before an idea is clear
Every six months, I get to know a small group of high school students from my hometown and help them build collaborative passion projects. I started the “consulting” program because our town had few college prep resources, and many kids didn’t realize that pursuing their weird, specific interests could be part of getting into a good college.
Working with them, I found that the difficulty often came before they had a project in mind. They were insanely smart and creative, but didn’t always know what to do with the first spark and “I want to do something” became “it was just an thought.”
I started writing their ideas back to them with more structure and a concrete next step. That helped them move, but they tended to do exactly what I suggested instead of questioning or changing it. My version of their idea had become an instruction.
So I added a step: explaining how I’d arrived at that interpretation and returning to what they wanted the project to do. I wanted them to be able to question the structure I’d given them eye-to-eye, including whether it fit their interest at all. They went on to turn ideas into events and community projects that received thousands in funding.
As an engineer and student, I’m interested in how people come to trust their own curiosity. I chase that moment when a vague thought gets enough structure that someone can see what’s interesting about it and feels able to follow it, even before they know where it’s going.
Software can create more of those moments. What it stores, the order it reveals things, and what it makes easy to change are all creative, decisions. Those choices give a thought a particular shape and make some possibilities easier to notice. The structure is already an opinion, and it should be possible to question and change it.
In his essay on designing Notion AI, Ryo Lu describes how a flexible system becomes easier to use when it offers tools suited to the moment: drafting on an empty page, editing when text is selected. The interface makes a few useful possibilities visible within a system that can do many things.
What I like about Haruki Murakami’s writing, for example, is the cadence. Reading his sentences feels like walking barefoot, a stream of thousand tiny sensations with the occasional sharp profound idea (ouch). The arrangement of the words is part of what I’m responding to, and what inspired Textellation. I wanted to make the texture of words something a person can work with, even if the exact order of words became a bit obscured. Someone can see the structure of the arrangement, tweak it, and begin to recognize which relationships they want to follow.
Their response gives the next move a direction. I want to make it easier to begin while preserving the part where someone tries a change, notices its effect, and decides what matters to them. Following that interest and learning to translate curiosity into agency can be worthwhile even if nothing gets finished.