TESSERRA
Exploring how experience becomes pattern, meaning, and understanding.
Much of what matters in a person's life doesn't happen as a single event. Experiences repeat, change, connect with other experiences, and sometimes take on different significance as we look back on them.
TESSERRA is an ongoing project exploring how those connections can be represented and examined carefully—without moving too quickly from what someone experienced to an explanation of what it means.
At the center of the project right now is Synnoema, a framework for mapping lived experience and examining the patterns that may develop across experiences over time.
From experience to pattern
We make connections between experiences all the time.
Something happens more than once and begins to feel familiar. An experience in one setting reminds us of something that happened somewhere else. Over time, several moments may begin to look like parts of a larger pattern.
Those connections can be useful. They can also become more certain than the experiences themselves support.
EXPERIENCE
↓
POSSIBLE CONNECTION
↓
PATTERN
↓
INTERPRETATION
Each step changes what we are claiming.
Noticing that two experiences seem similar is different from deciding that they reflect the same recurring pattern. And recognizing a pattern is different again from explaining what that pattern means.
Much of the work within TESSERRA is concerned with what happens between these steps: what information is preserved, what evidence supports a connection, what remains uncertain, and when it is reasonable to move from one kind of claim to another.
Synnoema is where I am currently working on these questions most directly.
Synnoema
A framework for mapping lived experience
Synnoema is the most developed part of TESSERRA.
It began as an attempt to preserve individual experiences while also making it possible to see what develops across them over time. As the project evolved, that raised increasingly difficult questions about when experiences should be connected, when recurring similarities justify calling something a pattern, and how interpretation can remain distinguishable from the information that supports it.
Synnoema provides a way of working through those questions.
Individual experiences can be represented without immediately explaining them. Relationships can be examined as evidence accumulates. Longer-running patterns can emerge without requiring every possible connection to be resolved.
Just as importantly, the map can stop.
An experience doesn't have to become part of a pattern. A possible relationship can remain uncertain. And later information can change an earlier understanding.
The goal is not to find as many patterns as possible. It is to make clearer what the available information actually supports.
Current work
Testing the foundations
Much of my work on Synnoema right now is less about adding new parts to the framework and more about testing whether the existing method actually holds up.
One of the questions I'm working on sounds simple:
When is an experience distinct enough to represent, and when do several pieces of information actually belong together?
In practice, those decisions can be surprisingly difficult. Divide an experience too quickly and distinctions may appear that the original information doesn't support. Combine too much and potentially important differences can disappear.
I'm currently testing methods for making those decisions more explicit, including a step I call Candidate Formation and the criteria used to determine when an experience is eligible to be represented as a Node.
Rather than changing the framework whenever a difficult case appears, I'm increasingly fixing the rules in advance and seeing how they perform against test cases.
The results may support the existing method. They may also show me where it needs to change.
Development Notes
Following the work as it develops
TESSERRA is still changing, and some of the most important parts of the project are questions I haven't answered yet.
Development Notes are a way for me to occasionally document that process: what I'm working on, problems I've encountered, decisions I've made, and places where my thinking has changed.
These aren't intended to present every new idea or provide a running record of everything happening behind the scenes. They're periodic snapshots of where the project stands and what I'm trying to understand next.
Latest note
Where TESSERRA Is Now
I've been working on TESSERRA in one form or another for quite a while, but I don't talk about it very often. Even people who know that I'm working on it probably don't have a very good sense of what I actually spend my time doing or how much the project has changed.
Latest Note
From framework to application
TESSERRA isn't intended to remain only a conceptual project.
As Synnoema becomes more stable, I'm interested in exploring how the framework can be used with people who want to examine their own experiences more carefully.
One direction I'm developing is reflective consultation. Someone might bring a recurring experience, a period of change, a question they have been thinking about, or a collection of experiences that seem connected but are difficult to make sense of. The consultation process would provide a structured way to explore that material and develop a clearer map of what appears to be happening across it.
The purpose wouldn't be to provide a definitive interpretation of someone's experience. Instead, the process would help distinguish what is present in the experiences themselves, what appears to recur or connect across them, what remains uncertain, and where different interpretations might still be possible.
This work is still in development. Consultation is not currently being offered as a service, and the form it eventually takes will depend partly on what I learn as the underlying method continues to be tested.
But it represents one of the directions I hope TESSERRA can eventually move: from developing ways of representing experience to creating useful ways for people to work with their own experience.
Consultation in development
Behind TESSERRA
I'm a psychologist, researcher, and lifelong maker of things.
My professional work has mostly involved psychology—clinical practice, research, teaching, and consultation—but I've also always had a strong creative side. I started writing music when I was young, later became interested in technology and information systems, and have generally been drawn to projects that involve figuring out how complicated things fit together.
TESSERRA has gradually become a place where some of those interests can interact.
It gives me room to explore questions about human experience using ideas from psychology and research while also experimenting with systems, technology, and forms of representation that don't fit neatly within any one of those areas.
I don't know exactly what TESSERRA will eventually become. For now, I'm continuing to build Synnoema, test the ideas behind it, and follow the questions that emerge from the work.