What I think about when I'm not designing.

I think about systems a lot, and not always in a way that's easy to explain. Not systems in the UX sense, not interaction flows or information architecture, but more like the logic underneath things. How a set of rules holds up when you push on it. What a community does when the thing it organized itself around stops being true. I find myself doing this with everything I read and listen to, kind of stress-testing the world someone built, looking for where the assumptions live. It's a little obsessive maybe, but it's also just genuinely how I enjoy spending time.

The writer I keep coming back to is Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm reading The Beginning Place right now and it's doing something I find hard to articulate but basically comes down to this: the other world in the book isn't a backdrop, it's a question. Why do certain people need a place like that. What it gives them that the real world doesn't. What it costs to come back. Le Guin always makes the world do the argumentative work, every decision about how a place is organized reflects something she actually believes, something she's refusing to take for granted. And what I find interesting about that is how it reframes what speculation even is. It's not escapism. It's more like, if you have to build something from scratch you have to make your assumptions explicit. You can't just inherit them.

I write fiction too, which is probably related. I've been working on a fantasy novel for about a year, and the part I find myself most drawn to isn't plot or character exactly, it's the world underneath. Does the society hold up. Do the rules have real consequences or just aesthetic ones. Is there an actual logic to how people survive and what they believe and what they're afraid of. When something feels off in a chapter it's usually because I haven't thought that layer through enough yet, and fixing it means going back to the system, not the sentence.

I think that's what draws me to all of this as a hobby more broadly. It scratches a specific itch that I don't think is totally separate from what I like about design, this question of what a system believes about the people inside it, what it makes easy and what it makes hard and whether anyone actually decided that or it just kind of accumulated. Le Guin always decided. You can feel it. That intentionality is something I think about a lot, in whatever I'm reading, whatever I'm writing, whatever I'm turning over in my head at the end of the day.

I don't have a tidy conclusion to this. It's just a thing that's true about me that doesn't really fit on a resume.