What I Built and Why

The origin story of Curiosity Canvas — and an invitation to explore.

I want to tell you something about how this started.

It didn't start with a product idea. It didn't start with a market opportunity or a go-to-market strategy or a whiteboard session about user personas. It started with a problem I had been living with for a long time and couldn't adequately articulate until I tried to solve it.

The problem was this: I am someone who reads widely, thinks across disciplines, and has spent more than two decades building things at the intersection of technology and human behavior. And yet, for all of that, I kept finding that the tools available to me were making my thinking smaller, not larger. They were extraordinarily good at helping me go deeper into what I already knew. They were nearly useless at helping me get out.

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I've spent twenty-four years at a market research firm, in a role that has evolved alongside the technology available to do it. I've watched the industry move from manual data collection to sophisticated analytics to AI-powered synthetic research. I've built frameworks for understanding consumer behavior at scale, developed AI systems that generate statistically valid behavioral representations, and sat in enough strategy sessions to understand how rarely genuinely new ideas enter a room full of experts.

The insight problem isn't unique to market research. It exists everywhere that expertise accumulates. The more people know about a thing, the more their thinking about that thing converges. Expertise produces depth and consensus. It does not, on its own, produce novelty.

Outside of work, I've maintained a discipline of self-education for most of my adult life. Not formally, just a persistent habit of following curiosity wherever it goes, across whatever fields it wanders into. Mesoamerican history. Cognitive science. Woodworking joinery. Medieval poetry. The history of measurement. Whatever catches the attention and won't let go.

This habit has been one of the most valuable things in my intellectual life. And I kept wishing I had better tools for it.

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The long vision underneath all of this, the thing I've been working toward without always naming it directly, is a kind of immersive cultural experience. A place where ancient civilizations become tangible, where history stops being something you read about and becomes something you can enter. That vision requires bringing together knowledge from a dozen different fields and finding the connections that make them cohere into something a person can feel, not just understand.

Building toward that vision has required me to get good at something that most tools actively discourage: thinking at the border. Staying at the intersection. Finding the structural similarities between things that have no obvious reason to resemble each other.

Curiosity Canvas is, in some ways, a tool I built for that work. It's an externalization of a mental habit, a way of systematically generating the kind of cross-domain collision that I'd previously had to engineer manually, through years of undisciplined reading and the occasional lucky conversation.

I built it first for myself. Then I kept using it. Then people I showed it to wanted to use it. So I built it into something other people could actually access.

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I want to be clear about what it is and what it isn't, because I think honesty about AI tools is in short supply right now.

Curiosity Canvas is not a creativity machine. It does not have ideas. It does not understand what it's generating in any meaningful sense. What it does is surface connections that exist in the compressed representation of human knowledge that large language models contain, connections that are real, often surprising, and frequently useful as starting points for genuine thinking. It is a tool for human curiosity, not a replacement for it.

It will occasionally be wrong. AI systems produce incorrect information, and no safeguard eliminates this entirely. What Curiosity Canvas generates should be treated as a starting point for exploration, not a final authority. Follow the threads it surfaces. Verify what matters. Think critically about what you find. The goal is to spark something in you, not to do the thinking for you.

What I've found, in my own use and in the experience of the people who've been exploring it early, is that the sparks are real. The unexpected connection between medieval Islamic geometry and modern network theory. The structural similarity between a Renaissance workshop and a contemporary product team. The way a biological concept suddenly illuminates a long-standing problem in organizational design. These moments happen. They happen more reliably than I expected. And they lead to genuine thinking, the kind that doesn't resolve quickly, that opens more questions than it closes, that you're still turning over three days later.

That is what I was looking for. That is what this is for.

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Curiosity Canvas is available now at CuriosityCanvas.com. There's a free tier that gives you enough to see whether the experience is real for you. If it is, the paid tiers are priced to be accessible to individuals, not just organizations with software budgets.

If you are a researcher who suspects your thesis connects to something three fields away. If you are a writer who wants the intellectual territory behind an image, not just its surface. If you are an educator who wants to show students that every subject touches every other subject. If you are anyone who has ever followed a thought somewhere unexpected and found that the unexpected place was exactly where you needed to be — this is built for you.

The world is not divided into academic departments. It never was. The divisions are administrative conveniences that we've mistaken for the structure of reality. Every important question bleeds across the lines. Every useful insight arrives from somewhere you weren't supposed to be looking.

What I built is a tool for being in the right places. A way of staying at the intersection. A system for generating the kind of distance between ideas where new thinking lives.

I hope it's useful to you. I hope it surprises you. I hope it takes you somewhere you didn't expect to go.

That's the whole point.

You can check out Curiosity Canvas here: https://curiositycanvas.com