Frank's notebook

What is this?

This site is a kind of personal computing tool built in the lineage of Notion and Jupyter notebooks: a system of blocks for thinking, writing, and coding all in one. Think of it like the eccentric notebook of a designer, where each page is an expression of curiosity—rather than expertise.

Surfaces:

A surface for the Game of Life

Thought:

Design is compression

Breakthroughs are unintuitive

Knowledge is a material

Design is a search problem

About Frank

Design is compression

I like to start with the idea of shape: designers shape.

An architect shapes space, and is accountable to form and how it meets physics. A designer shapes tools, and is accountable to how those tools meet human minds. Where the architect compresses behavior into space, the designer compresses human faculty into tools.

A designer can't escape shaping form—the form of an idea, an image, a story, an artifact that compresses a sequence of actions. Shaping form is the job.

Design, in this sense, is one of the oldest human crafts. Long before we had a word for it, the first humans shaped a stone into a blade: faculty compressed into form.

What is a tool?

A tool is a compression of our abilities into an artifact we can wield—something we could have done by hand, encoded instead into a form that does it better. Mark making, counting, communicating, writing, remembering, seeing, thinking.

The alphabet is a tool: a set of symbols that codify sound—speech in any language—into a medium that outlives the speaker. A pencil is a tool: it lets a human record symbols on physical material. A kitchen knife is a tool: it divides material into discrete units. Excel is a tool: it models relationships between numbers and quantities.

Exceptional tools are general. Each of the tools above was designed for a specific job, yet applies to countless others. This is not a separate virtue—generality is what maximal compression produces. Compress a problem all the way down and what remains is the part it shares with countless other problems.

Sometimes that compression is the gift of the designer, and sometimes it's the gift of time. The kitchen knife and the pencil became universal partly through centuries of anonymous use, refined by hands that never thought of themselves as designers.

The designer who works deliberately toward generality traverses from the branches of a particular problem down to the trunk. Specific problems grow from general ideas. To design is to find the general in the particular, and build the tool from the trunk up—so that a single form serves every branch.

To design, then, is to think deeply about a problem, extract its universal strands, and shape them into an artifact that lets humans achieve old ends in new ways. And because thinking is itself one of the faculties we compress, design is recursive: the better the tools we design, the better we design.

Tools that think

AI makes obvious something that was always true: tools exist on a spectrum of cognition. The designer of a doorknob shapes a static object; the user brings all the cognition. The designer of Excel shapes a system whose behavior is fixed but whose outputs are open-ended. The designer of AI shapes a tool whose system is itself cognitive.

When the tool thinks, the designer is no longer just shaping how a person reaches through an artifact toward a job. They're shaping how a person's thought is shaped alongside a tool that thinks back.

If the strand running through design's history is the compression of human faculty into form, then we've arrived at a new end point: the compression of the faculty that itself compresses. Every compression is a choice about what to keep. So the question for a tool that thinks is the question for any tool, raised to a new power: which of our faculties does it compress, which does it preserve, which does it let atrophy?

A tool that thinks back shapes not just the output, but the human who wields it. What McLuhan said of media has never applied more literally to tools: we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.