Daily pages - February 07, 2022

Yesterday, I had a great talk with Andy about my writing. She said she had taken probably about 6 hours looking at my stuff, so I really appreciate the time she took to make sense of it.

She immediately asked who my audience was, and I know that is an ongoing challenge for me. Her thinking was that my audience was a highly-educated group, maybe graduate school level because of the concepts and background information that is required to kind of grok the writing.

We talked about more accessible ways to present the information. I always thought of patterns as a more accessible way to present the info, but she found patterns to be very confusing. Part of that was the different way she thinks about patterns, as something repeating, so she was having trouble distinguishing pattern from principle. That has always been a sticking point for me. I think the difference is that a principle is one level separated from a pattern. A pattern is more like a heuristic, a rule of thumb. A principle is perhaps the larger idea behind the rule of thumb. A simple example would be “work with gravity when building a retaining wall by making sure there’s enough mass in the wall components.” The principle is gravity.

I don’t know, that seems kind of weak, but having an example like that might prove to be useful.

I talked about something that has been on the periphery of my thinking: that maybe the pattern language is really mostly about my synthesizing the ideas that I’ve been interested in. Certainly, I think it still has real value and might help someone else to synthesize the same stuff, but it may not be the best introduction to the ideas.

I had thought before about how talking about the patterns in blog entries is one way to get them across, and then having them ordered in a pattern language is like the value add for the ideas. Like if I were to go through Seth Godin’s writings and turn them into a pattern language, that might be a very valuable thing.

But maybe we need simpler books to get started. We talked about people in our audience as being different ages, and they might each need a different approach to talking about a creative practice. Very young readers might need one approach, 20-somethings might need another, and empty-nesters might need yet another.

Anyway, in some ways it seems simpler to look at a shorter, less involved book about creative practices as my first book. The patterns are still there, and they can continue to develop, perhaps as an open artifacts project, with the idea that maybe they’ll be useful to a wider audience over time. I also think that among those of us trying hard to synthesize these ideas, it could be very useful now. I’d love to get Daniel Schmachtenberger’s perspective on it.

So, the question becomes, what should I be focused on? Lately, I’ve been focused on open artifacts projects and trying to promote them. Creative practices are a big part of that. I find myself wanting to work up an outline for a book around that concept. I think there’s a lot there, much of which is already outlined in the pattern language.

In terms of open artifacts, I’m considering buying a domain for the Gitlab instance: myopenartifacts.com or maybe openartifactslab.com (though I don’t like how the last part reads as “slab”). I’m hesitant because it’s going to cost money to run this instance on Google Cloud (or any service) and I’m nervous that I’m still not making money on this stuff. It feels like something I should just have faith in, however.

Side note: I just found a podcast that is called “Make Things That Matter” with Andrew Skotzko (https://andrewskotzko.com/podcast). I like the title, but I could see modifying it a bit to “Make stuff that matters” and I kind of like that idea for your creative practice.

Begin a creative practice and make stuff that matters.

or “creating stuff that matters,” I suppose, but making seems more accessible and ties into the maker community. My biggest frustration with the maker community is how much stuff is being created that doesn’t matter. That’s probably a terrible way to look at it; trivial stuff is how we start, then we move on to more important stuff, we hope. Is it trivial to make a violin? I don’t think so, so is it trivial to make a chip clip? It serves a purpose and doesn’t hurt anything. Making with plastics that can’t be recycled is a bit dodgy, but I think that will be worked out.

Anyway, I like the tag “make stuff that matters.”