Hi, I'm Ian: a writer, urban planner, and teacher from Toronto, Canada.

When I first launched this site in late 2011, I had no idea what it would be about. I thought it could be a place where I wrote about technology, cities, and productivity, but every time I sat down to work, I got stuck. I had too many ideas, too little focus, and I struggled to develop a consistent or distinct voice. Overwhelmed and frustrated, I gave up.

A few weeks later, in the dark of winter, a meteor shower tore through me. The earth smoked. Fires flickered in the shadows. I spent months in a smouldering shell, my skin blackening as gas seeped from the sunken toxic rocks. 

But amid the crackling catastrophe, as flames threatened to burn off all oxygen, something breathed to life. It was a voice deep in my gut, the voice of my instinct, and it was screaming, wheezing, and gasping its way out of prison.

Before the molten hail, before the celestial explosion that set it on its course, I'd mangled this voice into a machine. Systems seduced me with their promise of objectivity, and I allowed them to override my ephemeral, impractical instincts. I turned to software, policy, and technology to guide my decisions, encasing intuition in regulation. I became a one-man bureaucracy. Plodding. Indecisive. Rigid.

And then came firestorm. It crumbled my shield of rationality and eviscerated the mechanical web in which I'd cocooned myself, releasing my gut's wordless whisper like steam from a punctured valve. The flames dimmed, the rocks cooled, and I leaned into the hiss. To heal. To become nimble. To re-learn to listen to and trust my instincts.

So I returned to this site with a new focus. I would write about experimenting with disconnection, celebrating instinct, and embracing the organic, fluid disorder that often characterizes the world. I would still write about cities, technology, and productivity, but they would be touchstones in a more elaborate story, a story about disentangling from too much machine.

I hope there's something here you connect with. Thanks for reading.