Walking through the British Museum on a lunch break, I noticed dust settled inside some of the display cases, a thin grey layer on surfaces designed to remain untouched. I asked an archivist whether that dust might contain material from the objects themselves, mixed with contemporary particulate drifting in from outside. They confirmed it was likely. Ancient matter and contemporary matter, occupying the same surface, indistinguishable at the scale of a mote. The objects in th

Thinking with Interfaces  For over four decades, the desktop metaphor has shaped how we think about the computer interface. Introduced with the Xerox Star in the early 1980s, it framed the computer as an office-like environment populated by familiar objects: files, folders and documents. By grounding interaction in everyday physical experience, the desktop metaphor provided users with a stable mental model for navigating an otherwise immaterial system. The desktop did not sim

Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) scan of a paint fragment A fragment of paint lifted from the wall, magnified until it becomes terrain, then returned to the place it came from. The surface and its interior occupying the same coordinate. What appeared flat now holds ridges, fractures, crystalline architectures. Nothing was added. Nothing was discovered. The vastness was already there, compressed into the appearance of smoothness. The scan does not explain the wall. It does n

For most of human history, measurement stayed close to the body. A hand was a unit of length, four inches, used to measure the height of a horse. The thumb across its knuckle gave us an inch. A foot was a foot. These were not arbitrary conventions so much as traces of older ways of knowing, using the body as our first reference point for making sense of what surrounds us. In this sense, the body was our first tool. As tool-making evolved, the body remained the starting point.

Within organisations, when thinking needs to be done, a team session is often treated as the natural setting. Faced with a problem to be solved, the default response is to bring people together and work it through. But thinking does not automatically improve when it becomes social. Some forms of reasoning benefit from interaction; others require time to form individually before they can be productively shared. The difference is not whether people collaborate, but when  and ho

First principles thinking is the practice of reasoning from underlying causes rather than inherited instructions. Instead of asking what is usually done, it asks what must be true. The goal is to understand the forces and constraints that make a system behave the way it does. Often the same forces that tradition learned to accommodate long before it could explain them.. I spent the summer of 1991 making bread in Paul Bunyan’s all-you-can-eat restaurant in Wisconsin Dells. The

Thinking tools are the methods people use to orient themselves in the world. They include mental models, heuristics, frameworks, and problem-solving techniques that help individuals analyse situations, reason through uncertainty, and decide how to act. Every thinking tool carries assumptions. It highlights certain aspects of reality while obscuring others. A checklist simplifies complexity but risks oversimplification. A model clarifies structure but may ignore context. Learn

While thinking tools describe how individuals reason, thinking systems describe what happens when thinking is distributed across people, structures, and technologies. Most meaningful decisions today are not made by isolated minds, but by systems: teams, organisations, institutions, markets, platforms, and increasingly, human–machine hybrids. In these contexts, thinking is shaped less by individual intelligence and more by incentives, feedback loops, communication structures,