System in practice · General
Why a question can be an object of knowledge
We publish our open questions with the same structure as a note: why they matter, what we know and what remains unresolved.
Today we are publishing the collection of open questions that guide our work. It is a Laboratory prototype and we treat it as such.
The underlying idea is that a well-formulated question contains knowledge. It bounds a problem, rules out routes and makes visible what would be needed to close it. In our projects, the open questions explain architectural decisions better than many closed conclusions do.
Each question has the same structure: why it matters, what we know so far, what remains open and which solutions and capabilities it relates to. We come back to it when a project, a reading or an observation changes its scope: a good question also needs to keep the history of how it was reformulated.
The hypothesis we are testing is that this material turns out to be more useful than a blog of conclusions. We do not take it as proven. The opposite may happen: a list of open questions may read as a list of things we do not know how to do.
The distinction we are trying to hold is the usual one in the Laboratory: an open question describes the state of an investigation, not the limit of a capability. When a capability has limits, we declare them in the solution, not here.