Skip to content
Tayakorn
← All experiments
LAB.03RunningStarted

The chapter globe — ten forms before the final one

Continues LAB.02 Separating the play zone from the read zone

What was tried

Grew LAB.02 into a field that carries real data (one dot = one of 228 chapters across 18 books) and searched for its form by mocking, playing, and deciding round by round — from a plain dotted sphere, through a globe whose ladder rungs are inner shells revealed by a cutaway wedge, to the form that was finally chosen.

  1. A sphere of hollow ladder-colored rings on warm paper with a figures table below
    ROUND 01Dropped

    Plain dotted sphere — dots were only dots, no story

  2. Dots arranged in one column per book, layered by rung, short book names below
    ROUND 02Kept

    Wide strata — moved to become the /handbooks navigator

  3. A globe with a flat quarter-circle cutaway parallel to the screen
    ROUND 03Dropped

    First drill-core wedge, screen-aligned — two faces collapsed to lines, flat 2D

  4. A globe with a huge tilted octant removed, cut faces covering half the disc (re-created from the final build)
    ROUND 04Dropped

    Tilted octant — cut faces ate half the globe, most dots vanished · re-created frame, the original was overwritten

  5. A globe with a full-height cake slice removed, one wall seen face-on
    ROUND 05Dropped

    Full-height cake slice — one wall face-on, the other a line

  6. A globe with a 60-degree lower-hemisphere wedge showing gold-to-red rings
    ROUND 06Kept

    Lower 60° wedge — the right shape, but fixed to the viewer: a window, not an object

  7. A boxless globe on graph paper with a dashed rim, its wedge attached to the globe
    ROUND 07Kept

    Wedge attached, box removed, 2×2 figures — a real object that turns with the hand

  8. A globe where chapters are strung into 18 helical strands from crust to core
    ROUND 08Dropped

    Drill strings — 'worse than before': dots bunched into strands, unreadable

  9. A globe whose dots are soft blurred warm glows on paper
    ROUND 09Dropped

    Bokeh glow dots — pretty on dark, invisible on paper

  10. A globe whose dots are crisp ink discs in ladder colors, pale when unread and full when read
    ROUND 10Kept

    Crisp ink dots — the site's chart language, every dot legible · the chosen form

LAB.03 — Each frame is labelled kept or dropped · the reason sits underneath it

Open the final mock, playable (snapshot 5 Sep 2026) →

What was learned

The most 'creative' form (chapters strung into drill strings) lost to the most legible one · soft glowing dots that look good on black vanish on warm paper — on paper, brightness means saturated ink with a crisp edge, not blur · a cutaway fixed to the viewer feels 'locked'; it had to travel with the globe to read as an object.

What fell short

Every round was judged by an audience of one — this entry records the search for the form; the thing itself is the next entry.

Line of experiments

  1. LAB.02 Separating the play zone from the read zone
  2. LAB.03 The chapter globe — ten forms before the final one (this entry)
  3. LAB.04 The chapter globe, built — round one on the real surfaces
  4. LAB.05 The chapter viewport — a Blender-style 3D window around a cloud of real chapters