The Junkyard
A points system that would reward neighbours for showing up to community workshops.
Why it failed: The metric quietly replaced the meaning. People started optimizing for points instead of presence.
Lesson
If your incentive is louder than your purpose, the incentive wins.
An app that would assign weekly gardening shifts using calendar APIs.
Why it failed: Plants do not respect Google Calendar. Neither do humans.
Lesson
Some systems work because they are loose, not in spite of it.
A token backed by literal seeds in a literal vault — a half-joke that almost shipped.
Why it failed: Logistics. And a very kind lawyer.
Lesson
Some ideas exist to be told at dinner, not deployed at scale.
A small social network where every post had to be a Venn diagram.
Why it failed: Turns out we like sentences too.
Lesson
Constraint as design is good. Constraint as personality is exhausting.
An ambitious mockup for a single dashboard tracking goods across six countries.
Why it failed: Ambition outran data partnerships by approximately five years.
Lesson
Mockups should be cheap so reality can disagree quickly.
A bot that would email me one prompt every morning, forever.
Why it failed: I unsubscribed on day nine.
Lesson
Discipline cannot be outsourced to a cron job.