This week, we crossed paths and axes with Evaldo Fernandes de Freitas Neto — an interface alchemist, a draftsman of the unforeseen, a conductor of microfractures. Evaldo is Lead Product Designer at Cloudwalk, and among dashboards, APIs, and boiling feedback loops, he cultivates a curious field of attention: errors.
It struck us — we had never formally met a designer of errors. And yet, there he was, sketching the contours of what could go wrong. An architect of soft collapse, mapping friction, alerts, and detours. In his hands, the error ceases to be failure and becomes structure.
Error not as flaw, but as fold.
We wandered together into the terrain of visual navigation — not just through information, but through knowledge. Scrolltelling came up, like in the brilliant narrative format of The Pudding’s wine-animal piece, where each scroll layer reveals a new nuance. But what if the process isn’t linear? What if it’s layered, looping, fractal?
A blog, for instance, already inverts expectations. The top isn’t the beginning — it’s the now. Time is vertical, reversed. To go deeper is to move backward, like unearthing the fossil record of thought. So is our Codex a blog or an excavation?
What if the process doesn’t fit a single vertical axis?
What if, instead of scrolling through time, we scroll through themes, through tools, through tensions?
Evaldo shared the classic Product Design map: the double diamond — diverging and converging, opening and narrowing. But in a project like Creativity in vitro, where art, science, and technology fold into each other, the diamond may just be the skin. We imagined a double diamond with internal fractals — self-replicating cycles, echo chambers of method and experimentation.
Other clues emerged from the conversation:
- Navigating knowledge graphs, like in IBI.cash, where nodes connect by energy or concept, not chronology;
- Thinking in multiple verticals — not just time, but material, method, emotion;
- And the idea that we’re not telling a story, but cultivating a narrative ecosystem, where each entry is a seed, and each collaborator a mycelium.
We thank Evaldo for planting this fertile doubt.
We keep designing failure as method, the map as myth, and process as science fiction in practice.