STRIXFORMES
About

The person behind Strixformes

Strixformes is the name I use for the structure behind what I create. I build companies, products and systems, but I do not think any one of them explains me. I am interested in what makes things behave the way they do — the relationship, the rule, the feedback, the observer. Sometimes that question becomes software. Sometimes a business. Sometimes philosophy. Sometimes it stays a question until I understand it better.

THE NAMESTRIX
Strixformes is the order of owls. Strix is the genus. I chose it for what an owl is: focused, and able to see in the dark.

The owl

Focus, and seeing in the dark. It is also the name — Strixformes is the taxonomic order of owls, so the mark is not a symbol applied to the identity, it is the identity.

The wolf

Alone. Not lonely — the distinction matters, and most of the work happens at a distance from a crowd.

How I think

I usually begin by removing the names from the problem. If I call something a platform, a company, a market or a community too early, the name arrives carrying assumptions I have not examined.

So I ask what is actually there.

  • What are the parts?
  • What relationship exists between them?
  • What rule changes that relationship?
  • What behaviour appears?
  • What happens when the rule changes?
  • What feeds the result back into the system?
  • What stabilises it?

Then I can start rebuilding the explanation. This is how I approach most products. It is also how I approach most philosophical questions — which is why I do not experience them as separate activities.

The method, plainly

Observe without explaining too quickly. Separate the parts. Find what connects them. Find the rule. Watch what the rule produces. Identify what amplifies and what stabilises. Find the threshold where behaviour changes. Change one condition. Compare. Keep the explanation only if it survived.

The first explanation does not need to survive. Coherence matters more than protecting an earlier conclusion.

What I study

Mathematics, data and philosophy are not unrelated degrees. They are two sides of one curiosity, and the building is where they meet.

PhilosophyWhat exactly do we mean? What assumptions support the claim? What can we actually know? How does perspective change the description?University of Glasgow
Mathematics and Data ScienceWhat patterns exist? How can relationships be represented? How can behaviour be measured?University of Stirling

Mathematics and data ask what patterns exist, how relationships can be represented, how behaviour can be measured. Philosophy asks what we actually mean, what assumptions hold a claim up, what can be known, and how perspective changes a description. Then the building asks whether anything can be made from it.

What I am trying to become

The direction is not owning more companies. It is creating structures that increase what people are capable of doing — digital, economic, social, intellectual — and understanding systems deeply enough to build better ones.

Turn observation into structure, and structure into possibility. Then watch what reality does with it, and revise.

I remain coherent towards Greatness.

The word doing the work there is “towards”. The other is “coherent”.