Containing the Beautiful Mess

Some time ago, I wrote about moving my website away from a more conventional structure toward a digital garden. At the time, that shift was motivated by a desire to make space for holding unfinished thinking, allowing ideas to develop in public, and resist the pressure to present coherence too early.

After working with that setup for a while, I started to see more clearly where it aligned with how I actually work and where it did not. The underlying intention and philosophy still holds, but the structure has evolved to better support my way of working.

The Gap

As I continued writing and publishing, I noticed that not all of my content behaved in the same way over time.

Some pieces were effectively one-and-done. I wrote them, published them, and didn’t return to them except, apparently, to prove to myself that proofreading is mostly an act of misplaced confidence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Some others persisted. I would come back to the same ideas across notes, prototypes, and occasional projects.

Alongside this, there were broader themes and larger lines of inquiry that unfold slowly. These were not well served by individual posts or short studies.

My earlier structure didn’t clearly distinguish between these different modes. Everything lived at roughly the same level, even though the depth and engagement with each kind of work was quite different. That mismatch became more apparent as the body of work grew and became harder for me to ignore.

Inquiries & Permeable Streams

The site continues to be organised around different streams of writing and making. Rather than being presented as how finished something is, Notes, Studies, and Projects each represent distinct modes in which I engage with ideas. They are not to be treated as stages and are not meant to collapse into a single outcome.

Notes are the sense-making layer. This is where I try to articulate understanding. This includes reading notes, interim thinking, process notes, reflections and occasional attempts at closure.

Studies are my exploratory practice layer. This involves working with tools, testing methods, building small prototypes, field notes, micro-projects, and pretty much any form of hands-on making.

Projects are my contribution layer of sorts. These are more sustained efforts, usually over a longer period of time. This is where research, interpretation and making come together into a more coherent body of work.

Much of what lives in these streams is self-contained. Some pieces are one-and-done and remain so. Others, however, continue to grow because they contribute to questions I keep returning to. Over time, work from these streams begins to cluster around those questions. I refer to these longer-running theme as inquiries.

An inquiry begins with a question I do not yet understand well enough to answer. At first, it may exist only as a seedling. It develops through a sustained stream of writing and making. As this work accumulates, the inquiry evolves and synthesises. The question sharpens or shifts, new sub-questions appear, some lines of thinking are abandoned, and others become more clearly articulated.

The dedicated inquiry page reflects this synthesis as it develops. It holds together the related notes, studies, and projects that have contributed to it and presents them as a connected body of work.

This is how permeability operates in the site. I've kept the boundary between everyday writing and making, and longer-running inquiries, deliberately porous. Work from ongoing streams can feed into an inquiry, but this does not change the status of the original work. These pieces are not removed from their original contexts or overwritten; they remain a note, study, or project. What changes is their relationship to the inquiry — and to one another — captured through tags and backlinks. The original work remains visible as a record of my understanding at a particular moment, while the inquiry page traces the evolution of the idea over time.

As more work permeates through this layer, the inquiry matures. This way, the site now supports long-term inquiry without collapsing process and better reflects how I produce and work with knowledge over time.