@public

stefan klocek

Why This Direction, Why Now6 Aug 26

The most verifiable argument isn’t about AI adoption or competitive pressure. It’s about medium mismatch. Figma is a static tool. The experiences we are being asked to design are not static. They are dynamic, non-deterministic, context-sensitive, and multi-path by nature. Figma can show a single path with craft and precision. It cannot show the many all at once. The medium we work in no longer matches the design problem in front of us. That gap is not a preference or a philosophy. It is structur

Tools, Abstraction, and Craft6 Aug 26

All tools shift work into higher levels of abstraction. At the first level, the practitioner remains close to the material. The knife is in the hand, the pen between the fingers, the saw guided by arm and shoulder. The tool extends the body, amplifying power and precision, but the practitioner is present through every movement and small correction, still in direct contact with the decisions the work requires. At this level, the prosthetic quality of the tool both extends capability and cushions

Standing Upright6 Aug 26

Healthy organizations are not free of tension. They are structured by it. A human body stands upright because of balanced tensions. Muscles pull against muscles. Bones carry compression. Ligaments constrain movement. The nervous system constantly adjusts micro-imbalances. Remove tension and the body does not become peaceful. It collapses. Organizations work the same way. Their health does not come from eliminating tension but from placing tension in the right locations. Disagreement, conflict, a

Critical Design methods6 Aug 26

If critical thinking is missing in a lot of designers these days, what would it look like in practice for them to bring it to their work? It’s easy to be critical of something and a bit harder to come up with a path forward that would be better. The most efficient way to do this is ethnographic research. This means sitting with real users in real life situations, watching how they do things. It means having the user narrate their thought process as they go. Afterwards, it means debriefing with t

The Workshop Problem6 Aug 26

When I was younger I lived in an apartment with no extra room, no garage, no dedicated space for anything that required materials or setup. If I wanted to make art or build something, I had to unpack everything first: lay down a drop cloth, arrange the tools, constitute the workspace from scratch, and then, when any other demand on the space appeared, I had to reverse all of it. Pack it up, store it away, reconstitute the room for its next purpose. The living room had to be a living room again.

The Hard Lines of Belief6 Aug 26

The possibility in any situation is partly gated by imagination. When people fail to act, the cause is often the absence of a mental model that places the action within reach, not the absence of capability. If the model holds no mechanism between intention and outcome, the experiment never runs. Even when one does run, perception filters often misread anomalous results as noise. Belief operates perceptually as well as motivationally. It changes what gets attempted, and once attempted, how long s

The Dawn of Everything — Annotated Passages6 Aug 26

Selected quotations from Graeber & Wengrow, with insight and implication notes. The book's view of leadership is unusual in modern political and organizational thought: it is simultaneously skeptical, structural, and morally serious. Graeber and Wengrow refuse three of the most common framings — leaders as natural products of social complexity, leaders as solutions to coordination problems, and leaders as moral or charismatic exemplars — and replace them with a more uncomfortable account in whic

Memory Is A Bandwidth Problem6 Aug 26

A UX Collective piece treats AI chat recall failure as an architectural mistake: messaging-app patterns applied to knowledge work, RAG layers as industry admission that the original architecture was insufficient, sixty years of HCI research describing the missing piece. The framing is implementation, not invention. I think the framing understates something. There are fundamental information theory constraints that show up as memory problems in any sufficiently large or longitudinal system. Landa

Ideas Need Adversarial Testing to Improve6 Aug 26

The claim that good ideas need a marketplace in order to improve rests on a principle that is well-supported but widely misapplied. The principle is this: ideas improve through adversarial engagement. A claim held in isolation doesn't encounter the cases it can't handle. Without external pressure, weak assumptions don't surface. Blind spots become visible only when a framework is applied to cases it wasn't designed for, which requires someone outside the framework doing the applying. This is a d

AI and the Creative Act: Learning from the artistic process10 May 26

Many people are worried that AI is so powerful and so skilled that it will replace human effort and labor. And it is true – it has reached capability levels where it has the skill and speed to outcompete humans at high-quality productivity, and it appears likely to only continue to get better. In a world where these tireless, high-skill capabilities threaten to radically displace human labor, it becomes important to look carefully for what cannot be replaced. There is a very specific lens that h