ome things you cannot read your way into. Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions, ceramic glazes, chemical gardens, crystal growing, fermentation, mokume-gane, natural dyes and perfumery all share a shape: a deep published literature, a small number of people who are genuinely good at them, and an enormous gap between the two that consists almost entirely of undocumented practical judgment.
Creative Jackpot
ActiveA working corpus across eight material and craft domains, run as a generate-and-prune process.
Each domain gets the same treatment: read the literature, generate candidate directions worth actually attempting, and then kill most of them in writing before spending money or bench time. The killed list is kept rather than deleted, because the reasons things were rejected turn out to be the most reusable part.
What exists126 notes and a candidate pipeline, last added to in May. No photographs, no finished objects, nothing grown or fired or dyed yet. For eight intensely visual subjects that is the honest weak point, and it is a materials-and-time problem rather than a research one.
