Notes

I keep noticing that the best endings (in writing, in bread, in a studio course) are the ones that don’t explain what just happened. They land somewhere the body recognises but language only points toward. A loaf cooling on the rack. A student holding something they’ve made and not yet knowing what it means. The moment before interpretation.

Illich defined convivial tools as those that expand the range of what a person can do without requiring specialised knowledge they don’t have. A bicycle is a convivial tool. A car isn’t. I keep testing software against this definition. Most of it fails. A spreadsheet is convivial; you can make it do almost anything. Enterprise software is not; it requires you to think the way the software thinks. What would a convivial tool for bakeries look like?

A farmer near Forssa showed me an emmer field last summer. The plants were taller, thinner, more ragged than modern wheat, less domesticated, or domesticated in a different direction. She said the yield was maybe 40% of what a modern variety would produce on the same land. But the flavour of the flour was extraordinary, and the grain was adapted to this soil, this latitude. It didn’t need the inputs that a high-yield variety demands. I keep thinking about what “productive” means when you change the frame.

Micro bakeries operate in a gap: too complex for spreadsheets, too small and too specific for enterprise software. Production planning, ingredient management, recipe scaling, cost tracking. Every baker I know handles these with some combination of notebooks, Excel files, and memory. The gap is not a market opportunity. It’s a design problem.

In the MA course, I replaced presentations with weekly sketchbook submissions. No slides, no podium, no performance of understanding. Just the sketchbook, open on the table. The quality of thinking changed within three weeks. When you remove the audience, you remove the need to have arrived somewhere. The sketchbook becomes a space for being in transit.