Lab culture
The hero’s culture at the scale of a section, and the one you can handle.
Laboratory
Ganglion
This site’s design system, live: every component and motion engine on the code that ships, with a clock to slow it and a loupe to see its dots.
Darkroom
35mm film scans, converted, cleaned and reviewed in a pipeline of my own, then published.
Submarine MCP
Personal finance over iMessage: an app and MCP server built for the 2025 HackMIT×Poke MCP Hackathon.
Pawsome Health
AI in veterinary diagnosis, prototyped in Figma for the Cognizant GenAI Hackathon 2024.
Director Delta
A GenAI critic for UX and UI designs: honest, blunt feedback first, recommendations after.
This is the home page’s Laboratory section, unchanged. Point at a cell, drag one, hold one at the edge, open an experiment. The culture runs on its own clock; the bench’s doesn’t reach it.
Anatomy
| Cells | one named cell per experiment and 10–24 unnamed ones by area, seeded so the layout is the same on every visit at a given size |
|---|---|
| Wiring | each joined to its two nearest neighbours by a bowed axon, and the named cells joined in order, so it is one network |
| Alive | the hero’s anchored sway, redrawn every 100ms while in view; every 2.4–5.6s a cell fires on its own, its flash on the firing’s envelope and its pulses streaked through the shutter with a tail a quarter of the hero’s, for its scale |
| Pointing | a cell leans toward the pointer; a named cell fires once (360ms flare, a pulse down each axon at 0.9px/ms) |
| Dragging | a cell pulls its neighbours on springs and settles back when let go; held at the band’s edge it strains and fires in ink |
| Opening | the fibre grows to the card in 200ms with an ink spark at its tip; the card burns in from where it lands (360ms) |
| Band | 23 modules tall, 16 when narrower than 720px, with the ground dimmed under it by --ground-veil |
| Reduced motion | still: no sway, no firing, dragged cells snap back, the fibre is whole at once and the card cuts in |
From src/lib/exposure/lab-culture.ts and the guide’s Motion §12.
Decisions
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Firing in ink
An earlier version fired user cascades in red and read as too much red. Only the open experiment is --state: its cell, its fibre to the card and its name’s fill.
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The hero’s rules, shared
Since Nov 2026 the print, the sway and the shutter come from tissue.ts with the hero’s and the 404’s, so a change to how tissue prints or moves is made once; the lab had kept its own copy and was left behind when the hero changed. Its fibre to the card grows on --ease-front.
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Preview, don’t switch
Pointing at a name only previews it: switching the panel on hover changed it on the way to it, and a click on a cell left the site (Oct 2026).
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The culture runs on under the card
An earlier version cleared the tissue from under the card, and the card burned out onto a blank patch.
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Strain at the edge
A dragged cell used to follow the pointer out and vanish behind the band’s edge; now it stops and strains, so the stop reads as the tissue resisting rather than a wall.
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Handled, not read
The lab, the one section that is experiments, can be handled like the hero’s culture rather than read like a list.