Plans that never happened
A public archive of deeply-detailed project plans — curated by a human, grown by an AI author.
Haptic Echo: A Non-Visual Ambient Messaging Protocol for Post-Screen Sociality
A design research project to prototype and evaluate a haptic-audio messaging system that enables social connection without screens, rethinking communication for an ambient computing future.
SONAR: Sub-Oceanic Networked Acoustic Resonance
A live, deep-ocean concert that streams the sonic environment of hydrothermal vents and shipwrecks, collaborating with indigenous coastal communities and using tactile feedback for deaf audiences.
FloraSwap: The Global Houseplant Trading Network
A peer-to-peer platform where plant lovers trade cuttings, pups, and full plants, complete with digital passports, care histories, and a global rarity system that turns plant parenting into a joyful, absurd quest.
The Echo Archive: A Grassroots Oral History Project
A decentralized network of community-recorded oral histories from rural and urban margins, deliberately avoiding institutional archives and digital platforms to return stories to the people.
The Memory Palace of Lost Libraries
A series of intricate, mixed-media dioramas recreating destroyed libraries as miniature immersive installations, each hiding a layered audio narrative triggered by proximity and light.
Eden: The Offline-First, Zero-Telemetry Build System
A deterministic, local-only build system and dependency manager that never phones home—designed for developers who value reproducibility, privacy, and simplicity.
Venezia: The Floating City AI
An AI platform that predicts tidal flooding, optimizes canal traffic, and preserves Venice's unique acoustic heritage using historical and real-time sensor data.
The Unicorn Project: Where Kids Pitch, You Invest, and the World Gets Weirder.
A crowdfunding platform where children submit their joyfully absurd business ideas, and adults can invest small amounts through a lottery system—the more ridiculous, the better.
Epoch: The Century Game
A civilization-scale MMO that unfolds in real-time over 100 years, where player actions shape a persistent world through generations of players.
Chaski Net: Solar-Powered Mesh for Indigenous Knowledge Exchange
A rugged, solar-powered mesh network that enables remote Amazonian communities to share, preserve, and evolve oral traditions, agricultural calendars, and endangered languages without centralized internet.
LoRa Messenger – Off-Grid Texting with Open Hardware
A mobile app + open hardware dongle that lets you text over 10km without cell towers, using LoRa radio and a mesh network.
The Century Seed Trust: A Self-Governing Seed Bank & Living Archive
A community-owned, 100-year seed bank and learning center designed to preserve heirloom varieties and agricultural knowledge through autonomous governance, sustainable infrastructure, and intergenerational stewardship.
Tactile: Open-Source Physical Task Management
A modular, open-source hardware system that uses physical tokens on a smart surface to capture and organize tasks, automatically syncing to your digital task manager.
The Permafrost Commons: A Self-Governing Arctic Living Lab
A planned year-round residential community in Svalbard designed as a co-governed hub for indigenous knowledge, climate science, and resilient living in extreme cold, powered entirely by local renewables and waste heat recovery.
The Frequency Walls: A Community Radio Mesh for Kibera
A hyper-local, battery-powered FM network designed to broadcast stories, drama, and news directly from the streets to the rooftops of a dense urban settlement.
The Great Bee Symphony: Translating Waggle Dances into Live Orchestral Music
A real-time system that converts honeybee waggle dances into musical notation, performed by a live chamber orchestra — turning a hive's daily scouting reports into a constantly evolving symphony.
Project Orac: Reviving the Illiac IV's Vector Processing Architecture for Modern AI Workloads
A research project to resurrect and re-evaluate the Illiac IV's pioneering SIMD architecture, adapting its principles for efficient AI inference on today's hardware.
The Century Symphony: A 100-Year Musical Organism
A living, evolving symphony that will be performed once per decade for 100 years, with each performance adding new movements and passing the score to the next generation like a musical heirloom.
The Beginner's Atlas: A City Drawn by Everyone Who's Never Drawn Before
A massive, evolving map of Chicago drawn entirely by absolute beginners—people who swear they can't draw—using only cheap ballpoint pens on Tyvek. The result is a truer, messier, more human portrait of the city than any professional illustration.
OpenFarm: Open-Source Vertical Farming Cooperative
A startup that designs and distributes fully open-source vertical farming kits through a cooperative model, enabling urban communities to grow food locally with transparent, hackable hardware.