Lab notebook

Alchemy lab

Notes and experiments, posted as they happen. Some are finished thoughts. Most are tests that haven't earned a conclusion yet.

Made here, used here daily₹3,000 once, about $36

Fractal

Fractal in use: a canvas of connected thoughts with one branch opened, showing what it is, why it matters, a provocation and three uncomfortable moves.
An hour in, one idea has become sixteen you can argue with, and each one tells you what it is, why it matters, and the uncomfortable move you have been avoiding.

An infinite canvas for taking one idea apart. Drop a thought in and it branches. Each branch is a move you choose: expand it, challenge it, break fixation and go lateral, test the axiom underneath, borrow a lens from another field, or let it incubate. Those are the moves that produce disruption rather than refinement, and nothing is discarded, including the directions you ruled out.

It is modelled on the thing it is standing in for. Every thought carries an activation that rises as you work on it and decays as you leave it, so the canvas forgets at its edges the way you do. Every link strengthens with use. That is Hebbian reinforcement in its plainest form: what fires together, wires together. Every new thought is also wired faintly to its neighbours, and when one of those latent links crosses threshold it surfaces as a remote association, the kind that arrives as insight rather than deduction. Traces nobody returns to fall below the line and are pruned. What is left on the canvas earned its weight.

Ideas are cheap to generate now, and an answer arrives before the assumption under it has been examined. Notes apps file thoughts away, whiteboards flatten them, a chat window hands you a conclusion and clears the screen. Fractal holds the problem open instead, and keeps you in the state insight actually comes out of.

A single file you download and keep, for ₹3,000, or about $36 paid from outside India. It runs in your browser on your own API key, nothing you write in it leaves your machine, and there is no account and no subscription. Updates for this version are free.

  • Expandwhen the thought hasn’t finished forming
  • Challengewhen it came too easily
  • Lateralwhen you keep landing in the same place
  • Axiomswhen something underneath needs checking
  • Cross-fieldwhen it needs a borrowed lens
  • Restwhen the pushing has stopped helping

Who it is for

  • Designers and art directors who are tired of arriving at the defensible answer.
  • Founders and strategists holding a decision that will be hard to reverse.
  • Writers and researchers whose problem is structural rather than verbal.
  • Anyone taught to work fast and now finding that speed is not the scarce thing.
Buy Fractal

Experiments that found a client, a constraint and an outcome are collected as work.

Explore works

Learn to design disruptively

PD46 exists to make work that disrupts rather than improves, and that begins in how a problem is thought about. These sessions pass that thinking on: how to take apart the brief your category handed you, make the leap that category would never make on its own, and hold the result to a standard that survives scrutiny. The same method behind every product made here, taught one session at a time.

These came from sessions run free on ADPList. The method was the same; only the booking has changed.

What people said afterwards
Request a session

Tell me which session you want and what you are working on. I reply with a payment link, and the slot is confirmed once it clears. Sessions happen over video, and prices are per session. Bring something you are working on, finished or not. The method needs a real problem to act on. Two places each month go at half rate, for students and for work nobody is paying for. Ask when you write.