ABOUT
Design, digital products, learning,
and institutional change.
The problem
kept changing
shape.
For a long time, I thought the work was to make something work: an explanation someone could understand, a product they could use, a service that could reach more people.
Experience kept showing me how much the result depended on things I had not included in the design.
I began close
to the person.
My early work included helping people use creative and technical tools. Having access to the software was one thing. Making decisions with it, solving unfamiliar problems, and working without constant help required practical judgment and confidence.
Working directly with people made that difference visible. I could see where an explanation failed, where confidence broke down, and when something finally became possible. That closeness shaped how I worked, but it also raised a question: how much of the progress depended on someone being there to help?
If every new person needed the same direct support, reaching more people required a different way to organize and deliver the expertise.
Building something
changed the question.
A service could organize expertise. A digital product could make it available beyond a particular place or time. I began thinking about how people would enter an experience, find their way through it, and return when they needed it.
The work included the content, the product carrying it, and the support around both. I believed that if I got those things right, the change would follow.
Then I encountered the limit of that belief.
Something worked.
And that was not enough.
People could use what had been built. It could operate and spread. Yet the practices it was intended to change could remain much the same.
That was difficult to reconcile with the effort that had gone into making it work.
I had treated successful use as evidence that the larger change was taking hold.
It did not always mean that.
Using a new approach might require time no one had allocated, a decision no one clearly owned, or support that ended with the launch. People could understand what was being asked of them without having the conditions to carry it through.
I had to reconsider what I was taking responsibility for when I said I was designing a solution.
More of the work
sat around
the product.
Questions I had treated as implementation details became central.
- Who would carry the work after the initial effort?
- What would make room for it in an ordinary day?
- Which decisions would support it, and which would quietly undo it?
This brought me further into institutional work, where introducing something also meant working through ownership, capability, governance, and competing priorities. These affected whether people could make the new approach part of their work, even when they wanted to.
Some questions extended beyond the institution itself: whether a new approach would be formally recognized, and what policy allowed.
Each move made the work harder to contain within a single project.
I still build things.
I care about the quality of an experience, the clarity of a product, and the details that make something usable. But I now pay closer attention to where my responsibility begins and ends, what the project depends on, and what will happen when the support of its creators is no longer close at hand.
I am slower to assume that the visible object contains the whole problem.
That is the thread connecting my work. Some of the questions it raised also found their way into Athar, my Arabic podcast, and Afterhold, my exploration of what remains after an experience ends and how it shapes judgment and action.