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research essays.
Research essays on design, cognition, AI and how systems hold together, alongside shorter practical notes.
The Brush Group: Why the Brain Science of Inspiration Favors Making
A popular science video lists what happens in your brain when you look at creative work. I read the studies behind each claim. Every one exists, and almost every one is stretched by a single step, always in the same direction: credit that belongs to making gets moved onto looking. The best-supported result in the video belongs to a group of retirees who spent ten weeks learning to paint.
The Margin of Crudeness: Ornament After Intricacy Became Free
A stock-image company says ornament is back. I checked the claim against the trend data, the history of ornament and the research on handmade goods. The look of labor became free when machines learned to draw it, so ornament now proves less than it seems to, and two older jobs are returning in its place: the trace of a particular hand, and the emblem that makes a name recognizable in a crowd.
Observation Lock Points: There Is No Observer Outside the Process
Reality does not need observers to keep transforming, yet some of the configurations it produces hold a perspective for a while. I propose a process-first account of where those perspectives come from, a name for the moment one forms, candidate measures for finding it, and the tests that could prove the idea wrong.
The Variance Penalty: Bodies Aren't Content Calendars
I set out to argue that women lose focus half the month and the feed punishes them for it. The research took the first half of that sentence apart and made the second half stronger.
Image Inflation: The Death of the Image Has a Bibliography
A video essay says images are losing their power to signal status. I checked its claims, found one inflated number, and traced the century of theory it never names.
Character Maintenance: The Egregore in the Safety Dataset
A video claimed Anthropic had mapped the demons inside its AI. I checked, expecting the usual inflation. The wildest word in the claim turned out to be a row in the paper's own tables, and the discipline the paper describes turned out to be one I already practice.
The Adjudicator Problem: Why Designers Perform Certainty
A one-page essay from 2008 tells scientists that feeling stupid is the job. It works because an experiment eventually answers. Design has no experiment, and what fills the gap is the confidence of whoever is presenting.
The Obedient Layer: What a Style Gate Actually Removes
A style rule strips the AI register's vocabulary completely and leaves its rhythm untouched. I set my eleven published essays against machine essays in the same genre, and on sentence rhythm I could not tell the two piles apart. This is also the essay where I withdraw most of my own earlier numbers and explain why.
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