An independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.
Ink & Switch
An independent research lab exploring the future of tools for thought.
Manuscript — an imagined editor for research writing
A walk through an imagined product for academic writing, mocked up by Claude Design.
How to Research Tools for Thought
Projects – discover our non-empty spaces
Fostering spaces for growth is an important part of our trajectory. We seek to harness the combined power of practice, critical inquiry and creativity to address some of the issues of our times - health, environmental awareness, social equality and multilingual, trans-cultural collaborations.
Rewilding the Web: my workshop report from Edinburgh
Notes from a wonderfully interdisciplinary Edinburgh workshop on 'Rewilding the Web', ranging coopetition and biological variety through the philosophy of self-organisation, polycrisis governance, protopian science fiction, and moderation seen through the lens of artisanal cheese.
ICPA - ICPA 2026
Welcome to the 2026 International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA). This year, we meet in Omaha, Nebraska, bringing the international ecological psychology community together in a setting that reflects a growing culture of research and innovation.ICPA brings together scholars from around the world who study perception and action as inseparable, mutually constraining processes grounded in organism–environment relations. The program features work spanning affordances, perceptual learning, coordination and control, development, social interaction, ecological design, and methodological innovation.The conference is designed to support sustained dialogue across theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives—welcoming diverse viewpoints and participants from across institutions, disciplines, and countries. We invite you to join us for a week of scientific exchange and community building as we continue to advance ecological approaches to understanding behavior in real-world contexts.
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
Words for our Present Reality - Strange Matters
We need a new kind of thinking. It would involve a break from the absolutism with which we dress up our systems of thought. It would demand that we bring different communities of thinkers together – especially those who have been left on the margins – and get them talking to each other so that we can inch closer to a shared language and a usable history.
Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas
Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis
Dear friends, The Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper that charts the landscape of leading-edge responses to the global metacrisis. In “Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis”, IAM scholars Brandon Norgaard, Nicholas Hedlund, PhD, and Claudia Meglin provide a sweeping (albeit
A Vision of Metascience
How does the culture of science change and improve? Many people have identified shortcomings in core social processes of science, such as peer review, how grants are awarded, how people are selected to become scientists, and so on. Yet despite often compelling criticisms, strong barriers inhibit widespread change in such social processes. The result is near stasis, and apathy about the prospects for improvement. People sometimes start new research institutions intended to do things differently; unfortunately such institutions are often changed more by the existing ecosystem than they change it. In this essay we sketch a vision of how the social processes of science may be rapidly improved. In this vision, metascience plays a key role: it deepens our understanding of which social processes best support discovery; that understanding can then help drive change. We introduce the notion of a metascience entrepreneur, a person seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science. We argue that: (1) metascience is an imaginative design practice, exploring an enormous design space for social processes; (2) that exploration aims to find new social processes which unlock latent potential for discovery; (3) decentralized change must be possible, so outsiders with superior ideas can't be blocked by established power centers; (4) ideally, change would align with what is best for science and for humanity, not merely what is fashionable, politically popular, or media-friendly; (5) the net result would be a far more structurally diverse set of environments for doing science; and (6) this would enable crucial types of work difficult or impossible within existing environments. For this vision to succeed metascience must develop and intertwine three elements: an imaginative design practice, an entrepreneurial discipline, and a research field. Overall, it is a vision in which metascience is an engine of improvement for the social processes and ultimately the culture of science.
metaBUS – explore science