Form follows Context

January 5, 2026 8:44 AM Subscribe

Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process. Henrik Karlsson on the critical importance of context and its place in shaping a life you are comfortable with. "If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding....The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it." Part 2 is a meditation on the role of perception. — "If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is. It is a feedback loop between you and the context. By gradually adjusting the thing you are designing and observing how well it fits the context, you create a feedback loop that embeds the context’s knowledge into your design. Your design ends up smarter than you." —

"Having spelled this out, I can see several ways to get better at unfolding. Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context."

He then follows up with a set of questions to help break down the barriers towards more context.

"My preconceptions are a filter that reduces the amount of information I get from the context. How can I filter less?

A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things: a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status? Maybe you would have more time to write if you took a high-paying job, consulting part-time, instead of funding your writing by selling pieces to magazines? "

"It will be easier if you can overcome your social fear of looking stupid or incomprehensible. Wanting to be understood by others, or not wanting to contradict ourselves and our established identity—these are major blockers to unfolding."

Part 2 on becoming perceptive:

"But, and this is the important point: if the prediction error is small, your brain will filter it. When this happens—when reality seems predictable to you, like what you see is what you expected to see—what you perceive is mostly your predictive model, not reality.

When I moved to Denmark, this became obvious to me in a visceral way. I only understood a few words of spoken Danish, but I could wing it. I remember a journalist came up to me at a party and made a series of unintelligible noises that ended with, “. . . P.O. Enquist?” Ah, he wants to know if I have read Enquist, I thought. Enquist is a Swedish writer. Having this shared context made it easier for me to follow the rest of the conversation: “kompliceret . . . Gud”—we were talking about Enquist’s complicated relationship to God; “Herrnhutiske”—the pietistic churches in the marshlands of 1930s Northern Sweden. In halting Danish, I spoke about Enquist’s childhood church’s near sexual fascination with the open wounds of Christ. Finally a proper conversation in Danish!

Then the journalist mentioned, in passing, that Enquist’s father had been a TV preacher—which didn’t make sense at all. Enquist’s father was a woodcutter. When I pointed this out, the journalist looked at me with a quizzical face. We switched over to English, and I realized that he hadn’t been talking about Enquist at all. He had been talking about an American country singer he had interviewed. The entire conversation I thought we’d had—it had been a hallucination."