There's something sad about this. By focusing on those first questions, we miss everything worth celebrating; everything that makes it worthwhile to be alive. We see clearly what we want life to be rid of, but not what we want it to be full of.

This difference also affects what we make.

Imagine you’re building an educational platform. Are students there to pass the test or get a certification? Or are they there to follow their curiosity, to face their open questions, or to celebrate together the beauty and complexity of the world?

On top are things your customers want to get done, get over with; on the bottom, the things that make life worth living.

Call the things on the top our goals. We are intricately aware of them. They form a kind of superstructure—smaller goals fit into larger ones, and we are dimly aware of the whole tree. We make lists of goals, at different scales.

Call what’s on the bottom our sources of meaning. Or I often call them our values. We are much less articulate about them. We don’t see the same kinds of patterns in them, that we see in our goals.

Part of my goal in this talk is to change that. To sharpen up “sources of meaning”—make them as clearly defined as goals seem to be, and as communicable.

Let me start by …

See, this difference in articulacy makes things challenging for entrepreneurs. Say you interview your customers for “pain points” or “customer needs”—but what’s top of mind for both you and your customers are goals, not sources of meaning, you’ll only collect their goals.

So you’ll design for their goals.

You’ll think of yourself as building what I call a funnel or a tube, not a space. Funnels and tubes are goal-driven.

I call something a funnel if it gets everybody to do the same thing, or work on the same goal. By this definition, the checkout area in a supermarket is a funnel. So are many organizations. There's one goal for everyone.

Similarly, I'll call something a tube if it gets people from where they are to their own goal. So Amazon, and all marketplaces, are tubes. So are Google searches. Tubes accelerate everyone to their own goal.

Both are goal-driven things, that everyone involved would accelerate if they could—to get the goal accomplished more quickly.

Many entrepreneurs see all design tasks as funnels and tubes. But that’s a big mistake.

Some things aren't designed around goals at all. Instead, they are about values, or exploration according to values. I'll call those exploratory spaces.

There are

These are not goal-driven. You know something is a space if you don't want it to be over quickly. You would accelerate an Amazon purchase if you could, or an uber ride, or an organizational goal. The things you do in a space are things that you would not accelerate.

Most design tasks involve a mix of these three parts.

Imagine you're making a messaging app, like Telegram or Messenger.

A messenger app can be thought of as a tube, or it can be thought of as a space. And there are many, many things like this.

Same with that educational platform I mentioned before. If you focus on your users’ goals, you’ll think of it as a funnel or tube. If you focus on their sources of meaning, it’s a space.

This is even true with something like advertising analytics: it may seem like your customer has a straightforward goal—to have the most people see their promoted tweets. But you could also design an advertising analytics tool as a space—a space to explore your audience, to find audiences who meet you in certain ways, to build up a certain kind of meaningful rapport in a community.

So designers can often decide whether to make a funnel, a tube, or a space.

Or—as with our messaging app—they might make a mix of all three, where each screen or UI component participate in one or more funnels, tubes, or spaces.

So far, I’ve talked about “sources of meaning” with vague words like “creativity”, “vulnerability” and “rapport”. But this won’t do. We need to make “sources of meaning” as clear and communicable as goals, fears, or feelings.

Imagine you're making a space for vulnerability, or an exploratory app for creativity. Or maybe you are expanding a network of farmers markets, and you want them to be good spaces for people to explore localism in food systems.

Well, you have two big problems in orienting your design around vulnerability, creativity, or localism.

I struggled with these problems for many years.

They're quite deep!

It took years of reading to solve them.

Here's some papers that helped me figure them out.

These are by Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel prize.

These are by philosophy professors—Ruth Chang, Charles Taylor, and David Velleman.

In the the end, based on this reading, I came up with these values cards.

One key idea, that I got from my reading, is that values show up when we make choices.

They show up in our attention.

If you care about something, you’ll pay attention to it during a choice.

So, the center of each card tries to capture what people pay attention to, and choose by, if they have this source of meaning.

The other key idea is that values are less about concrete outcomes, more about a quality people want in their lives.

So, at the bottom of the card, it says what qualities happen, when you live by the value.

That’s it! The cards define “a value” or “a sources of meaning” (we use these terms inter-changably) in these two parts, and give it a name.

To show the power of this, consider these two kinds of creativity.

Even though these are both kinds of creativity, they call for different designs.

Put Person B in environment A, and they won't be able to pay attention to those long lasting curiosities, they won’t have a chance to do deep work.

And vice versa: put person A in environment B, and they won't be able to find someone to brainstorm with and do creative riffing.

That’s an important fact. The attentional paths that are written on these values cards let us differentiate one kind of creativity from another; one kind of vulnerability from another, and one kind of localism from another.

And they let us be rigorous about whether a kind of creativity (or whatever) is happening in our designs. It’s simple: for a value to really be happening, people must be attending to what’s on the card, and choosing by it.

If, in your design, people can attend to these particular types of things, and make their choices by them, congratulations—people are able to live by their value within the space you made.

It’s eye opening to find out the sources of meaning for the people around you.

One way you can do that is by asking about the spaces they need in their lives: which spaces are responsible for their most meaningful experiences? What were those spaces good at?

Another way to learn about them is to look into people's emotions. Emotions point to values that are working out, or not working out.

See:

Similarly:

In each case, the way I want to live can be written as values card.

Whatever I'm feeling, whether it's a positive or negative emotion, will point to something important to me, something that can written as a values card.

Making these cards, and finding values in feelings—these are two of the best ways I know to get clear on your own values and the values of the people you love. Once you see each emotion points to a value, your understanding of your sources of meaning sharpens right up.

There’s one other advantage of these values cards. As you collect them, trade them, and make them, you start glimpsing what I’ll call “the universe of meaning” — what the space of values is, with everyone's sources of meaning all together.

It’s interesting! The collection of all sources of meaning—this collection is smaller than the collection of all goals, or the collection of all preferences. It’s smaller but it’s still endlessly surprising, and always changing.

Remember, values cards are limited to things you’ve actually paid attention to, and found meaning in paying attention to, so they always cut right to what’s real, and meaningful, where you’ve already had the experience.

This is different than the collection of all goals, which includes many far-off goals. Goals like “get rich like Elon Musk”. Or goals people only have because they hope they’ll lead to something good later. Goals like “impress so-and-so at the bar.”

Of course, these goals relate to our values. With some goals, we hope accomplishing them brings us closer to our values. For instance, maybe you think that getting rich would allow you to finally spend time playing music.

With other goals, they provide a venue, or social context for our values. For instance, if I find meaning a kind of visual creativity, I might set a goal of publishing a weekly comic with a friend, to create a venue for that source of meaning.

So goals relate to sources of meaning, but vastly outnumber them.

It’s similar with preferences. The collection all preferences includes taste preferences, like the preference for chocolate cake, or goth make-up. And it includes ideological preferences like the preference of Trump or Biden.

Some preferences are deeply expressive of your sources of meaning. For instance, if you love nature and prefer a certain forest which had a quality that opens your heart.

Other preferences might be quite strongly held, but only related to your sources of meaning by a long train of inferences.

Perhaps you think, if Trump wins, things will get worse for your family, and the forests will be cut down. That’s why you prefer Biden. The connection between your source of meaning and the preference is distant.

If you collect sources of meaning directly, instead of preferences, you cut right to what’s precious and immediate about being alive. The basic ways of living, choosing, and attending, which a person finds meaningful. The things we need spaces for.

So, that’s the talk.

In each chapter, I covered some of what it takes to be a space-trepreneur.

If you compare space-trepreneurs with traditional entrepreneurs, you see three big differences:

If the answer’s yes, it’s a space where people can live by their values. A space of meaning, agency, and self-expression. A good space.

So, space-trepreneurship is a different art form.

There's a kind of progression as people learn it.

If you'd like to go through this process yourself, I have a free textbook online. And I’ll personally administer tests while you go through it, to make sure you can write values cards well, interview people about their sources of meaning, identify hard steps, design legitimation processes, and so on.

So, I’ll test you for free, and you can use the text. If you want more structure and support, there’s a course. We call it the School for Social Design. It starts with a five-week intro about developing a shared language of meaning, together with the other participants in your group.

But, of course, training and connecting space-makers is just the first step. The goal is to help them occupy their right place in the economy, to align markets with meaning and togetherness.

There are many opportunities.

For instance, so many institutions have become funnels, that should really be spaces.

This includes institutions of democracy, science, and education. These have moved away from the sources of meaning that made them work.

Space-makers can start alternatives to these, but there’s perhaps a more exciting and direct approach.

Imagine there was a membership organization for space makers and for others who want to bring about the meaning economy.

Such an organization could so many fun things:

Thinking a little bigger,

So, all that’s what we want to work on, next.

We'll need lots of smart, capable people, to do it.

So if you know someone who’d be perfect, that’s one of the main ways you could help.

But also: all these ideas require space-makers, and a shared language of meaning.

So that’s the main way you can help. Become a space-maker. Develop a shared language of meaning.

We can start there.