![Found on are.na](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2afc52de-ee6a-4d4e-a2e3-d665de2508d6_1200x675.gif)

I've spent the last week immersed in web3, learning as much as I can specifically about DAOs — what they really are, the deal with governance models, compliant legal entity strategies, optimal tooling stacks, IRL working examples, etc.

And I've consistently circled back to this working thesis that the future of independent work needs exactly this.

In my time working on building marketplaces for local creatives or cannabis workers, or even working as a freelancer myself, you realize that the power was never really in your hands to begin with as a contractor.

The dream is often marketed as being 'your own boss,' but in reality, it's more like being treated as a pseudo-wage slaves without benefits and key protections.

You’re left to fend for yourself at the mercy of platforms and clients.

You might say, well, that's because it's hard to run your own independent operation, which is why we have companies in the first place. Companies provide work, infrastructure, resources, and protection.

Well, not necessarily—at least not for the benefit of the worker.

Corporations came about as a product of the industrial revolution to better optimize production by having a guaranteed workforce that can keep pace with demand, [minimize transaction costs](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x), and easily [aggregate capital](https://www.amazon.com/Elastic-Enterprise-Manifesto-Business-Revolution-ebook/dp/B007CT4LF2) to do things.

It was a win-win for the employer and employee because it provided stability and insurance for workers even at their own expense.

The model was popularized and evolved to where we are today with the latest manifestations being ever-scaling companies and platforms who are amazing aggregators for work, talent, labor, and capital, but have disproportionately benefited from being just the intermediary.

And this hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Historically, workers themselves have acknowledged this time and time again through new independent movements, ideologies, and models.

It’s just that most incarnations never fully live up to their potential and go dormant until they are resurfaced again with a small, incremental twist.

One such incarnation, having cycled many times, but I believe has hope this time around are [worker cooperatives](https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-start-a-cooperative/).

The Mondragon Corporation and REI are two prime examples of historical cooperatives that worked immensely well, and others like Ampled are up-and-comers slowly making waves.

They are old, but have become [new again](https://ia801707.us.archive.org/9/items/morshed-mannan-single-web/Morshed%20Mannan_single_web.pdf), and provide an alternative path for independents.

I believe what we're seeing now is a new form of cooperatives rewrapped, empowered, and elevated as DAOs where independent workers are banding together to create something potentially more powerful than any corporation or cooperative before.

![Found on are.na](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1bd5d79d-7eae-426d-8c22-57e28a1bac52_750x743.jpeg)

Packy of Not Boring wrote this piece that had a pretty tremendous impact on my thinking.

In [The Cooperation Economy](https://www.notboring.co/p/the-cooperation-economy-?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo5MTg4ODUsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM3MjUwNTc1LCJfIjoieWZRZU4iLCJpYXQiOjE2MjMwNzE4MTQsImV4cCI6MTYyMzA3NTQxNCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTEwMDI1Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.Y8hLpGUE2raVewN_unHci1yEVpIDPx4Gi1VHiFaMMks), he pens how the emergent way of working will be liquid super teams or collectives of people who independently, either formally or informally, to do work together.

The most compelling point he proposes is that people individually have the capability to become their own trillion-dollar company when you start to break down the primitives that corporations are able to offer and enable the individual.

And extrapolating out a trend of more workers taking on independent work and realizing rising earnings, we can expect that this coupled with generational shift and desire for autonomy and flexibility leads to the prediction that the next decade of work will include independent work as a core part of any worker's portfolio and likely integral to every businesses' operations.

And then, possibly, a trillionaire will emerge.

Regardless, the more I dug deeper, the more I realized that it is necessary not only to build a more equitable world for people but a logical and organic step for businesses to survive, and the stars are aligning for this to happen.

![Found on are.na](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1fbd9735-95db-4296-820a-0de74ba3d59c_1442x2048.jpeg)

If you haven't figured it out to this point, I'm incredibly bullish on web3.

You could call it another cycle of unbundling and hype, but people are progressively beginning to acknowledge that we can accomplish more with less and can do so.

This means less capital, fewer people, and fewer costs, and web3 is enabling this at the center.

Imagine a world where you no longer need an obscene headcount for alignment, capital freely flows if the idea and work are good, the work you do and contribute is compensated accurately, and ownership is not a question but a requirement.

Again, to be clear, I don't believe becoming a trillionaire is feasible alone. Not everyone can be a renaissance business, but a small group or a cooperative can.

This is why I think DAOs (or worker cooperatives 3.0) are the future.

Historically, cooperatives made sense because they're owned and operated by their members.

This means members (creators, consumers, or both) typically fund the co-op, enabling them to have governance and extract most of the value created, if not all.

When they work, it's an amazing thing.

Members share similar communal values and understanding of pooling resources to accomplish things that benefit the collective, everyone gets rewarded for such, new members aligned with the mission join, and the cycle repeats.

But, cooperatives aren't all peace and love.

Why?

Coordination of members is difficult. Raising seed capital is hard. Complex governance stalls things—all reasons why many go the corporate route.

But the promise of DAOs changes things.

Concisely put, DAOs introduce clear and transparent rules, incentives, and governance, all managed by code and automation.

I'm inspired by examples like [Raid Guild](https://www.raidguild.org/) and projects like [Braintrust](https://www.usebraintrust.com/), who've built new models of work leveraging web3 concepts and technology.

What they've shown so far is there's a lot of potential unlock that can happen.

* Smart contracts enable peer-to-peer coordination (and trust in trustless) and align incentives in a minimally extractive way
* Pseudonymous work is feasible
* Tokens create new possibilities for self-organization
* Tokens enable new forms of ownership
* Tokens enable new forms of governance
* Tokens enable new forms of capital creation and distribution
* Tokens create intrinsic network effects
* Decentralized governance reduces risks linked to the centralized power and authority
* Decentralized governance focuses on long term growth versus short term gains
* Decentralized identity enables flexible interoperability between organizations

And the list goes on.

![Found on are.na](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c00c3e7-53e8-4c41-9ed6-d583fb56919c_737x737.jpeg)

What's the clearest in all of this to me is that the web3 movement is making it easier than ever to band together, align incentives, and compensate one another. The complicated part still left to be solved is managing that over time.

We know many independents and organizations already operate in loose squads, but they need better tooling to help facilitate onboarding to the ideology, managing many-to-many relationships, fluid participation, and ownership.

Most web 2.0 tooling falls short, and alternatively, current-day DAO tooling is too technical and often prescribes models that don't necessarily fit small cooperatives and squads.

Not to mention, there are a few obvious things to acknowledge as it grows.

* Decentralization tends to make the organization more chaotic
* Keeping operations organized means compromising on decentralization
* Scaling makes it challenging to maintain a high degree of participation
* DAOs are most dangerous (in a good way) at scale, but most effective with a limited, but manageable amount of members

Yet, I'm still excited for a future where work is independent, interoperable, and done by highly collaborative networks built by and for workers — where you can work on what you want and how much you want with who you want, capture all the value of the work that you contribute, and build equity in not just a business, but something you can believe in.

It might be something, but it's probably nothing.

Thanks for reading.

web3 worker cooperatives & squads are probably nothing

![From my Zombie Zoo collection](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/UmzN8nk7alMXCZbimTGR_.png?height=512&width=512)

Had a chat with one of my bffs recently whose an artist and wanted context on all the chatter around NFTs, web3, DAOs, etc...

I entertained him with my limited but growing knowledge.

Here are a few takeaway notes from our convo — apologies if it feels disjoined or doesn't make any sense. I was inspired and wanted to dump out my stream of consciousness. I’ll likely add to this list in the near future.

Most of the bullets have the potential to be entire essays, but I'll leave it to the passionate and willing.

* Artists (using loosely here) ultimately define the ethos for big ideas because they're able to distill and communicate them to a wider audience that businesses and the founders can't. This means that they're more than likely the lifeboat required for crossing the chasm to mass adoption, and I think that's what we're seeing right now with the push in the space from both believers and non-believers. With that being said, I hope this is truly a larger organic call-to-action and not a macroeconomic warning shot.
* One way to win artists over (that aligns with part of web3 thesis) is teach them how to make more money. The problem here though is that this narrative sets a weird precedent for NFTs as a money scheme and all the other benefits are glossed over. I believe NFTs in their current state are just financial manifestations of web3 that serve as forcing function for awareness, education, and adoption. What is left to be seen is when dollar signs are replaced with other forms of capital. Is the concept still compelling then?
* I think all this talk of money also interestingly creates an adverse effect for some artists, especially the purists, to not want participate and/or prompts themselves and others to look at the NFT art medium as a zero-sum game. Related to the zero-sum part, a few popular writers, economists, and regarded thought leaders have mentioned some derivative of this. I wonder how repressive these viewpoints actually are for overall ecosystem of curious creatives or is it just whatever I’ll do it anyways.
* Artists are some of the most business minded people out there. But many are so focused on the 𝓊𝓃𝒾𝓆𝓊𝑒𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈 of their art that it translates into how they do business and sometimes ends up hurting more than helping. Copying and pasting business models should be normalized. Monetization as a form of art never hits right IMO. I get the message — just sell the thing already so you can make more dope shit.
* Building community and gamified incentives as a way to increase the value of your art is a brand new concept for many. This is especially true for those who've worked often BTS, undiscovered, alone in a studio, with no one but themselves, maybe a few friends or collaborators, and curators or gallerists pushing them. I think there's a ton of education and opportunity around community building for artists and their teams to work on if it is a path they choose. Otherwise, I'm curious to see other strategies that will emerge in the near future.
* Everything is so early that it's hilarious to give or receive advice on any of this — the best way to learn is to just dive in. Sure, Mirror essays, Spaces, threads, and frens help provide context, but who tf actually knows what they're doing rn? If you asked, I bet close to none.

Thanks for reading.

More notes to come…

Notes on art in early web3

![Painting by Johan Andersson, OpenSea Listing by Laurence Fuller](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/1A9R7nGRHONmD4Y1KM5FI.png?height=655&width=600)

FYI: This is just a quick note, but honestly deserves a longer dialogue.

There's a lot of contention around the hype, purpose, and future potential of NFTs.

Whether it be around bubble speculation or meme economy shilling, I think the unmistakable thing is the rally of normies getting involved in financial markets at a rate unprecedented.

Even for myself, diving deeper into the market in just the past few months, I've learned more about financial literacy, and market dynamics than I ever did during my business school studies.

You could point to Robinhood and fractionalize investing as the key unlock, but I'd argue that those examples are just the very tip of the iceberg. They expose you to the world from an institutionalized lens, building on the back of a system as they've known it.

NFTs, on the other hand, teach you finance in a completely different way that is digestible even for a five year old and exists within a system meant for fairness and participation.

The main reason is that everything is abstracted to the level of a tangible thing, but with a sticker on the back that says “Belongs To X, Y, & Z.”

Dabbling into the world, you are forced to learn about how to move money (fiat currency into digital), do research (read macro and micro trends to comb down to what you should invest into), do due diligence (dig into the creator's history and the project's community engagement), track the market (monitor trading activity), acquire the thing, decide on an exit strategy, and then begin your shilling roadshow.

This level of engagement (or opportunity to do so) is not at all matched by stock trading. And the magic, more often than not, is that are intrinsically pulled in to be involved.

And on the opposite end from the creator's POV, you learn about what it's like to launch, IPO, and operate a pseudo-company of sorts just by minting something.

And along the way, the narrative of cutting out the financial middlemen and rent-seekers becomes all the more clear and compelling.

Now you start to get it...

For me, I think the most enlightening through-line of this all is the unlock of financial education for those who are traditionally marginalized and wrapping them into a common subculture that is all their own.

An indirect comparison is /r/WallStreetBets and what it has done for its community of investors that run the entire gamut of trading aptitude.

But, what I mean more so are all the people who would never even had access to this level of inner workings of a complex financial system in the first place. I'm talking BIPOC, LGBTQ+, immigrants, foreigners, young folks, old folks, blue-collar workers, you name it.

Obviously, at the current level of user experience in most dApp projects, this isn't necessarily attainable for everyone yet. But, the time will come and what's even more exciting is that there's an appetite for it.

However, the question that remains is whether or not the system will become pay-to-play or continue to maintain accessible participation for all. We already see some early signs of this in the art market…

Still, I hope that builders and users themselves approach with an acknowledgment that more participation equals more value created for all — such is the thesis of decentralization itself.

Whether it's a temporary craze or not, I'm still in awe of the magic taking place before our eyes.

What we’re seeing in real-time is the breaking of a traditionally discriminatory system, an opportunity for a more level playing field, and the possibility for new generational wealth creation that we've never seen before.

I'm excited for my people and my people's people.

To the moon we go.

NFTs and the birth of a new generation of marginalized capitalists

It's funny to think about a time when the concept was nascent.

I remember creating UI style guides paired with a brand guide and then throwing it over the fence to let the developers figure it out.

We've come a long way.

![Xerox Star 8010 Interface (1981)](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/yWcjusSTmkrQNeDs8JgeY.png?height=1564&width=1550)

I've built many design systems from scratch, remixed a bunch, and worked with good (and very bad) ones belonging to some notable companies.

Here are a few takes and tips that I can provide from my experience.

* **Designs systems are only as useful as it is usable for those implementing it**

  A design system is just one approach to product development that makes it easier to communicate ideas for implementation. You create artifacts, organize them, and share them to communicate your designs to an engineer, designer, and product manager to execute.

  Thus, it is essential to acknowledge just creating a design system isn't the goal. The goal is to get across your ideas clearly and consistently.

  Here's a list of things I'd suggest you put that additional effort into as you're working through developing your system:
  * Technical docs - This is the key artifact for implementation. You may not be tasked with actually creating this as a designer, but your design will be synthesized into this. Provide as much clarity as possible, think about things through an engineering lens, and partner with your technical teammates to get this knocked out.
  * Variants - Documenting component variants is extremely crucial and will cut out at least 40% of the questions you would otherwise get. Make sure consistent with how you name and explain their use cases.
  * Interaction details - Interactions are another 30% of questions that you will get. If you have motion design skills or are good with any of these new animation plugins and tools, I'd highly recommend at least doing a pass for a few of your most crucial button or transition interactions.
  * Patterns - If we refer to the [Atomic Design Philosophy](https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/chapter-2/), patterns are organisms. They combine information from variants and interactions into larger ideas. And, unfortunately, I don't think many designers do a great job of adequately communicating them. The patterns will likely become more evident over time to someone newly picking up the system, but front-loading some of this effort will help cut down on ramp-up time and unnecessary back-and-forth.
  * Walkthrough demos - I believe in async work and when it's recorded and able to easily be referenced, chef's kiss. Leverage Loom to provide a higher fidelity perspective on whatever it is you want to be implemented.
  * Common language - Every design system I've ever worked on ends up having a lingo of its own. It just comes naturally in communication when trying to communicate a complex asset or pattern. I recommend documenting this somewhere that is accessible for a new teammate to refer to and pick up quickly.
* **Organization is a superpower**

  Make things easy to find. This begins at the top level with a good team and file structure for projects and consistent naming conventions. Spotify has a great example of how they structure their projects in Figma. You can check it out [here](https://www.figma.com/community/file/832911648132248625/Spotify-Ways-of-Working).

  Then, more granularly, naming things consistently on the component level is a godsend. I generally follow a structure similar to this: Category / Type / State / Version. An example would be you have a button with multiple states. You'd want to name it something like Button / Small / Hover / v1. Make sure you use the "/" separator because this is optimized for the Figma [instance swap feature](https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039150413). It'll make it easier to search and swap your components.
* **Good version control helps tell the story**

  I can't express enough how important it is to have a single source of truth but also a track record of where you've been.

  One reason being it's very easy, especially with multiple designers, product managers, and engineers collaborating for things to slip through the cracks. It becomes difficult to track the state of the system. You lose designs, flows, components and constantly have to point people back to where things are.

  Another reason is you want to be able to explain the journey of the designs easily and how they got to where they did so, there's no redundant exploration or questioning of decisions.

  Figma has a built-in function for version control, but I mainly use this as a safety net. What you want to do instead is create a file structure that clearly defines what something is:
  1. First, have one file that is the single source of truth. This is the master project file.
  2. Next, have a file type that is for all exploratory but defined work. These are WIP designs that you're still iterating on and need to get sign off for.
  3. Last, have a file type that is your personal playground. This is a scratch sheet. Play with your concepts here, and then transfer them to the exploratory file when you're ready to share.
* **Have an agreed-upon process for feedback, updating, and communication**

  A defined process is the needle that threads all of the work together. This falls into the world of Design Ops, and you'll likely split duties with others. But, you want to make sure that there is a clearly defined written SOP on how designs move from one stage to the next, when and who you're pulling in at what stage, how you're gathering feedback, and how to communicate best and track the implementation of that feedback.

  Setting guidelines will help your direct team members and save you the headache from dealing with external or low-touch contributors.
* **The design system should change from mobile to web**

  This is obvious, but I've seen too many cases where designers try to force-fit cohesiveness between web and mobile. Whether due to laziness or pressure, we have to acknowledge that different form factors intrinsically require different needs.

  Don't use a component or interaction that works well on the web if it doesn't make sense on mobile. It's ok to deviate if justified. Document why and share your position with your team.
* **Accessibility matters, dark patterns matter**

  All great designers are great users. And to be a great user, the product has to be usable and trustworthy.

  This begins with ensuring that your product is conducive to the user's intentions and aspirations and leveling the playing field for all.

  Do yourself and your users a favor by digging into [accessibility](http://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/The-7-Principles/) and [dark patterns](https://www.darkpatterns.org/).
* **The vibe should always be collective co-creation**

  Building a company, product, or team is all about the people making it and who it ultimately serves. A design system is no different.

  Thus, it would help if you always worked with the mindset that the design system is built upon and for collective ownership. It does not belong to you, him, her, or me.

  We all play a role in its existence, and when we understand that, it can improve.
* **Hand-off should be less of throwing it over the fence and more of a continuous, collaborative moment**

  Throwing work over the fence is the worst operational process and philosophy ever, especially if you expect the product and users to be evolutionary and not something indifferent to change and time-sensitive.

  I love this graphic from [Daniel Eden](https://daneden.me/) on how design fidelity should scale alongside engineering, not bifurcated into two cycles.

![Don't do this](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/BKUa-BK8L4N8ykZ9nH3xy.png?height=429&width=840)

![Do this](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/gyJvCB2Phuz-RpJIEIXet.png?height=429&width=840)

* This helps maintain expectations, contributes to less compromise and infighting, and ultimately yields higher quality work because everyone works in tandem and is on the same page.
* **Balance enforcing with exploration**

  Design systems limit creativity.

  The goal of a design system is to create a unified visual language that helps us work and iterate quickly while maintaining cohesiveness. But naturally, we have a tendency to go rogue because we might think we know of a better solution, or it might be more cumbersome to adopt an institutionalized system than to leverage what we're already comfortable with. This is the paradox of design systems.

  My advice is to keep exploring but to carve out ownership and a motivation to evolve the system.

  It will feel like an uphill battle at times, but cooperation and open contribution is the name of the game and will ultimately lead to better outcomes.
* **The system should be more of a framework than a doctrine**

  At the end of the day, a design system is just a means to an end. It is not a one-size-fits-all, even though it aims to be.

  Things will change as the product evolves. It's essential to establish flexibility and versatility within the system and the processes that manage it.

  Experiment often, track the impact and iterate. Your team and your users will thank you for it.

Thanks for reading.

Design system tips

There’s a common thread between the works of all great designers.

It’s that designing with a cultural lens is integral to everything — to have the level of deep understanding of the space you operate and the community your work serves to create the things that have the type of outsized impact they do.

It's not all that novel of a realization, but it's something that I think because of its seemingly obvious nature, many have trouble articulating, understanding, and defending, including myself.

So, I decided it's worthwhile to write about, both as a resource and reminder for those out there to leverage on their journey as they build for the future, and an exercise for me to make sure I’m not full of shit.

![Kanye being Kanye](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefd0a843-1e1b-4268-924f-0f41989bc839_2010x1338.png)

**Cultural Capital**

Often things are created that, for some reason or another, become highly successful in reach, popularity, profit — whatever metric you want to use — but that same thing may not have been successful, say ten years, five years, one year, or even yesterday. t may also be a hit with one group, but not for another.

If we exclude technological or financial limitations here, that leaves us with the most underrepresented catalyst: culture.

I've been diving into the sociological concept of cultural capital, coined by Pierre Bourdieu. If you're interested, I would watch this [quick intro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DBEYiBkgp8) and [this explainer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0eYWnGZ_4&ab_channel=Then%26Now).

The TL;DR here is that culture itself is capital. We see this in streetwear, Kanye, NFTs, exculsive communities, etc.

How this ties back to us is that what these things are able to do is tap into a particular cultural zeitgeist that strikes the chord of the public narrative, whether intentionally or not, and produce an enlarged, exponential amount of return that can be exchanged for other types of capital. Culture is currency, currency is culture.

The need, the timing, and the aesthetic all coincide into a perfect inflection point for ideas to seed themselves and eventually take off. And this is all because the stars have aligned, cultural capital was created, and then captured.

I’m not necessarily saying the goal here is always to build cultural capital per se, but to make a point that it exists, is important, and something that you can begin to leverage in your favor.

**Why**

But first, why does this even matter?

Well, in art, it doesn't, unless maybe your end goal is widespread acclaim or fame and wealth. Otherwise, it's a random occurrence that puts you on an upward trajectory.

But in business, it's different.

As designers, technologists, and entrepreneurs, we've learned the behavior that you're building to solve a problem for a specific user. And that problem and customer you're servicing, although often a moving target, can be synthesized into one clear statement, prime for a beautifully articulated slide. But, it's never that simple and often the wrong approach because you miss the big picture.

You miss the underlying potential of what this could be, who this will serve, and even possibly the cultural moment that ultimately takes it over the hill. You’re refusing cultural capital.

Not to mention, products that attempt but miss the cultural mark can be considered outdated, unqualified, over-engineered, or even flat-out ignorant.

To be clear, I’m not saying cultural thinking is a prerequisite to every successful product. There’s plenty of cases where magic can happen, but the opposite is also true.

There's this theory called [Ontological Design](http://www.academia.edu/888457/Ontological_designing) by Anne-Marie Wills that postulates that we design our world, and our world turns around and designs us. We can point to online examples such as the Instagram selfie, Youtube content creator, or Soundcloud rapper as technology that came before acknowledging the culture and has since evolved with the culture itself in a back-and-forth, signal-noise dance.

![A big map or internet cultures](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09e8e276-78dd-462b-aa0b-ea47b6aa9b98_4003x2836.png)

When this happens, we sometimes get amazing cultural step-changes, but equally, dangerous implications that come with it in the form of things like internet narcissism, doing it for the gram, cancel culture, fake news, and mumble rap (joke).

It's here within these implications that I wonder how more cultural thinking could better impact outcomes, help us avoid pitfalls, or get to the same resolution quicker.

**Something Different**

Ultimately, what we’re really after is authentic, focused intent, and understanding to create something dope, and operating culture-first is just one tool in the toolbox to get us there.

I don't think culture is at all this elusory holy grail that many make it out to be. I believe it’s a honed skilled just like everything else.

I also don’t think it should be gatekept from outsiders. If you want to see change, you have to be open to alternative perspectives.

So as the name of this post mentions, I want to relate this to design and propose an actionable concept of how you can begin to implement this in your workflow or suggest it to others.

I've been calling it 'Culture-first design,' but maybe it'll change in the future, I'm not sure.

To me, culture-first design is a meta-design mental model that emphasizes the importance of cultural understanding, integration, and design from a community-centric approach. The best design understands the history, mentality, evolution, artifacts, and capital of the culture it touches and leverages it in its favor.

At large, this is what the typical research and design process looks like:

 1. Start user discovery
 2. Collect interviews
 3. Identify pains, needs, and wants
 4. Synthesize
 5. Develop spec
 6. Begin design
 7. Test designs
 8. Get feedback
 9. Iterate
10. Hand-off

This workflow is a standardized, tried-and-true model, but again, it misses the emphasis on culture, and more often than not, depriortizes it.

Instead, a culture-first research and design approach could look something like this:

 1. Start user discovery
 2. **Define the subcultures**
 3. **Listen to the stories of the community members**
 4. **Note key players, communities, artifacts, and subsequent values and behaviors**
 5. Collect interviews
 6. **Observe internal trends**
 7. **Draw lines from macro trends**
 8. Identify pains, needs, and wants
 9. Synthesize
10. Develop spec
11. Begin design
12. **Get feedback from purists and tourists**
13. Iterate
14. Hand-off

This workflow instead places importance on cultural exploration. To me, this comes in the form of truly immersing yourself in the community of the culture without compromising the study. It's combining what you know about the community that pushes the culture, where it's trending, and taking those learnings to implement into your work.

The goal is to build up a sort of ever-evolving knowledge culture.

![Trippy mandala of collective knowledge](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe313794c-0955-434d-bbbc-536010482755_587x440.png)

How you go about implementing it into your work is a whole separate topic and likely depends on your discipline, form factor, etc., but I think you get it.

**The Future**

We already see many compelling examples of this in the real world with projects like seasonal fashion collections (Louis Vuitton), music releases (DONDA), shows (Kerwin Frost Talks), and films (A24).

Cases also exist within technology, but again, we've operated on the Silicon Valley model for so long that there aren't as many.

A few technology projects, teams, and companies that are progressively operating in this direction include [$FWB](https://www.fwb.help/), [MSCHF](https://mschf.xyz/), [Zora](https://zora.co/), [Foundation](https://foundation.app/), [Axie Infinity](https://axieinfinity.com/), [Roam Research](https://roamresearch.com/), [Rainbow](https://rainbow.me/), and [PartyDAO](https://party.mirror.xyz/).

What you may notice from this list is that many of them operate in the web3 space whose operational models are perfectly encapsulated by this tweet:

[https://twitter.com/jarroddicker/status/1425535203397804039?s=20](https://twitter.com/jarroddicker/status/1425535203397804039?s=20)

(Note: Expect a write-up that expands on this soon.)

Our world is trending towards more widespread cultural consciousness, and the next generation of builders intrinsically have and value high cultural IQs (as shown by Gen Z).

At present though, the importance of 'tapping in' is highly undervalued, but I foresee a massive shift already occurring.

However you choose to implement this model or take inspiration from it, I'd love to hear about it. My DMs are always open for suggestions and collaboration on expanding this.

Thanks for reading.

web3 worker cooperatives & squads are probably nothing

Notes on art in early web3

NFTs and the birth of a new generation of marginalized capitalists

Design system tips

Culture-first design: A process to tap in