A Thousand Things, and the One I Couldn't Make

For ten years I introduced things. About a thousand of them. Tech, gadgets, design objects, put in front of people in the US, Japan and Taiwan before anyone else, with an explanation of why this one was worth having. Later I set up Korean fashion, cosmetics and desserts in pop-up stores in Japan. The job was to arrange the shelf, get the lighting right, and make a passer-by stop and pick something up.

Of those thousand things, I could have made none. There was a day I stood in front of a pop-up shelf and noticed this, and it stayed with me longer than it should have.

The work gave me something, too. Give me a few days with an unfamiliar field and I can find its shape: the concepts, the flow. Enough to lecture on it for an hour or two. In theory. So if you ask whether I know the field, yes. If you ask whether I'm an expert, no. I'm quick at organising concepts and processes; the real difficulties, the ones that don't translate into words, I don't know. It's the kind of knowing you get from learning about love in books. Is that knowing at all? I left that question alone for a long time, and while I did, my eye for other people's work got sharper, and my sense of what I was good at, what I liked, and what I could actually make faded a little at a time.

I know the textbook way to find a business: look at a market first, find what's inconvenient in it, build the thing that fixes it. It isn't wrong. But two questions remain. Can I solve a problem I don't feel at all? And if the demand is that visible, am I really the only one solving it?

So unstackd starts from the other end. I take up something I'm actually interested in and do it. When I get stuck, I look for an existing way through. If there isn't one, I try to build it. I record the process and open it up to whoever needs it. Free would be fine. But I'd like to get it to the point where charging for it wouldn't be embarrassing. That's the only ambition here.

I doubt I'm the only person like this. Whether that's true, I don't know yet. If it works, good. If it doesn't, that's an answer too. Either way the process stays: what I tried to make, where it stuck, how it came unstuck, in the order it happened, piling up here.

Ten years explaining other people's things. Now it's my turn to explain my own. How long that explanation runs, I'm curious to find out.