Living. Rewritten whenever it can be said more simply.
What it is about
Most of what we know does not fit in one list. A recipe is a dinner, a season, a set of ingredients, a memory of who cooked it. A planet is rocky, has a colour, has moons, sits at a distance. Folders make us choose one of these as the master and hide the rest. Tags keep them all, but never show two at once.
Cube Design starts from the other end. A thing is a piece, and a piece sits on several dimensions at once. A collection of pieces is a cube. You never see the whole cube; you look at it through one, two or three dimensions at a time, and turning it shows the same pieces in a new order. That new order is often where understanding happens.
How it is found
Dimensions are not handed down. They are noticed.
- Put two things side by side and ask what is the same about them. That sameness is a dimension, even before it has a name. A colour is enough to start.
- Then ask how the same two things differ. The differences are the options of that dimension.
- Ask why both appeared here. The answer is often another dimension.
When something does not make sense, we do not force it into the words we have. We try other words, compare again, and see what is the same and what differs. A thing we do not understand yet is a piece we have not opened yet.
No base case
Look closely at any piece and it opens as a cube of its own. Step back from any cube and it is a piece of something larger. There is no smallest unit and no top. The floor is wherever attention stops, for now.
This is why the same design fits apps (Mosaic), knowledge (Cubes) and what is in the heart (Anlat). The subject was never the point. The way of looking was.
Cube Design is a cube too
Cube Design is approached with its own principles. Its files, decisions, open questions, drawings and this text are pieces. They sit on dimensions (what part of the design it is, how settled, who reads it first), and new dimensions are noticed as they grow. A question that comes up is not a bug to fix; it is a piece to place. Is it a piece of an existing cube, a cube of its own, or a new axis? Whatever we learn about cubes, we use to understand Cube Design, which teaches us more about cubes.
So nothing found is thrown away. Findings are collected, placed, and settled one at a time. Versions are how the cube looked on a given day; the website lets anyone turn back to an earlier one.
Where it can be applied
Anywhere things belong to several groupings at once and no single hierarchy feels right:
- Personal tools: notes, recipes, training, money, todos: anything that ends up in folders that never quite fit.
- Knowledge: a library of public cubes (planets, elements, countries) that you grow your own cube from.
- Inner life: stories, moods and the patterns between them, found by the person rather than imposed.
- Thinking and design: conflicts, decisions, requirements, and design systems like this one.
How it can be applied
- Start with a few pieces. Do not design the dimensions first.
- Look at two pieces and notice what is the same. Give it a colour; name it later.
- Leave empty cells visible. Unknown is information about where attention has been.
- Let any piece open. Do not decide in advance how deep things go.
- Show at most three dimensions at once. Let people turn the cube rather than read a table.
- Keep the words the same everywhere, and write down why each decision was made.
What it is not
Not a database with a nicer face, not a score, not a test. The cube was always solved: nothing is wrong or missing, only the way of seeing changes.