A Gateway into My Research Work
This is a repost of my February 2022 newsletter, covering the research work that’s occupied my recent time.
I’m experimenting with an audio version of this note, as well. If you’d like to hear me narrate, here you are.
Peer into my research work with
a gateway analogy 🔍
This month I'm sharing details on the research work I've taken on since my grand experiment in life began.
This piece won't touch on our findings. I'll save that for another day, after we have published the work. We will explore the idea of research, though. The work Rob Haisfield (PI), Joel Chan, and I are doing dives into how knowledge is formed and built upon.
We'll set the stage with a crime board.
Ah yes, the crime board. Modern cinema has ensured that you've seen them before — full of pictures, notes and news clips connected by red strings, swimming in the scent of burnt coffee and cigarettes. Perhaps there's a pill bottle to the side, signifying the unhinged crazy of our protagonist. They know something connects all of this; they just can't crack the code...yet.
In our films, detectives and conspiracy theorists construct these boards to lay out their thoughts, search for undiscovered connections, and uncover the storyline that connects each piece. All of it is right there in public. We're led into the room and struck with the overwhelming tangle of people, events, manic writings, colors and strings. Always strings. Strings connect distant ideas and expand our understanding of the whole.
Of course in the films, we later realize — this isn't just a whodunnit?! Often we discover an expanded understanding that connects much more than we had hoped for.
Sometimes called crime walls, there's a whole site dedicated to these! This one was created by a very passionate woman on Reddit trying to connect Trump to Russia.
The crime board is the gateway analogy for my recent work.
For the past 8 months, I've worked in a small team of 3 on a funded research project on how researchers...research. We talked to computer scientists, NYT best-selling authors, cutting-edge designers, and a slew of others trying to change the world with their insights. We investigated what their process looks like when forming a new theory or advancing the current state of the art. And we had a lot of fun.
A gateway analogy can be thought of as the entry point, a common introductory narrative that allows someone to quickly grasp the territory you're discussing. The researchers and software builders we talked to need gateway analogies to properly share their work.
Formally, the process we see on the crime board is known as synthesis. We may not construct a physical board in our own living rooms, but we are connecting the dots between different points of information to form a new conceptual whole.
Academic researchers do this in literature reviews to give themselves a 'lay of the land' — often grounding their future theories within this context.
You probably do it when you need to solve a tricky problem for your work — you're projecting numbers to set next year's budget, looking for patterns in a sea of customer feedback, or trying to prioritize what to spend your team's energy on. You're aiming to form a new model in your head that operates with the reality of our world. Through this lens, everyone doing knowledge work engages in synthesis!
The crime board serves two purposes for me in this piece.
First, it illustrates, rather completely, the messy process of synthesis when constructed in a single person's mind. Just look at that board — to an outsider, it's a mess!
Most of the people we interviewed worked alone, which made sense, but also may be specific to us. Synthesis is still tricky to distribute. For things to work smoothly, collaborators need to share context — what do you already know about this? what tools do you use? how do I ensure we're on the same page? We love to bounce ideas off of others, but only when these collaborators share our context. We don't want to slow our thinking down when trying to solve a problem!
Throughout our interviews, we've seen firsthand how hard it is for these brilliant humans to bring others in to their work. When you're in so deep, it's hard to articulate everything you know to someone with different experience. Your brilliance leads to the curse of knowledge. We intuitively know this! It's very difficult to step outside our heads and bring someone else up to speed.
In fact, that's precisely what I'm trying to do for you here. It should be clear to you that I'm in deep. Inherently, the process of synthesis isn't something we actively dissect each day, which means it's difficult to clearly convey what I'm doing. I think back to how I described my work in the early days of this project, and well, sorry...I'm sure that was confusing.
Hence, the crime board acts as our gateway analogy for synthesis. Seeing a picture of similar work sparks our brains. Now you're able to ask questions through a different lens, and I can gradually peel back layers of the work. If I do it right, I'm even likely to advance the idea from hearing your unique knowledge.
Second, the crime board illustrates the collaborative process of synthesis. Remove yourself from the analogy of the board as the problem to solve. Blur your eyes and take a second look, solely focused on the shape and connections you see below.
If we consider the pictures, print-outs and names as entities, and strings as relationships, we can see the interconnecting nodes in the form of a network. This is the graph that we exist in. Any new name can be added to the board, and a wealth of new connections can be made to it.
Let's translate for us humans and our ideas.
Each of us is a single entity. Each connection we make is a relationship. Sharing an idea with another entity allows that idea to expand. Someone else can help us understand a nuance we hadn't seen or point us in a different direction. Another person can connect us to someone who knows even more. Sometimes we butt up against a local limit; our networks need to expand! This is good. It typically brings about new perspectives.
When we're forming ideas, it's easy to default into keeping to ourselves. But the process of synthesis does not need to live in a single brain. In fact, we hypothesize this is a key driver holding back innovation! This lies at the heart of why we're doing this work to begin with. We aim to enable decentralized synthesis, in order to advance innovation + collective intelligence.
Looking at the board in this light, we see the need to connect with others to advance our own understanding, no matter the idea. The more connections we make, the wider our perspectives reach.
So, our work examined the process of individual and collective synthesis. Specifically — what do people's notebooks look like? how do they signify important information? how do they grow these ideas and share with others?
We uncovered many limitations of our digital tools. We suggested new design primitives to advance technology and make it easier to connect ideas without losing the root. We examined new publishing strategies to enable anyone sharing an idea. We saw new waves of software tools that will advance our generation.
...and today, that's where I'll leave you.
Rob Haisfield (PI), Joel Chan, and I are excited to share more throughout this year.
A quick closing, as I want to share a word on how great this time has been.
Rob + Joel brought me into their world, and I'll forever be grateful for them doing so. Through this time, I learned more about the process of doing great work than in any other time of my life. I scoured academic papers to the point of brain mush. I interviewed people I could previously only imagine talking to. I synthesized this work to uncover new findings, and advanced them through our consistent discussions + cowriting sessions. It's been mind-breaking, exhilarating, and consistently some of the best conversation I could ask for. Tremendous, to say the least.
We're putting a pause on this work following our publication later this March, while each of us pursues other immediate projects. Later this fall, we'll publish in a journal + the wind will take us from there, as it always does.
It's been a joy of my life to do this work, and those two gentlemen (and the many other humans who gave us their time) are all deserving of true gratitude + many, many good times. 🙌🙌🙌
Here's to each of you finding your own great projects, teams, and working environments.
There’s more in the newsletter version of this post. If you’d like to read more, including thoughts on Ukraine and, on a totally different note, my favorite recent album, click here + sign up for future notes.
Love,
Bren