The Atlas of Possibility

The default career story is a ladder: one role above the last, each rung clearly named, each promotion a small accomplishment. For people whose work crosses disciplines — designer and researcher, builder and storyteller, founder and educator — the ladder stops describing reality somewhere around year three. After that, the next rung is never the right shape.

The atlas is a different metaphor. Instead of asking 'what is the next role?', it asks 'what is the territory I am living in, and where in it am I right now?'. Projects become places. Skills become routes between them. Detours become parts of the map rather than betrayals of it.

The talk walks through a practical exercise for mapping your own work: identifying your recurring themes, the kinds of problems you keep returning to, the methods that keep showing up, and the people you keep wanting to talk to. These are the regions of the atlas.

Each region holds projects. Some are finished, some are in progress, some are still rumours. Plotting them together makes the connections visible — and reveals the gaps. The most interesting next project is almost always sitting in one of those gaps.

The Atlas of Possibility started as a private practice for organising my own work — design projects, ventures, research, illustration, teaching — and became the structure of this site. The talk shows the working behind it: how the regions emerged, how the projects were placed, what was deliberately left off, and how the atlas keeps changing as the work changes.

The aim is not to convince anyone to copy the format. It is to give them permission to invent the format their own work requires.

A vocabulary for talking about their work that does not depend on job titles. A first sketch of their own atlas. A clearer sense of which next project is genuinely interesting, and which is just the next rung pretending to be interesting.