The design-concepts laboratory of the Historiotheque — where works are designed before they are made.
A design concept is a designed whole conceived all at once: a novel, a series, an album, the workspace itself, the Art Operation. One file per concept, in five sections — the concept whole, systems and simulations, philosophical machinery, bottleneck note, open questions. Versions are new dated files, never in-place rewrites: the history of a design is part of the design.
DesignConcepts is the middle layer of the operation: Refcards hold the atoms, DesignConcepts hold the systems, Works hold the outputs.
- The concept, whole — the work as it arrived: premise, world, arc, stated as one continuous vision, not broken into steps.
- Systems and simulations — the concept treated as a system: its moving parts, its rules, its feedback loops. What is being simulated?
- Philosophical machinery — the theories the work carries and how they are expressed — through characters, images, sound, structure — rather than expounded.
- The bottleneck note — where the concept stands against the 1D bottleneck: what has been executed one unit at a time, what is stuck, and what the next actionable step is.
- Open questions — what the concept still needs: research, decisions, missing machinery.
- One file per concept:
concepts/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md. - Frontmatter:
id(DC-YYYY-NNN),title,domain(novels | series | sound | texts | workspace | operation), dates,status,related_cards,related_logs,supersedes/superseded_by. - New versions are new dated files; link versions in frontmatter.
- Project repos link to concept IDs; they don't duplicate the files.
See index.md — the map of the laboratory, grouped by domain. Every concept links
to its versions, its Refcards, and the works it feeds.
A note on what this is. This repository belongs to an ongoing research-creation project at the intersections of art, history, and philosophy — the open working record of one artist-researcher's practice. It documents a method, not a manual: nothing here is instruction, counsel, or advice on running an art operation, a studio, or a creative life, and nothing here is presented as a model to follow. What holds in this laboratory may not hold in yours.
All works are offered in good faith as contributions to public discourse and aesthetic reflection. Take what is useful and leave the rest — the responsibility for interpretation, and for whatever is done with it, remains with each participant in that dialogue.
All Rights Reserved.