Embodied Material [LC25]

Looking at artifacts

When we work together to build things, our ideas step into life through an array of transformations and adaptations. We can see the visible evolution of this work through the artifacts that it generates.

Each artifact — a sketch, document, model, prototype, discussion channel, or deployment — constrains and evolves what was understood before. Each makes some kinds of thinking and action more likely, and other kinds less likely. Through artifacts, we find the wake of past motion: we can understand prior trajectory and see the context that drives our current direction.

The danger is to reduce our understanding of the work to its visible artifacts. The truth of action arises from the guiding intent of work — our felt understanding of what we’re trying to do — and what we can see as options for action.

For the individual who sketches, draws, codes, or writes, there is a strong correspondence between the artifact and the understanding it represents. The very act of conversation and artifact consolidation creates new connections and evolves our understanding. This is why we protect time for exploration and collaboration: we shift the representation of work through different forms to advance our thinking.

In the reality of remote and asynchronous work, artifacts must do the heavy lifting to create shared understanding. It's a source of many problems. To imagine that a document or drawing will convey the same depth of understanding that was achieved while creating it is a timeless mistake. To expect others may interpret a series of sketches, maps, or interfaces in the same way that we do is more common and confounding.

Shared understanding is material

When groups of people work together, it is their shared understanding that drives the process and its possibility. The quality of our material lies in the coherence of shared understanding across the individuals who need to move and act together.

The artifacts we create and produce are merely attempts to express, evolve, and communicate the more embodied truth of action. They are subordinate to the understanding they attempt to capture and convey.

In an individual design process, the correspondence between what we understand and what we create while thinking is extremely high: it is easy to mistake them for the same thing. In a collective or distributed process, that correspondence does not necessarily hold. New kinds of steps emerge in our process: not with the aim of getting-to-artifact, but of collective understanding and productive challenge to individual perspective and biases.

A crucial awareness — a material to be worked on — is the shared understanding in the team that brings the effort to life. That shared understanding has concrete quality: it may be more coherent and aligned, or it may be more scattered and incoherent. Our goal, then, is to choose the right tools to increase its coherence.

Choosing artifacts and activities

Last year in Frame Control [LC11], I drew a view of how we grapple with a complex external reality with various frames.

Each frame illustrates a different aspect of the situation. We can flip through them to sharpen our sight, as an eye doctor with a phoropter. The same metaphor applies to getting a handle on what we are building together.

Shaping shared understanding starts by focusing collective attention on what needs clarity. From there, we reach productive questions or conclusions. It’s easy to pull our tools off the shelf and make what we always do: the PRD document template, high-fidelity design components, a favorite kind of map or model. Better if we first identify what that tool should accomplish for us.

Good artifacts are designed to elevate concepts that need clarity and ignore what is not yet important. They enable the right discussions and decisions. They evolve with our understanding or cede to a newer instantiation. Using them well is a skill that depends on our attention to the invisible, embodied material of shared understanding.

Other things of note

1. My uncle finds, in Freeman Dyson's correspondence, a letter from Robert Oppenheimer admitting defeat on a matter of quantum electrodynamics. It's a two-word response in Latin. A short post: Freeman Dyson Proves Robert Oppenheimer Wrong.
2. This view of shared understanding has been brewing for awhile. In some ways, it's another expression of the answer to my failed research report problem from 2011, as seen in the opening of the Researcher's Journey.