Short working notes on research method, the texture of a medium, and the boundaries of tools.
Some stay rough; a few become longer pieces. If you came here for the research record, the CV is the shorter path.
2026 · 07 · 16 garden note
Life before tools
I sometimes spend too much time admiring how precise, elaborate, or clever a tool is. The tool becomes interesting enough to distract me from the problem that was supposed to matter.
I am trying to reverse that order: start with the problem, understand what needs to change, and then choose the tool that can help. A tool should earn its complexity by solving something real.
This is easy to forget precisely when the tool is exciting.
View full size →A signal crosses a medium and arrives in a different shape.
I used to think of a medium as a container: a bridge, an interface, a platform. Lately I notice that it also decides what is easy to see, easy to do, and easy to ignore.
That decision is rarely announced. It lives in a curb height, a default, a badge, or a camera angle. These material details carry a view of who is expected to be there and who is not.
This is why I am interested in medium as more than a channel. A good design does not only avoid harm; sometimes it changes the relation so that a person has somewhere to stand.
I used to think that the important thing about a tool was what it could do. I am increasingly convinced that its boundary can matter more than its feature list.
Once a tool finds the edge of its usefulness, it becomes easier to use it fully rather than ask it to become something else. The boundary is what lets the tool find its proper place.
Honesty about that boundary is not modesty for its own sake. It is how the tool’s usefulness becomes clearer.
View full size →A line leaves the page, circles through unfinished fragments, and returns.
My writing often moves in circles. I return to the same point from different directions, and sometimes the piece ends before it has an answer.
That is not always a defect. I am more interested in giving someone the movement and vitality of a thought than in presenting only its final conclusion. Writing lets another person see a mind working, including the places where it hesitates.
There are many answers. What is rarer is the presence of a real person behind them.
Hao Ling
