Alarm at 07:00 on a Sunday. But I slept a lot. Last night. And the night before. It’s good to be rested. And to enjoy the quiet of early morning, when no one’s around.
I’m annoyed because I’m not inspired. There’s this faint nausea from lack of clarity. I don’t have a clear idea of what I should be doing and it disorients me. I’d love to dive into the pleasure of writing about something that brings me joy. Yes, exactly — letting myself go into a chain of note connections gives me pleasure. And I want to do it again.
What blocks me is the vastness of scattered thoughts. Where do I start? Why? What will I have achieved when I’m done? This ruins the anticipation. Either I stop caring and throw myself into enjoying this spontaneous session and whatever happens, happens… or I reflect on objectives, maybe framing them into a path, and ruin the pleasure.
But the goal of my connective game was never to have a goal. I just had to repeat the exercise a hundred times to gather auto-anthropological data. Nothing more. So I’ve found the answer on my own: I shouldn’t set any goal or hesitation, I just need to carry out the exercise as planned. Trust the system!
So let’s lay out the protocol:
- pick Atom A
- pick Atom B
- Go wild on whatever connections you find between them and make a damn molecule!
It’s that simple. Nothing else. Proceed.
- Atom A: [[be formless, shapeless, like water]]
- Atom B: [[design level]]
Easy! I have a starting point and I didn’t have to think about it.
Atom A: “Be water, my friend”
Let’s read.
Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. —Bruce Lee
The first atom comes from an athlete, artist, philosopher. A concept that has always struck me deeply, one I’ve adopted as a way of life, mostly unconsciously. “Be water, my friend.”
The suggestion — simple and profound — from the great philosopher of martial arts, creative of movement, lethal anatomical machine and self-made man who built a school of thought: well, that suggestion, at least on the surface, is about adapting to your environment.
“Now water can flow or it can crash.” And those who live where floods sweep away their homes seasonally know something about that — or where houses are uprooted by earth washed away in torrential rains.
And yet, drop by drop, water appears as the most innocuous and benevolent substance in creation. But put together a few billion billion drops and you get the complexity of a system of drops that becomes an unstoppable force of nature.
Taking the shape of the container. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking of a concept drilled into me during my early studies: the ideal gas, “which occupies all available space.” It strikes me as an extension of the water concept — water, subject to gravity, can occupy all available space, yes, but pushing downward, where the earth’s force pulls it. Less influential, though present, is gravity’s pull on the ideal gas, which instead expands to fill an aerial volume but, unlike water, goes upward.
It’s a digression, an extension of the original idea. I don’t even know what to do with it, but I’m noting it down.
Water taking the shape of its container signals the absence of its own form. Being amorphous, shapeless — it’s not an insult about deformity, it’s not a deviated form, it’s a lack of form. And Bruce Lee invites us to make it a strength. Renounce form — identity? — to take on any form, to assume any identity? Or role?
As a component of a socio-technical system, then, should we assume the identity of the environment that hosts us? But isn’t this an alienating, estranging concept for a person?
He’s probably talking about zeroing out the ego, shutting down personal ambitions, the desires that divert us, in order to integrate with the environment. He’s not talking about identity, uniqueness, desires — except by inferring that from water’s formlessness can come both flowing, “the stream,” and destroying, “the crash.”
He was a fighter, philosopher, teacher of combat. So his philosophy of being formless is, evidently, oriented toward the only objective a fighter can have: winning, by defeating the opponent.
Flow through the environment, undisturbed and unnoticed, become the container that contains you, and sweep and shatter whatever you meet when you rush like a torrent in full flood.
After so many years of this passage resonating in my head, after this careful examination, it changes flavor. I tended to interpret the adaptation part — flexibility, ductility — rather than the lethality.
I’m partly surprised, and not in a pleasant way.
Atom B: “Design Level”
Damn, already from the title this promises to be very distant. This annoys me a bit. What if I have to do backflips to connect these atoms?
Well. Let’s see.
The passage I extracted on August 29, 2022, is copied dry — no comments, I don’t know why I captured it, nor how I felt about it, no clues on how to connect it or to what. The classic example of an information fragment, without context, feeding the black hole of informational entropy.
Source: reb00ted | Levels of information architecture. My note is titled [[design level]], and that’s the only personal contribution — the rest is copied and pasted. (Is there perhaps a worse cardinal sin in note management?)
I’ve been reading up on what is apparently called information architecture: the “structural design of shared information environments.”
I find this atomic definition very interesting: the structural design of shared information environments. It was there, for many years, and I’m reading it now for the first time. Compact, efficient, effective, beautiful.
The author proposes a framework to interpret the different levels of scope in which one can interact with a shared information environment:
So I propose this outermost framework to help us think about how to interact with shared information environments:
Universe-level: Focuses on where on the planet where a user could conceivably be, and how that changes how they interact with the shared information environment. For example, functionality may be different in different regions, use different languages or examples, or not be available at all.
Environment-level: Focuses on the space in which the user is currently located (like sitting on their living room couch), or that they can easily reach, such as a bookshelf in the same room. Here we can have a discussion about, say, whether the user will pick up their Apple remote, run the virtual remote app on their iOS device, or walk over to the TV to turn up the volume.
Device-level: Once the user has decided which device to use (e.g. their mobile phone, their PC, their AR goggles, a button on the wall etc), this level focuses on what they user does on the top level of that device. On a mobile phone or PC, that would be the operating-system level features such as which app to run (not the content of the app, that’s the next level down), or home screen widgets. Here we can discuss how the user interacts with the shared information space given that they also do other things on their device; how to get back and forth; integrations and so forth.
App-level: The top-level structure inside an app: For example, an app might have 5 major tabs reflecting 5 different sets of features.
Page-level: The structure of pages within an app. Do they have commonalities (such as all of them have a title at the top, or a toolbox to the right) and how are they structured.
Mode-level: Some apps have “modes” that change how the user interacts with what it shown on a page. Most notably: drawing apps where the selected tool (like drawing a circle vs erasing) determines different interaction styles.
I agree, and I like thinking of Information Architecture as “the structure behind the design.” Though we could more correctly say that Information Architecture is the design.
And this feeds into the age-old discussion about “design” understood as “art,” “creativity” and “colored pixels” and “buttons” versus the famous claim “design is how it works.” In this case we might say: design is how it’s structured. But try explaining that to those who still search for “UX/UI Designer.”
The author concludes with a laconic:
I’m just writing this down for my own purposes, because I don’t want to forget it and refer to it when thinking of design problems.
And I’m left empty-handed when I reread my note and the original article. I realize there’s nothing exceptional here. As a designer, this hierarchy of contexts is entirely natural to me. I understand the author had this realization only then and wanted to jot it down. But why did I capture it four years ago? Wasn’t it this obvious just 48 months ago?
I’m rather puzzled.
The molecule: adaptive design means better usability
With little enthusiasm, the connection between the two atoms pours out spontaneously: it’s obvious that when designing a shared information environment, you need to make sure that the delivery of information — and therefore the interaction with the user — adapts to the user’s needs.
In other words: accounting for the various narrow and broad levels of context in which the user exists and operates — geographic position, environmental context, devices used, position within the software, navigation and mode of use — the shared information environment must be structurally designed to deliver information in the most effective, efficient (and pleasant) way possible. Which is nothing more than an elaborate (and Proustian) alternative definition of User Experience Design.
Bruce Lee as an early UX Designer? “Be the environment, my friend”?
I’m surprised that I’m not particularly surprised.
What does Bruce Lee know about design that designers have forgotten?
It’s only after talking to someone else that I finally discover unexpected connections:
1. The tension between adaptation and lethality as a design principle. Bruce Lee doesn’t just say “adapt.” He says: flow or crash. This duality has a precise equivalent in design: a well-designed information system doesn’t merely adapt passively to user contexts — it reshapes user behavior. Think of forced paths (dark patterns, mandatory onboarding, choice architectures). The water that crashes is design that manipulates. Here lies a molecule with an ethical core, not just a functional one.
2. Amorphism as renunciation of design identity. I had raised a magnificent question — “isn’t this an alienating, estranging concept?” — and abandoned it. But transposed into design, it becomes: does a system that adapts perfectly to every context still have an identity? Think of the difference between a coherent design system (which maintains recognizability across contexts) and a design chameleon that becomes indistinguishable from its environment. Water has no brand. Can a product afford not to have one?
3. The ideal gas as an alternative model. My “digression” about gas expanding to fill all available space upward is actually a fertile intuition. Water is bound by gravity (it descends, fills from the bottom); gas expands uniformly. These are two different models of adaptation: one constrained and directional, the other expansive and isotropic. In design, they correspond to two strategies: responsive design (I adapt to device constraints, like water) versus pervasive design (I occupy every available surface, like gas — think notifications, widgets, ambient computing).
I’m too absorbed in unpacking sources and weak in teasing out connections. I need to do better. How?
The pattern: I treat unpacking as the “serious” work and connection as a byproduct. But in my exercise the hierarchy is reversed — the atoms are the pretext, the molecule is the product.
A modification to the protocol
My three-step protocol is right but lacks an asymmetric time constraint. I should try this variant:
Phase 1 — Unpacking Atom A (15 minutes maximum). Read, reread, note the visceral reactions. When the timer rings, stop even if you haven’t finished. Write a single sentence: “For me, this atom is about ___.”
Phase 2 — Unpacking Atom B (15 minutes maximum). Same process, same final sentence.
Phase 3 — The collision (30 minutes minimum, no ceiling). Here, a precise technique kicks in. Take the two sentences and place them side by side. Then ask yourself in sequence these three questions, each deeper than the last:
- What do they have in common? — This is the surface connection, the one that will feel “obvious.” Write it down and then set it aside.
- Where do they contradict each other? — Look for the friction point, the tension. In this draft: water renounces form to adapt, but design levels impose structure to function. Fluid adaptation against rigid architecture. This friction is almost always more generative than similarity.
- What would a concept look like that contains both without canceling the tension? — This is the real molecule. Not a synthesis that flattens the two atoms into an obvious statement, but a new concept that needs both to exist.
Why this works
What I had been doing — unconsciously — was looking for common ground between the two atoms. But common ground produces tautologies (“adaptation is important in design”). The generative connection arises instead from dialectical tension: not where A and B agree, but where they challenge each other.
In chemistry: a molecule is not the sum of two atoms that resemble each other. It’s the result of a potential difference — one atom has electrons to give, the other needs them. The bond is born from imbalance, not from resemblance.
An immediate experiment
So what does this molecule look like?
- Atom A: “This atom is about renouncing form as power.”
- Atom B: “This atom is about hierarchy of contexts as necessary structure.”
I’ve already found the obvious connection (adaptivity). The contradiction is juicier: can a system be simultaneously formless and structured in layers? And if so — what does that system look like? What’s it called?
There: that thing is the molecule.
Why this molecule generates further thought
And now I have a concept — infrastructural amorphism — that I can use as a lens. A system achieves maximum adaptivity not by eliminating structure, but by delegating it entirely to the infrastructure of contexts. The fluidity of content is directly proportional to the rigidity of the architecture that hosts it.
Bruce Lee wasn’t preaching freedom. He was preaching delegation. Water doesn’t decide its own form because it entrusts that decision to the container. Without the cup, the bottle, the teapot, water is a puddle — not a force, not a flow, not a weapon. Just a shapeless mass subject to gravity.
Stewart Brand knew this. In his How Buildings Learn, he showed that a building is made of layers that change at different speeds: the site is permanent, the structure lasts decades, the skin resists years, the services renew in months, the furnishings change in days. He called them shearing layers — and the principle is the same: the more stable the infrastructural layer, the more fluid the layers above it can be. Remove the load-bearing structure and you don’t get freedom. You get rubble.
And so I ask myself: does my Zettelkasten work this way? The notes are the water — amorphous, with no imposed hierarchy — but the system of connections, the tags, the vault’s structure: those are the containers. They are Brand’s deep layers, the ones that change slowly so that everything else can change fast. The more stable and well-designed they are, the freer the notes can be to flow between unforeseen contexts. Like this one.
And this exercise itself — from two atoms to a molecule — what is it if not a supremely rigid container? Two atoms, one connection, full stop. It’s the load-bearing layer of my thinking: a fixed protocol inside which the content is utterly free to be water.
I’m surprised to be surprised.