas or beliefs used to plan or decide something. But in the recent scene of knowledge sharing in the digital medium, they have become more, visual, creative and colourful. But are the visuals I picked on my LinkedIn feed frameworks?

Let’s see what I discussed so far:

1. Frameworks fulfil a key need: understanding in problem-solving.

2. Conceptual frameworks are combining theory and practice through Purpose, Structure, Guidelines, and possibility for Reusability.

The hardest criterium to identify is the Guidelines as they are either implied or perhaps described somewhere else to save time and make others more curious about the content. So, they do offer some “framing” which makes exciting to look at and get inspired. Frameworks don’t have to be incredibly complex and technical. They can be simple as long as they fulfill their function effectively.

I let all the links at the end of this post as I don’t want to scrutinize my feed just yet. I’ll write a few more articles about how to identify, modify and create frameworks. For now, I just wanted to contemplate the beauty of frameworks:

1. Frameworks are not only functional. They are educational and a fantastic way to express points of views, condense knowledge and pass it on.
2. They make context more visible to outsiders, and can communicate across different levels of understanding and expertise.
3. They are addictive! Once you get a taste for frameworks, you will have a limitless folder of saved frameworks, and will seek to build your own.

The use of the term, might be a bit broad, but I think it’s a great idea to build more frameworks than simply state an opinion or enter a debate with narrow arguments. Frameworks can bring worldviews into a discussion, making it richer and more fulfilling.

Knowledge decays faster and faster now, but we also need to get faster at reworking, reframing, recycling it. Frameworks from simple to complex may be our only way to handle this phenomenon and not feel at a loss.

What I loved about those visuals I gathered on LD is their creative ways to putting together different sets of perspectives with experience, content, structure.

Links to posts that I used to build the main image (the sources are included in their posts if you want to check them):

5 B2B Buyers’ Behaviours in 2024 — Pierre Herubel

Product OKRs — Tim Herbig

Product Marketing — Anthony Pierri

Human Experience Continuum — Timothy Timur Tiryaki

The Improvement Goal Map — Timothy Timur Tiryaki

Mindset, ness monsequeira — Vanessa Monsequeira

Talent Grid — Monte Pedersen

The Full Stack Product Manager — Ankit Shukla

5 Types of Go-To-Market Strategies — Oliver Ding

The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice — Nick Babich

The Habit-Goal Paradox — Growth Tribe credits to Pejman Milani

For the past few years, Design Thinking has been “dying” in the midst of change.

Meeting expectations is hard.

Design Thinking came with the promise that it can bring outcomes that users value. Empathy, a revolutionary backbone to discovering insights, would set the tone for market research that is grounded in more qualitative data. But DT stems from…well… design architecture — principles of design with “sense-making properties” for the mind and the physical spaces, now in the service of user-centric businesses.

But, really, Design Thinking was never new or innovative.

Nothing about “thinking” is new, either. Rediscovering ways of thinking about problems it’s quite an extraordinary activity, nonetheless.

The most common death of design is due to its limits.

Yes, design thinking is limited.

This is a nice summary of the main shortcomings observed:

Shortsighted

Linear

Over-simplified

Overly Democratic

Undisruptive

Reactive —from Design Thinking is Dead

It’s hard to disagree, but, honestly, what isn’t like that? What does it take for something not to be short-sighted? How much of a foresight must build to overcome the first limit. The author here tries to help reposition design thinking in a space where it can provide more value:

By replacing “design thinking” with “design foresight”, we consider future scenarios in the innovative process itself. It requires innovation leaders to reach a new height of well-rounded skills and knowledge since the foresight aspect inherently reduces reliance on external iterative inputs. Design foresight cannot be drafted on a timeline or roadmap. It consists of various forward-facing predictive outcomes based on assumptions. —from Design Thinking is Dead

While this may take care of certain issues that come with short-sightedness, it’s hard to say the problems will dissolve. The other highlighted limits can transform into quite unintended sources of problems if they are treated as “what is wrong with DT”: Linearity may turn into an ambiguous and arbitrary thing, without an internal logic but a made-up one, trusting the judgment of those in charge. Over-simplification paired with less iterative inputs (now at risk of heavy selection bias) may lead to less transparency or ability to track a pattern fitting your organizational processes. Overly Democratic could be downgraded and become the loss of clear communication and means of contribution. Undisruptive and reactive seem to contradict each other — at least in terms, but together they seem to be the loop that never breaks through for design thinking to be the problem-solving methodology that was promised. Yet, there’s room for worse, disruption doesn’t always enable innovation, nor the better alternatives to reaction offer courses of action.

Regardless, most criticism is valid. DT had to come with these limits for quick standardization and implementation at scale. Those with a good design education may have benefited greatly from finally having a minimum vocabulary to communicate to the non-designers. Improvements and tweaks could be made. Yet, frustrations only grew over the years. After all, a limited DT brings limited results.

But before DT went into any transformation, well…it died…again.

Here’s a different way to categorize causes of death:

Failing to change the mindset, the organization (even society on a larger scale) or the methodology itself

— Criticising the conditions in which we operate and make room for DT to breathe is another way to look at this complex debate. DT is dependent on the variables and resources it’s being fed.

Mindset failure

To embrace Design Thinking, we need to shift our mindset from control to facilitation, from knowing all the answers to being curious about the questions. It’s about leading by letting go, by creating an environment where ideas can flourish, and where failure is not a setback but a step forward in the learning process. From Design Thinking is dead… again

Getting clarity over what goes wrong with DT is not easy to pinpoint, especially when proposing the supposed changes that are required to overcome this challenge.

Let’s cut the crap. Really? “Design Thinking” and “Design Doing”? How about “Design.” Yes, just Design. Design is a mindset, an approach, a set of principles, a way of thinking and first and foremost a process of creation. Focusing on good design solves problems and sparks innovation. — From Design Thinking is Dead. Long Live Innovation!

At this point in time, it’s hard to envision something that doesn’t hold the seeds that DT cultivated for almost the past two decades.

Methodology Failure

The integration of AI in design processes is seen as a necessary and pivotal move to boost the speed and quality of delivery. However, the friction is quite high. Adding new dynamics is a great way to rework previous application of DT, but it hardly seems to be a departure point from DT itself, despite the claims.

The double diamond is no longer promoted by the Design Council, they have innovated their framework bringing in more significant aspects and trends, such as systems thinking. That said, AI is a design tool and tools are not apparent in any design framework because…Ehr… they are tools. You can still use AI to support any activity in a whatsoever framework, provided that AI is mature enough for that specific activity. — From The new Stingray AI innovation framework by Board of Innovation — the death of design thinking, announced once again

The Stingray here is still a double diamond stretched into a more asymmetric visualization, in my humble opinion though… The hybridization of DT with other methods and approaches such as systems thinking has been a very interesting experimental journey yet to prove a decisive stepping stone for the transformation of DT.

So, is Design Thinking really dying?

Societal Failure

Sometimes things cannot change because there are greater things in place holding them from happening differently. If not DT dying, a lot of initiatives to improve or transform it have died in the process.

A shiny new design methodology isn’t going to fix a broken system. And the system, of course, is capitalism. Creating genuinely compassionate and community centered digital services is not easily done when everyone is asking you how you will make money. And it’s going to take more than a new design methodology to achieve that. Evolving our design process is very important, but we cannot evolve our design process in a world that only cares about profit. A designers work exists within the larger context of economic systems, and when those economic systems are fundamentally uncaring, these economic systems need addressed before we can have discussions about how best to design with compassion. — From Design Thinking is not dead. Corporations are.

I’m sure I skipped plenty of versions stating the obituaries for Design Thinking, but I doubt there won’t be other future ones to bring to the table. DT is not really dying, but it’s struggling:

1. To evolve and
2. To survive in its current state.

One last mention that highlights three problems that need to be solved before any transformation is brought to DT:

We lost the North Star

To be a designer, you have to become a designer!

Design is a serious discipline, and it’s becoming more serious. — From Design thinking is not dead, but are we extracting its full potential?

Finding what variations work for us requires learning and not just brushing over. Quality results, require quality inputs and processes that have at least conceptual depth. Should we separate Design from Thinking, pairing it with Doing, or simply call it Design-ing?

Regardless of the change we want to make, it better be a comprehensive framework that doesn’t forget the roots of Design or Thinking, and of course, it is responsive to the problems we seek to solve. Calibrating our lens is one way to do it, changing the lens is another, or perhaps, needing no lens at all is also a great way.

Being bound to the narratives in circulation is counterproductive and misses the point of why Design Thinking took off in the first place. We can’t kill what is commonsensical about it, but it takes discernment and lateral learning to see the full and the real body of Design Thinking.

By no means an exhaustive list of resources tied to the debate:

Design Thinking is Dead

Design Thinking is dead… again

Design Thinking is Dead. Long Live Innovation!

The new Stingray AI innovation framework by Board of Innovation — the death of design thinking, announced once again

Design Thinking is not dead. Corporations are.

Design thinking is not dead, but are we extracting its full potential?

I’d love to know your thoughts, as I’m always looking for perspectives I haven’t considered yet. :D

I always find many similarities between eating and learning. Ingesting — whether it’s knowledge or food — takes time to process and distribute. They are both necessary for humans to continue to exist. In many ways, eating is a form of visceral learning, where the body learns and relearns its relationship with food in different contexts. First, humans probably learned what to eat and what not to — that may or may not have served as the primitive basis for open knowledge and forbidden knowledge (which could be poisonous for the uninitiated). Some foods are good for us, but others can harm us, even though they taste nice. Let’s take, for instance, news (there’s hardly anything new in the pattern of news, though). News is supposed to inform and connect us with the world; it’s an espresso shot more than something you’d normally have to chew on- “a shot of reality.” But take too much, and you’ll soon have an increased heart rate, sickening anxiety, tremors, and regret of overdoing it.

Now, perhaps more than before, it’s the quantity we need to watch out for since it’s so accessible. We don’t learn from quantity; our minds and bodies have a limited capacity that requires careful measuring of how much we put in. After all, food poisoning is not referring only to eating poisonous food but simply eating too much.

Why am I beginning with this story?

As part of the Strategic Exploration I got to do so far, I’ve come to the realization that all of this applies to how I learn. Pausing and waiting for the lessons to sink in and then getting hungry again is a healthy way of learning, especially when some of the things I’ve got to learn had slightly new ingredients that I wasn’t sure of how my mind was going to react to.

The next stage of the Strategic Exploration will be called Moving Inward because I’ve established or actually re-established a new relationship with learning.

This is a temporary departure point from the Collaborative Learning highlighted previously:

“Learners may have different paces, given their prior knowledge, skills, and motivations/objectives. Unlike taking a course together where we are all learning the same thing, Collaborative Learning is a way of testing knowledge among each other to strengthen our own course.”

Moving Inward is not about disconnecting from the external world and meditating in a space removed from everything else. I believe it to be a key component of the learning process. Let’s simply call this Inward Learning and define it as the complex ability to build meaningful connections between different aspects of you and the world and the world of others.

Inward Learning is, in fact, an activity system, and that is why it can’t possibly work in a vacuum — it’s interdependent and continuously rewiring.

However, note that I use the word resonate, which refers to the property of “echoing” or resounding a vibration that it recognizes as compatible or similar. Learning requires similarity, not sameness — as I briefly touched on the idea of “breaking symmetries” as a necessary act to grow and learn new skills. Not everything carries a positive charge, smoothly echoing our learning intent. It’s an intricate web of happenings that, for the sake of cognitive exploration and inspired by Oliver’s awesome work on themes, I’ll refer to them as a network of themes:

Understanding that there’s an inherent structure and order to how we learn is essential to Inward Learning.

On the one hand, certain themes fall into a relationship, and our power to navigate them helps us build connections between them despite not knowing everything there is to know to fill the missing parts. We rely on those connections to strengthen the network between themes and trust that we will not fall into the knowledge gaps by mistake.

On the other hand, we often have to create connections where there aren’t, especially when engaged with new knowledge. Taking a leap of fate from one theme to another is an exciting way of experimenting with your internal learning scaffold. What happens to the knowledge gaps, then? We continue to live with them until we manage to enrich the network of themes and create a fabric of knowledge that is thick enough to support real and impactful transformation outside ourselves.

Inward Learning is a form of Self-weaving and appreciating how knowledge alters our perception and mental chemistry.

Our Learning body grows and begins to resonate with others, similar to wise people or certain experts who just “do themselves,” not necessarily preaching anything. Sharing knowledge is a certain way of being, but not doing it at this point.

Now, where am I going with all this, and what does that have to do with the title — Cycles of Reinvention?

With Oliver’s help, I considered Strategic Exploration as a main theme to pursue this year. However, it wasn’t clear to me what it meant to work with a primary theme and the method of slow cognition he proposed. To my understanding the two can be roughly mean:

Primary Theme: dedicating your activity space to the pursuit of Strategic Exploration

Slow cognition: track reflection and developments using a blend of historical and cognitive discourse method

In order to incorporate this new practice into my activity sphere and give it the right position, I had to consider how I split my life and what challenges arose from this project. First, I do not define my life as one activity space but as a blend of states in context.

There are three relevant spaces when it comes to learning:

1. Non-activity: brain at rest, idle.
2. Loose activity: leisure, broad uncommitted exploration, still learning but not bound to performance, not have to lead to action
3. Focused activity: intensive work that requires a high level of effort and commitment.

To continue the food analogy (non-activity is basically not eating, staying empty/hungry; loose activity is like drinking coffee and snacks between meals; focused activity is eating a full-fledged meal).

In relationship to the Network of Themes and the Activity Spaces, I believe that it’s becoming clearer I don’t work with primary or secondary themes all the time since I’m not an academic researcher or a knowledge worker that requires this type of hierarchy. However, I can “count” the themes I work with and alter them as I continue to learn and strengthen the connections between them to create that fabric. Inward Learning is perhaps a form of slow cognition but departs from it at a time to simply be idle and experience without the expression of thoughts what transformations are undergoing. The three Activity Spaces makes learning a transformative and rich experience as they all encourage different ways of learning.

The belief that holds me on this path is simple: how I feel is more important than how I think because most thoughts are by-products of my internal turmoils. I may be wrong, but I’m able to express it now here.

Until the next reinvention cycle!

For the past two weeks, I’ve embarked on a learning journey where I got to explore aspects of my experience as a learner, thinker, and doer through different lenses in an async conversation with Oliver Ding to see where this takes us — no expectations placed at the beginning to narrow the project, no attempt to go into one direction more than in other. Every topic emerged quite effortlessly from one step to another.

Now, as Oliver pointed out in TALE: The Field of Meta-learning (V1.0), it’s great to actually reflect for a moment on how far we’ve come and celebrate our current position.

I will highlight the key lessons I’ve learned so far:

1. Exploration is meaningful in itself because it is a first-hand experience of how we as individuals connect with a knowledge.
2. Learning something complex takes a toll on you, and the feeling of abandoning the path can creep in if the right queues are not in place. For me, two things helped tremendously: the prompts from Oliver that kept the “iron” hot to strike and the acceptance of imperfection in my documenting of the journey since I couldn’t always dedicate time for this exploration.
3. Collaborative Learning is a very empowering activity. You learn together differently.
4. Our attitude changes in relationship to why, what, and how we learn as we actively do it. Certain knowledge serves only as a stepping stone and may even be disposed of to grow to the next stage.

The outcome of the thematic conversation here sums up quite neatly the dimensions of learning as form (meta-knowledge), content (knowledge), and activity (work).

I find now that aligning the three spaces brought a certain clarity to how curiosity can be better channeled into projects such as these. Giving your curiosity a medium of exploration and, more importantly, of expression is key to building the courage to commit to your projects.

This has actually opened a new way of dealing with a learning pushback I struggled with: whenever I tried to learn something that I couldn’t validate in any way because it was too removed from my habits, social circle, work environment, etc. I found myself in a position where I would spend a terrible amount of energy just to sustain the thought “that I need to sit at my desk and learn that.”

Now, I can look back and see that the moments when I made any valuable progress in those side projects were due to the involuntary show-up of that courage to commit further. It might seem a bit paradoxical since curiosity entails some form of courage, but to stay with the object of learning even after that initial burst of curiosity has died out, takes quite an advanced level of mental courage.

Oliver’s diagram inspired me to test some possible ways to lay out the practice of Meta-Learning on a concrete use case (Curiosity in the context of the Strategic Exploration).

This type of courage is a sense of appreciation for knowledge and its impact on me as a person. What I learned is bound to change me deeply, and sometimes there’s bound to be some level of resistance to change since we’re not tabula rasa.

A better analogy to the appetite for learning is the appetite for eating. We may prefer one food over the other since it’s easier to digest or tastier, but if we consider our long-term health, we may begin to eat more consciously — adding in new types of food, trying out new recipes, and observing how they affect the body. The same works for the knowledge we absorb. For the most part, we take what we’re used to digesting comfortably, and unless there’s a deeper motivation, we simply cannot build the courage to learn something new and sustain it as a skill.

So far, I’m proud to say that this has become a bit clearer to me as a learner. The series of Strategic Explorations has proven quite useful. I have yet to explore with important dimensions of the learning experience that I wasn’t able to distill to a point of satisfaction:

Creation (as a theme)

Connection (as an activity/experience)

We will see what comes next and in what shape.

These are the previous 4 parts:

Personal Project on Strategic Exploration: Thinking differently requires doing things differently

Strategic Exploration: Peeling onions without shedding tears

Strategic Exploration: Breaking Symmetries

Strategic Exploration: You can’t swim in the same river twice

The “Thematic Conversation Project” that I’ve come to share with Oliver Ding prompts me to continue the Strategic Exploration work and discover different possibilities to make my exploration meaningful.

I have to thank Oliver for summarizing all of this into a diagram so well! It helped put things into perspective and move to the next part. So far, I’ve used a few methods of Building Meaning that coincide with the different dimensions highlighted by Oliver for our Thematic Space:

1. Diagramming — Meta
2. Storytelling — Thinking
3. Collaborative Learning — Doing

In the previous post, I touched on the connections between Strategic Exploration and Strategic Design (more concretely, the role as Strategic Designer). Still, I’ve left out Creation since it was not crystalized enough as a conscious process yet. But now, looking back at the Field of Meta-Learning, it’s becoming clearer that some of the drivers for Creation are hidden in plain sight.

One particular activity that I’ve been experimenting with since the start of 2023 is Decluttering, which proved to be an extremely powerful boost in productivity. Decluttering happens mostly at the Doing level (specifically on the “Working” side) as I begin to preserve or channel energy into more relevant activities. Decluttering helps me achieve two main objectives:

1. Make Space for learning
2. Explore different modes of Creation

Declutter is not a way of learning, but it can be used as a method of Creation by recycling mental waste, which is the addition I want to make to the diagram. Waste puts, in contrast, unmediated narratives between Self-Development and Creation. As displayed in the previous diagram, they are mediated through the elements in the Field of Meta-Learning.

But I want to entertain an ambitious way: the possibility of Building Meaning out of Waste.

In other words, it is possible to recycle certain knowledge and make Creation and Self-Development emergent in the Meta-Learning field as yet another layer of the previous diagram.

Why is this an important step to continuing the journey?

For now, it is necessary to consider the value of Decluttering because it helps put into perspective the circularity of learning, not just as absorption of new knowledge but as revising or refuting certain knowledge.

Also, by integrating Creation and Self-Development and making them emergent throughout the learning process, the whole exploration more flexible and easier to contain as an immediate experience.

Now it is not the time to conclude the meaning of the project since the direction keeps changing and I do not feel bound to my own conceptions. The priority is to experiment openly for a while (Also, I will not make any moves yet to correlate this exploration to the long-term value it may have).

With Learn, Relearn, and Unlearn, we may create that circularity inside the Meta-Learning Space.

…And cultivate insight for appreciating knowledge to see if that will improve the format of the exploratory journey.

The appreciation of knowledge will be the next focus in Strategic Exploration.

Part 3 of this series. Check out part 2 for some extra context.

Building Meaning as an activity for Strategic Exploration becomes a pivotal stirrer to expand any learning space, especially when you engage in a collaborative fashion. Learners may have different paces, given their prior knowledge, skills, and motivations/objectives. Unlike taking a course together where we are all learning the same thing, Collaborative Learning is a way of testing knowledge among each other to strengthen our own course. I believe that, in many ways, this is what my Strategic Exploration comes to rely on, given the ongoing conversation with Oliver Ding.

On the basis of Collaborative Learning, I am able to continue to build meaning in a more empowering way. I will highlight two main ideas that make learning meaningful:

1. Serving as a prerequisite for Creation
2. Acquiring depth and variety to strengthen my role as a Strategic Designer

As of now, I cannot yet step fully into the activity of creation because I need to declutter the space for it to emerge. Creation can happen spontaneously but not prematurely. A certain germination phase needs to occur through learning and exposure to creative triggers (e.g., others’ creative work, a certain mood, environment, a walk, etc.).

For this exploration, I will focus on building meaning for Strategic Design and how my role is impacted.

In Strategic Design, Building Meaning is a work of alignment of multiple instances — theoretical and practical — to solve certain challenges and derive new frameworks that can enable new actions and possibilities. It follows a long thread of developments, exchanges, and reframings before it reaches a stable state that can be shared with others outside the process.

Collaborative Learning is nurturing that ability present in design thinking to converge and diverge and creates the fluidity of experience necessary for navigating complex problems.

The by-product of Collaborative Learning in Strategic Design is to enrich context and meaning in a very active manner. Why does it have to be like this? Well, learning and sharing knowledge is a very complex feat that, if it’s not done properly and timely, can create more problems than it can solve.

Oliver’s description of Conceptual Heterogeneity is a very useful way of demonstrating how contexts are enriched but also separated:

“What’s Conceptual Heterogeneity? It refers to different people using the same word to express different conceptual meanings. It leads to Knowledge Fragmentation inside one discipline. Also, it raises the cost of cross-boundary collaborative projects.”

The costs of Knowledge Fragmentation seem to get higher and higher with time since no matter how powerful and comprehensive a particular study/theory within that discipline is, it cannot synthesize the entire complexity of that field. There are bound to be contradictions, counterarguments, and practical limitations.

So how does everything I’ve written so far tie into my role as a Strategic Designer?

The ongoing trends now advocate for more Transdisciplinarity as a way to bring experts together and share their Conceptual Heterogeneity in a given context in a way that is meaningful to the whole. The challenge is to build frameworks that are flexible yet robust enough to hold a heterogeneous dialogue without losing the relevant meaning and the quality of certain knowledge along the way.

While I rely on an extensive number of frameworks to meet different types of needs and clients with expert knowledge, even if I gain access to their knowledge, I might not be able to distill its value. My task is to create the means for Collaborative Learning to happen and keep the momentum through the right questions and stories so we build meaning together in a way that we can all understand and use. More or less

One last point on a previous highlight Oliver made that I want to build on is the diagram of Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with the addition of my insight on Collaborative Learning. As of now, the subjective and intersubjective parts are not in a state of balance, nor should they be until more exploration is “done.”

There’s a certain balance that needs to be achieved for knowledge to crystallize and allow for meaning to settle. But I believe that symmetries are not a good representation of the design as a transformative force.

Matt Ji suggested a while ago that creative thinking requires breaking symmetries to discover new things.

Staying active on the journey to explore and learn, unlearn or relearn is to find balance in movement!

Following up on the previous post.

To take the next step, I will introduce a new dimension to Strategic Exploration. My previous diagram, reviewed by Oliver, revealed to me one important medium for emergence: Storytelling. The way I designed previously, somehow hid this element, but it became more intuitive in the new version:

With it, I can move into the heart of the knowledge theme exploration, since identifying relevant knowledge theme marks only the beginning of the exploration. Embarking on this route requires multiple moments of departure: the knowledge themes require constant updating and validation — they must survive the test of time and not hinder new discoveries beyond their scope. A useful tool for testing the value of learning is Storytelling

Storytelling becomes an informal and implicit ally that gives Meaning to each element in the diagram (that is why I won’t reveal the visual representation of Storytelling itself, at least not yet).

I will attempt to use it as a way to build a more diverse exchange between abstract to concrete (and vice versa). The task is to build pathways for meaning to flow and curate a high-quality resource pool (The field of Meta-Learning). However, this is where practice comes in. Not every theoretical point is relevant or meaningful if there are no correlated experiences.

So how does one build Meaning?

1. Acknowledge Reality (given context as presented to you)
2. Select the Object (what sparks your attention or what is available to you at that moment)
3. Attribute a Sign (an abstract element that can be correlated with your Object and is context-relevant)
4. Distill a Pre-concept (a working definition — a metaphor or analogy, for instance — that serves as a shortcut into accessing the previous three steps as one)
5. Settle into Meaning (hard wire the Pre-concept into your experience as something worth sharing — this is not really an accurate representation of reality since that is hardly possible; so that’s why there’s a distortion in the meaning)

Applied to the Field of Meta-Learning (I’ll continue to use Oliver’s simplified diagram), it may look like this:

Now, I want to be able to tell a story to ease the integration of the knowledge theme and ensure I can continue to build further on it:

1. Reality: 19 January 2023. Sunny weather. Workday.
2. Object: Writing about Strategic Exploration before following through with my work-related tasks for the day
3. Sign: It’s a personal exploration filled with uncertainty about the outcome, but something like Hero’s Journey pops into my head.
4. Pre-concept: Discovery of a personal fable (I’m supposed to learn a skill that I cannot fully map yet)
5. Meaning: Self-fulfilling prophecy (Reality confers the perfect timing for pursuing this exploration. While the future is uncertain, the present has just become more fulfilling. That distortion from the previous diagram becomes Creation which can now be the writing of this post, and creation of the self shaped by the process).

This was a pretty interesting exercise :D

I haven’t touched yet on how this form of storytelling aligns with my role as a Strategic Designer and further with Creation, so that will be my next task for the journey ahead.