See · Think · Create
Human agency in the age of AI.
Exploring the ideas, art, systems & tools that help us understand and shape the world.
A philosophy of human ingenuity.
You've done this before. Somewhere there's a thing you couldn't stop looking at. A building. A song. A machine that quit. You looked at it longer than was comfortable, worked out what made it tick, and then did something with what you found: fixed it, built one, changed how you did your own work.
That's the whole philosophy. It's older than any school, it's how every good thing you own came to exist, and it's the reason this place does. Three moves. You already know them.
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See
Notice what's there.
Look at a thing closely before you have an opinion about it. Who made it, what it's for, how it actually works.
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Think
Work out why.
Take it apart in your head. Find the few principles that make it work, and the assumptions hiding inside it. Those principles travel: the same ones show up in a factory, a company, a piece of music.
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Create
Do something with it.
Turn what you now understand into something that didn't exist before. A fix, a business, a song, a better way of doing the thing you already do.
Where are we?
To know how to act, you first have to know where you are.
Here is where we are. For the first time, machines can write, draw, compose and design at a masterful level.
We've been here before, in smaller ways. Arithmetic went soft after the calculator. Nobody has remembered a phone number since the cell phone. A muscle that isn't used wastes away. Those were great inventions, and they came from the same human ingenuity that's now in question.
A society that stops valuing the line, the autonomy and the beauty of things people make will lose them. A person who stops practising those skills will lose them. And these are among the highest forms of being human.
The difference this time is that the same tools can strengthen those muscles instead of replacing them, if we're conscious about how we use them.
I'm an advocate for that. See Think Create is dedicated to the creatives, the individuals and the systems that keep these parts of us alive. If you see it the same way, come along.
Founder & host
Trevor Menard
I spent ten years inside other people's companies, working out how they really ran and then building what they could become. It taught me two things: look before you touch, and almost anything is understandable if you're patient with it.
The same two things turn out to work on everything else: a building, a song, a piece of software, a way of living. Somewhere along the way I stopped being able to look at anything without wondering how it was made.
I'm not an expert in most of what you'll find here. I'm someone who looks closely, and who wants to meet the people who make things well. This is where I keep what I find.
Keep looking.
New pieces land on Instagram first. Email gets a reply.
Consulting · collaborations
A few times a year I take the method into a company and find where it's leaking pressure. If that's you, or if you have something worth taking apart together, write.
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