3 Quarters
Every player in 3 Quarters has eight quarter circles, and almost any move you make can hand points to somebody else.
Matbhed
In 2023 Jaskaran Singh and I designed a board game for Conflictorium in Ahmedabad, and from today anyone can print it.
Bairang
A bairang letter is sent without enough postage. Whoever receives it pays, or it goes back.
Who agreed that a model would write it?
Delv, a writing tool now taking a waitlist, says it turns a fragment such as "tell him no but keep the door open" into the message you would have written, in…
Own voice, per hundred replies
I counted what my first-semester students typed to a tool that only asks questions, and set it beside what fourth-year students had typed to the same tool.
Small models that answer with a number
Since September, the models in the tools I build may answer only with a number, or not at all. I do not want a model to speak in them, and it has nothing to…
A record whose second track plays only with its key
A record made on Zariia is one file with two tracks in it, and only one of them plays for everyone.
SYNTAX
I have put up a small site called SYNTAX.
The boardgameBuilder wiki
In the tool you build a game from blocks, each one a single part of a game, such as drafting cards or a hidden goal. It does not write its feedback when you…
boardgameBuilder
I have put a small tool online for designing board games. It is called boardgameBuilder.
RAM
Tool release · RAM 0.5 · 15 October 2026 · open source
A short study on how design students judge their own work
I am looking for 6–8 design students to take part in a short study on how design students judge their own work.
Called a Machine and Read the Work
Positions · Called a Machine · Read the Work · 4 October 2026
rai
Tool release · rai 0.3.2 · 22 September 2026 · open source
A passage from Berger
A passage from Berger that read closely to the practice this week. It applies to filter cartographies more than I expected — what the panel shows is not what…
A correction caught in the studio
A correction caught in the studio this week.
The architecture has a DOI
The Koher architecture paper is now a preprint. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19661700. A peer-reviewed version went to She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and…
Tools for design students
I built a tool for design students — a diagnostic that helps them articulate why their concepts hold together or fall apart. It emerged from fifteen years of…
Notes archive live
Between September and December last year, I wrote thought experiments on LinkedIn. Short philosophical reflections — each beginning with a question rather than…
Critique That Engages With Reasoning
Design critique has become an exercise in making designers feel bad rather than helping them design better.
Jury Criteria and Transparency
Jury evaluation criteria needs to be transparent in its scope, interpretation and application context. While external jury panel members supposedly employ…
Rich Vagueness and Hollow Vagueness
We are trying to figure coherent ways to communicate vague ideas constantly. Our experience is vague but it can lead to sharp insights. How does this happen?…
Seamless Is Not Always Better
What is a seam? A seam is a point where something ends and something else begins. So actually speaking nothing is genuinely "seamless." The word functions like…
Self-Evaluation and Teachers
Self-evaluation remains unfamiliar to most people because most of us internalised the "self-critical" metric on the basis of external expectations imposed…
Teaching Coherence Evaluation
Design education operates through continuous exposure to critique cultures without teaching students to evaluate coherence in their own concepts. This…
The Mystery of Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation presents two perspectives on learners. One sees learners within a process such that they do not even know the extent of the distance they must…
The Social Context of Confidence
The perception of clarity, conviction and drive are socially mediated. Socially mediated by the friends we choose to have, either batchmates or seniors. I…
When Design Critique Resembles Astrology
Astrology is in all likelihood some primordial, impossible to validate, unscientific socio-cultural riffraff that is passed off as some holy insight into how…
You Are The Model
Koher builds tools that separate language from judgment — AI reads text, code applies rules, humans decide. The tools demonstrate this architecture…
A Blade Grows Sharp Against Stone
A blade grows dull against silk, sharp against stone. Our urban lives have become silk-smooth motorways of convenience, gliding us from comfort to comfort…
A Broken Compass Pointing Towards Impossible North
Democracy has always been a broken compass pointing towards an impossible north. We built it knowing it would malfunction, yet we persist in following its…
A Telephone Directory That Thinks It's a Community
We've built a world where your LinkedIn connection count functions like a credit score for relevance. Five hundred connections makes you credible. Five…
A Vintage Radio That Only Picks Up Certain Frequencies
Inheritance begins before the will is written. We arrive pre-loaded with ancestral software, entire operating systems humming beneath consciousness. These…
Activism Operates on Borrowed Certainty
Activism operates on borrowed certainty. Someone approaches with revelation's urgency, insisting they've discovered something you need to understand. They're…
Applying Crystalline Logic to Enzymatic Phenomena
Cables form the fundamental logic of how our world works. Not the physical objects, but the protocol—the assumption that connection requires hierarchical…
Breathing Pure Pollution Whilst Calling It Oxygen
We can only breathe freely within ourselves. The outside world constantly tricks us into holding our breath without realising it.
Can You Sense Another's Presence in Darkness
We have two kinds of moods. One is visible and obvious and the other is invisible and under the radar. The invisible kind can only be sensed through presence.…
Cities Are Unfinished Manuscripts
Public art taught me that cities are unfinished manuscripts, waiting for annotation. Every blank wall, every forgotten corner holds potential for intervention.…
Clarity Arrives After We Stop Preparing for It
Clarity arrives like an uninvited guest after we've stopped preparing for its arrival.
Consistency Gradients
Sometimes legacy is thick — arriving with detailed instruction manuals about how it should be applied to everyday life. Sometimes it is thin — weightless…
Designing for Entropy Rather Than Despite It
Engineers optimise for efficiency. Gardeners work with entropy. Somewhere between these approaches lies how we might better understand human motivation.
Drivers Who Don't Know Where They Want to Go
We have many vehicles on the streets of our cities, but many vehicles have drivers who don't know where they want to go. They are not just confused; they keep…
Ethics as Architecture, Not Opinion
We treat ethics as opinion when we should recognise it as architecture. If I say "murder is wrong," you don't reply "that's your perspective." Yet when someone…
Every Friendship Operates as Mutual Sculpting
Listening is a skill involving being responsive to what someone else is saying. When we find someone who listens, they become a friend. What is listened-to…
Finitude Creates Value
Time passes differently in the digital realm. Not in clock ticks or server timestamps, but in the way a piece of code ages, accumulates patches, develops its…
Future Bandwidth Allocation
We are trying to figure a way to resolve the conflict between the past which wants the future to be in a certain way and the present which wants to do its own…
Holding Stories Others Refuse to Remember
Some people relate to us as though parts of our lives are placeholders—as if they never happened, as if those roles held no significance. How does one play the…
Joy Derived from Circular Motion
Yesterday, whilst watching a grandmother push her granddaughter on a playground swing, I noticed something peculiar about their shared delight. The child's…
Knowledge Accumulates Beneath Articulation
Besides instruction, scaffolding and guidance, we learn most effectively by observation. Observing phenomena without narrative or notes, we label components…
Libraries Written in Human Bodies
Picture a museum where the most valuable artefacts are invisible. The plaques describe empty pedestals: "Here stands twenty years of debugging," "This space…
More Tenderness Than God Gives
J.D. Salinger said that "we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it." The definition cuts cleanly. Sentimentality as…
Rationing Oxygen Across Too Many Chambers
Very few of us think about what children need. Many lack time or motivation because we don't consider it important. Yet this might be the single most important…
Reconnecting Severed Circuits
Isolation functions like a kiln firing ceramic—high temperature strengthens bonds whilst preventing moisture exchange. Private moments cure under pressure,…
Righteousness as Pressure Valve for Unprocessed Grief
People struggle to change their behaviour (even when they desperately want to) because past trauma distorts perception—making stagnation feel like safety and…
Secret Gardens Within Public Parks
Imagine a vast public park in a city somewhere. Scores of individuals somehow maintain secret personal gardens within this huge public park. They've…
Taste Disguised as Analysis
We judge ideas constantly—proposals at work, student projects, design concepts. Yet most evaluation operates through taste disguised as analysis. Someone…
The Architecture of Personal Stability
>> The Architecture of Personal Stability
The Body Speaks in Dialect Requiring Translation
We persistently misread the mind-body connection as predictive mechanism rather than diagnostic instrument—as though emotional patterns generate illnesses…
The Bridge Phenomenon
For years, I dismissed formal education as irrelevant theatre. This scepticism wasn't intellectual rebellion but lived experience—the skills that define my…
The Bridges We Build Towards Moving Targets
We set out to know another person the way cartographers once mapped unfamiliar coastlines—charting what appears visible, assuming the interior follows…
The Everyday Struggle of Not Manipulating
Being available might be the most difficult thing to do—something we struggle with every day. Someone choosing a gift navigates three loyalties: give what was…
The Forgotten Creates Space for the Unprecedented
Forgetting operates like selective erosion, wearing away the sharp edges of experience whilst leaving the general topography intact. We misunderstand it as…
The Hygiene is the Boundary
The membrane dissolves.
The Infrastructure of Mediocrity
Sometimes nothing seems worth the effort. Those moments are not moments of weakness. Those moments are moments of our blindness. When we look only at the…
The Intelligence of Holding Contradictions
I stopped treating thought as singular and started recognising it as multiple, simultaneous, and contradictory. Rational deliberation—weighing options,…
The Invisible Matter That Truly Matters
A traffic jam forms without any car creating it. Each driver follows local rules—maintain distance, brake when necessary. Yet flow becomes standstill. The jam…
The Metabolic Relationship With Uncertainty
Watch someone build a prototype that fails spectacularly. Observe their immediate response—do they abandon the wreckage or begin examining the debris?
The Permanent Limitation of Any Generative System
The permanent limitation of any generative system is the actual personality and the life-experience of the user. Why? Because even if the sound is generated,…
The Thermal Signatures of Ideas
Each idea carries its own internal thermostat alongside its temporal rhythm. Some burn white-hot, demanding immediate attention, drawing crowds around their…
The Unmeasurable Remainder
Magnets stick to metallic surfaces because of their material properties. The reasons behind the orchestrations in our social relationships are, on the other…
The Vast Distance to Genuine Intelligence
Some of us insist that meaning cannot be manufactured, it can only be remixed into other forms—combining different meanings in different ways. But is this…
Three Dimensions We Confuse
My father recently shared a post referencing Krishnamurti, and the idea of a perpetually inward-looking humanity emerged for me. What would happen if we…
Tomorrow, They Arrive
Tomorrow, they arrive.
Unity Arises from Bandwidth, Not Essence
You inhabit one brain, experiencing one continuous stream of "you." This seems inevitable—consciousness bound to a single skull like a river confined to its…
We Need Someone Who Knows Who We Really Are
We have to tell someone—at least one person—about who we really are. The risk is that we will ourselves start believing that we really are who we pretend to…
What Flourishes When Light Withdraws
Of all pollutions, darkness seems simplest to overcome. Close your eyes and darkness arrives. But try closing eyelids in a bright room—they never fully dark.…
What If Mirrors Showed Cognitive Blind Spots
Imagine if every mirror in your home became a disruption screen - not reflecting your face but your cognitive blind spots. Not the spinach between your teeth,…
What If Teachers Were Learning Diagnosticians
A thought experiment: What if we approached classroom learning with the diagnostic precision of medicine—minus the pathology?
When We Abandon the Selves We Used to Be
We are all guilty of abandoning the past, at every moment. We pursue certain strands of our life with deliberate continuity whilst abandoning most positions we…
Why Absolute Freedom Might Be the Heaviest Constraint
Being an anchored kite is like possessing wings whilst choosing to remain tethered. Yet absolute freedom might be the heaviest constraint of all. Why would…
Why Humans Only Risk a Stampede
Collective intelligence emerges when we do something collectively that indicates we are all coordinated, that we possess the ability to orchestrate without…
Work With What You Don't Know
A student sits before me, convinced his youth is a creative disability. "I haven't experienced enough to write," he says, as if creativity were a warehouse…
You Cannot Talk Yourself Out of Caring
Try this thought experiment: spend an afternoon convincing yourself that nothing matters. That we're temporary arrangements of atoms, cosmically insignificant,…