SHELVES, NOTES & BORROWED LIGHT

Learn with us

Common Critter Workshop is built out of books, projects, conversations, experiments, and a lot of borrowed light.

This is where we keep track of what’s shaping the workshop, what we’ve learned from trying things in the real world, and what we’re simply enjoying right now.

DURABLE INFLUENCES

Bookshelf

Foundational books that shape how we see the world and how we decide what’s worth building.

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber and David Wengrow

systems
possibility
social imagination

What we’re carrying from it

Human societies have always been more politically imaginative and structurally varied than modern stories of “progress” tend to admit. It’s a useful reminder that the systems we live inside are choices, not inevitabilities.

Emergent Strategy

adrienne maree brown

adaptation
relationships
systems

What we’re carrying from it

Small patterns become large systems. Adaptation, relationships, iteration, and attention to how change actually happens matter as much as having a grand plan.

The Body in Pain

Elaine Scarry

embodiment
dignity
accessibility
making

What we’re carrying from it

Pain can make experience difficult to communicate, while making and imagining can help rebuild agency and a shared world. It keeps us thinking about embodiment, accessibility, and the limits of what systems can know about the people using them.

Utopia for Realists

Rutger Bregman

possibility
institutions
practical optimism
social imagination

What we’re carrying from it

Ideas can look unrealistic largely because the present arrangement has become familiar. It’s worth treating a better world as a design problem: asking what people actually need, examining alternatives seriously, and refusing to confuse “normal” with “inevitable.”

SURVIVED CONTACT WITH REALITY

Field Notes

Notes from projects we’ve built, systems we’ve tested, useful books, and conversations with people making interesting things of their own.

Project note

Building SealProof without accounts

SealProof is being built around a simple question: how much infrastructure does this actually need?

One early design decision was to avoid user accounts and long-term document storage. That choice changes the entire shape of the product: less data to protect, less user friction, and fewer reasons to collect information just because software usually does.

What we’re learning

Sometimes privacy starts by deciding not to collect the thing in the first place.

A short preview from a case study still taking shape.

Practical book

Imaginable

Jane McGonigal

A hands-on guide to getting better at thinking about possible futures before they arrive. The exercises treat imagination as a skill that can be practiced: noticing assumptions, rehearsing unfamiliar situations, stretching beyond the futures that feel immediately plausible, and becoming less surprised by change.

What we’re trying

Using future imagination as a practical skill rather than treating it as prediction.

NO THESIS REQUIRED

Nightstand

What we’re into right now.

Not everything has to become a framework. This is just what’s keeping us company, making us curious, or refusing to leave our head lately.

Short stories

An Oral History of Atlantis

Ed Park

Why it’s on the nightstand

Strange, funny, slippery stories about technology, art, identity, memory, and people trying to make sense of increasingly weird worlds.

Novel

Helm

Sarah Hall

Why it’s on the nightstand

A novel built around the Helm, a real and powerful wind in northern England, and the long relationship between people, place, weather, and the stories we tell about forces bigger than ourselves.

Horror

Spread Me

Sarah Gailey

Why it’s on the nightstand

Very weird body horror. Intimate, unsettling, excessive, and operating in exactly the sort of territory where desire, transformation, disgust, and fascination stop respecting their assigned boundaries.