The Lab Experiment

Refraction study

A rounded slab of glass laid over the signal. Move across it and the layers bend at different rates — a study in making “looking closely” literal.

Slice-glass refraction, live

Move your cursor across the glass

How to read it

Each vertical slice blurs and shifts by a different amount. Your cursor is the light source; the panel refracts around it.

Layered backdrop-filter slices, pointer-driven CSS transform. Pure CSS, no canvas.

Why it matters

Trust work is mostly looking carefully at things other people skim. We wanted an object that rewards attention — that only resolves when you move through it.

The Lab Experiment

Who actually connects

An ecosystem map of who is genuinely connected to whom — versus who merely claims adjacency.

Ecosystem map, a sketch

How to read it

Nodes are projects and people; links stand for observable relationships such as shared code, cross-citations and governance overlap. This version is illustrative, not a map of real projects.

Illustrative data. Hand-tuned force layout, static render.

Why it matters

Stated ecosystems are marketing. Actual ones are a graph. The gap between the two is often where trust is quietly borrowed.

The Lab Experiment

Activity, abstracted

Raw activity reduced to a pulsing grid. Legibility through subtraction.

Signal pixels, a sketch

Simulated data · read the form, not this pattern

How to read it

In a real build, each cell is a unit of public activity and brightness is recency, so the pattern is the signal. The cells here are simulated.

Simulated data. Opacity keyframes, CSS grid.

Why it matters

Dashboards drown you in precision you can't act on. An abstracted view shows rhythm — bursts, lulls, the shape of momentum.

The Lab Experiment

Surface tags

Every surface the public reads you on, drawn as one connected, labeled system.

Surface dependency map

Docs
Site
GitHub
Discord
X / posts
Forum

How to read it

Each pill is a surface; the dashed links show where a claim on one surface depends on another.

Illustrative surfaces. Dashed dependency links, static layout.

Why it matters

Teams manage surfaces in isolation. Readers experience them as one tangled thing. Mapping the dependencies is how you keep them consistent.

The Lab Experiment

Confusion as a flow field

A prototype for drawing confusion as a living system. Each node is a public question; each link is where one misreading drags another along with it.

Confusion field, live

Move your cursor across the field

How to read it

A node is a public question
A link is shared confusion
Bigger = more downstream pull

Synthetic, anonymized audit patterns. Force-style placement. Canvas 2D, self-healing resize.

Why it matters

A static FAQ hides which questions are load-bearing. Disturb one node and watch its neighbors react — that's where to spend your first clarification.

More experiments

Refraction studyInteraction A slab of glass laid over the signal. Move across it and the layers bend at different rates. Who actually connectsEcosystem map Who is genuinely connected to whom, set against who merely claims adjacency. Activity, abstractedSignal grid A sketch: public activity reduced to a pulsing grid, where the pattern is the signal. Surface tagsSystem map Every surface the public reads you on, drawn as one connected, labeled system. Confusion as a flow fieldField study Each node is a public question; each link is where one misreading drags another along.