Show Your Work

Share what you love

Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

That is the whole of the idea, and it is Austin Kleon’s, from his book Show Your Work!, which our own Show Your Work page is built round. Showing your work is not showing off the finished thing. It is letting people see the making: the draft, the false start, the thing you are learning as you go.

Show your work and your process. Showing your work creates serendipity and creates a scene.

The serendipity is the point. Work kept in a drawer meets nobody. Work left out where people can see it meets the people who love the same things, and they turn up with the piece you were missing, or a question that sends you somewhere better, or just to say they have been making something like it too.

created serendipity: the more connected you are, the more ideas seem to find you, not the other way around.

And it does not wait until you know what you are doing. Kleon’s way in is to learn out loud:

The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.

Scenius, not genius

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

A garage is where the story of the lone genius usually starts: one person, the door pulled down, coming out years later with the finished thing. Brian Eno’s word for what really happens is scenius, and Kleon took it up:

great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.”

Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.

So the door is up. Nobody in here is a genius, and nobody has to be: what makes a scene is people looking at each other’s work, borrowing, answering and adding, and that only happens when the work is out where the scene can get at it. It runs both ways:

If you want to get, you have to give. If you want to be noticed, you have to notice.

Showing your work is half of it. Looking at somebody else’s, and telling them what it set off in you, is the other half.

How we show ours

Most of what we make, we make in the dark.

Our Infodumplings post on a show your work night opens with that line, and the rest of how we do it at Stimpunks follows from refusing it. We default to open:

We are responsible for humanizing flow in the systems we inhabit. We do that best when we default to open.

So the work goes out before it is done. Cavendish Cards, our deck for naming sensory and interaction needs, says it is a starter draft on the tin, grows one card at a time in public, and ships with a blank card that asks what is missing. Our Infodumplings show your work night put that deck on the table to anchor it, seams and all, and made its open mic a show-and-tell for whatever anybody is building:

In progress is not just allowed. In progress is the theme.

This street shows its own the same way. Its source and its whole history are on GitHub, every change goes in the changelog the day it is made, mistakes and corrections included, and How it’s made says how it is built, by whom, and with what.

That’s what showing your work actually looks like when you mean it. Not a highlight reel posted after the fact, but the draft left out where people can see the seams — and change them.

Turning a card over

A spread laid face-down stays private until the person turns it up.

The gesture of turning a card over is the consent.

That is Cavendish Cards’ rule, and it is this garage’s too. The door is up because somebody rolled it up. Nothing goes on the bench unless the person who made it put it there, however much somebody else loves it, and it comes down the moment they ask, gone rather than hidden.

That’s the whole philosophy of a good sharing space, really: open by default, shared by consent, no one turned over against their will.

Sharing a draft is something you do when you are ready, and not one second before. Plenty of work stays face down in the box at the end of the bench, and nobody here will turn it over for you.

Three places to show your work

1. Today: this room’s channel

   Show what you are making today: a picture, a link, a sentence about where you are stuck, and see what everybody else is making.

   Tune the radio to This room while you are in here, or open Show Your Work on the chat page, under Community. Everybody signed on to the CB can read it, and every message on it goes 48 hours after it was sent, like every channel. Not on the CB yet? Getting started says how to get an invite.

2. Longer: Show your work in the forums

   For the longer write-up and the conversation that comes after it: what you made, how, what went wrong, and what you are trying next. A topic there can carry pictures and files, and people can come back to it.

   The category says it is for what you are making, writing, learning or fixing, finished or not. A topic there goes 3 months after its last post, so a piece people keep talking about keeps going. Anybody signed on to the CB can read the forums and write in them.

3. For as long as you like: the bench

   For work you want out on the street for as long as you like, where anybody can find it, signed on or not.

   The house puts it up when you ask, and takes it down the moment you ask again. What to send is just below.

Put yours on the bench

Tell us these, and the house puts a card up for it:

• Where your work lives: an address anybody can open, a repository, a page, a shop, a post.
• How you want to be named: your name, a handle, or none at all. Say how you want to be named and that is how it goes on the card.
• What it is, in your own words, if you like. Your words go on the card exactly as you give them; send none and we write a line and say we did.
• What state it is in: a first draft, half done, abandoned and coming back, never finished. In progress is welcome. Finished is not required.
• A photograph of it, if you like, under the polaroid wall’s rules: a description of what is in the picture in your own words, for anybody who cannot see it; who took it, and their yes too; and the yes of anybody in it, named the way they want to be named. A photograph of your work goes on its card whole, not cropped and not filtered.

Send it however you already talk to us: through the contact page, in our community, by email or in a text message. Before a photograph goes up we take off what a camera writes into the file, where and when it was taken and on what, and look at the whole picture for anything that says where somebody lives. It comes down the moment you ask, and coming down means gone, not hidden: the card, the photograph and the record of your yes.

Noticing, not marking

A show-your-work night is not a pitch competition. The difference is where the value lives.

When work is being sold, the value is the finished thing, and everything unfinished is something to hide. Here the value is the making, so the unfinished parts are the interesting ones, and what somebody brings is not up for judging.

When someone shares the rough, in-progress, held-together-with-tape version of their thing, the room is not there to audit it against a standard of done. The room is there to receive a design brief.

The gap in your project isn’t a flaw in you — it’s just the next card nobody’s drawn yet.

So when somebody shows a draft, the room notices it: says what it set off, asks how it was done, and offers what it knows when it is asked. If you want feedback on your own work, say so, and say what kind. Nobody gets marked here.

What is not in this garage

• Nothing ranked. No featured work, no best of, no work of the month. The bench is in the order things arrived, and nothing on it is above anything else.
• Nothing counted. No likes, no views, no followers, and no number of anything on the bench.
• Not a pitch. Nobody is pitching to anybody, nobody is judging, and nothing has to be defended. A show your work night is a show-and-tell.
• No marking. Nobody’s draft is held up against a standard of done. If you want feedback, ask for it, and say what kind; if you did not ask, what you get is somebody noticing.
• Nobody put up by somebody else. Nothing goes on the bench unless the person who made it asked, however much somebody else loves it, and it comes down the moment they ask.
• Nobody is a genius here. Scenius, not genius: work gets better with people looking at it, and nobody in here is above anybody else.
• Finished is not required. A draft, a sketch, a broken thing, a thing you stopped and are coming back to. The seams can show.

Next door, and up the street

Other rooms on this street where somebody shows their working:

• The Open Notebook, where Ryan Boren’s piece on keeping three journals in one notebook is in full, as he shared it at Infodumplings, with the questions our community asked of it.
• The Sandbox, a sandbox at dusk where nobody is waiting for you to finish anything: try things, break things, and say what you notice.
• Learning Large, whose sowing log is this street showing its own work: what came up wrong while it was built, and what caught it.