About fieldnotes

The true measure of your work isn't how things go when you're in the room. It's how people show up when you're not.

fieldnotes started as a personal project to solve a problem I kept seeing: design knowledge that lived in people's heads, disappeared into Slack threads, and walked out the door when senior designers moved on. It's built on 15 years of being embedded in the design community — collecting frameworks, testing processes, and interpreting insights through real organizations with real constraints. Inspired by Austin Kleon's Steal Like an Artist, the knowledge here isn't original in the sense that I invented it. It's remixed, tested, and interpreted. The belief behind it is simple: teams do their best work when it's safe to not know something. fieldnotes was built to feel like asking a trusted colleague — not querying a database.

Not a wiki. Not a chatbot. Your team's judgment, on demand.

Architecture as a Design Decision

Four Fields That Encode Judgment

A content schema is usually a technical decision. In fieldnotes, it's something else — an answer to the question: what does it take for knowledge to actually transfer? Every entry is structured around four fields that make the knowledge base opinionated rather than neutral.