# A scaffold, in seven lines *A reusable format for giving somebody a starting substrate without giving them a project. Take it, fill it, use it again — once per scaffold, written before you know who will take it.* --- ## What this is for **This is for handing over the half of a project that can be specified, and deliberately withholding the half that cannot.** A scaffold names a substrate — a machine, a topology, a thing counted, a place where the counting stops. It does not name a topic, a motivation or a method. Those three are what the person brings, and if you write them the project has nothing left in it that was theirs. The alternative it replaces is the assigned project, which fails in a particular and familiar way: the work comes back competent and hollow, because the interesting decisions were taken before it was handed over. The person did the part you left, which was execution, and there was nothing in the task that could have surprised either of you. **A scaffold is a suggestion and it exists to be changed.** Somebody who takes one unaltered has not read it as a suggestion, and the honest thing is to say so at the point of handing it over rather than to discover it at the end. That is an unusual thing for a given-away shape to say about itself, and it is the line the format turns on: **the gift is a starting position, and accepting it unmodified is a way of declining it.** **The two states are what make it a scaffold rather than a brief.** A brief says what is fixed and hands the rest over. A scaffold says what the thing does with nobody there, and what a person does with it, and then says that the difference between those two is the work. Everything else on the page is in service of that pair. *This format's two-state test comes out of a position of mine about objects that decide things: an object doing the same thing whether or not anybody is there has decided something it could not judge. That position has its own format at [/smart-system/](https://formats.teachsite.org/smart-system/), where the claim is set out and marked as mine.* --- ## The format ``` THE SUBSTRATE what it is made of, what it counts, and where the counting stops UNATTENDED what it does with nobody there, for ten seconds, while somebody watches IN USE what a person does with it, and what changes because she did THE STOP where the chain ends and a person begins THE FLOOR the smallest running version that still holds the stop IT GETS HARD the thing that will go wrong, named now BY HAND the version with no machinery in it at all NOT THIS a topic, a motivation, a method. None of the three is on this page and none of them is missing. ``` A substrate above, a withholding below, and six lines between. **If UNATTENDED and IN USE are the same, the scaffold has not been written.** ### What each line is asking **THE SUBSTRATE.** What the thing is made of, what it counts, and where the counting stops. Concrete: a number of nodes, a signal, a thing measured, a place the measurement is not kept. This is the whole of what you are entitled to specify. **Write it as a starting position rather than as a requirement** — the difference is audible, and the person can hear which one they have been handed. **UNATTENDED.** What it does with nobody there, for ten seconds, while a visitor watches. Ten seconds is short and that is the point: an object that needs a paragraph of explanation to be legible when idle has not been designed, it has been described. Most things fail here, and they fail by doing nothing at all. **IN USE.** What a person does with it, and what changes because she did. Not what she could do — what she does, and what is different afterwards. **The pair is the format**, and the pair only works when the two lines are genuinely unlike. **THE STOP.** Where the chain ends and a person begins: the point at which the object hands back. Every scaffold has one and it is named here. **What stopping there buys is not written** — that is the argument the person has to make and win, and an argument handed over is not one anybody can hold when it is pushed. **THE FLOOR.** The smallest running version that still holds the stop. State it as a floor rather than a target, because the person's own ambition goes above it and yours should not. A floor also does a second thing: it tells somebody in trouble what they may abandon without abandoning the project. **IT GETS HARD.** The thing that will go wrong, named in advance. Usually the point where the substrate does not measure what everybody assumes it measures. **This is not a warning to be avoided; it is the first thing the work will be asked about**, and naming it early converts it from an embarrassment into the subject. **BY HAND.** The same thing with no machinery in it at all — a person working the mechanism out of sight, a paper version operated in real time. Offer it without irony. A hand-worked version demonstrates the structure as well as a built one and often better, and it means a failure of construction stays a failure of construction rather than becoming a failure of the idea. **NOT THIS.** The topic, the motivation and the method are absent, and the page says so in as many words. **The sentence is load-bearing.** Without it the three read as an oversight, and the first thing a conscientious person does with an oversight is ask you to fill it in. --- ## A worked one ``` THE SUBSTRATE Three to five sensors on a shared connection, reporting to one place. The current count is held in memory and nowhere else. No log, no file, no database. Cut the power and it has never counted anything. UNATTENDED A number on a display, falling towards zero as the place empties. Ten seconds later there is nothing to say it was ever anything else. IN USE The only way a number survives is that somebody writes it on the paper fixed beside the display. What is on the paper is what she thought was worth keeping. THE STOP History. It counts the present and refuses to accumulate. THE FLOOR Two sensors, one display, a count that visibly falls. The paper and a pen. IT GETS HARD These sensors do not count people. They count changes in a signal, so two people arriving together are one event. This is not a bug to fix. It is the first thing you will be asked, and "what is it a count of" is the honest answer. BY HAND One person with a whiteboard, erasing every thirty seconds. NOT THIS What is being counted and why anybody would want it counted are not here. Neither is what the paper is for. Those are yours. ``` Notice that IT GETS HARD names the thing that would ordinarily be hidden, and that THE STOP says where the chain ends without saying what the ending is worth. Both restraints are deliberate and both are difficult to hold while writing. --- ## How to use it 1. **Write UNATTENDED and IN USE before anything else, and check they differ.** If they do not, there is no scaffold here yet and no amount of substrate will produce one. 2. **Write THE STOP without writing its justification.** You will want to. The sentence explaining why stopping there is interesting is the sentence that takes the project away. 3. **Say out loud, at handover, that it is a suggestion and that taking it unaltered is not taking it.** Written on the page this reads as encouragement. Said in the room it is a condition. 4. **Give BY HAND the same weight as the rest.** Offered apologetically it will be read as the version for people who could not manage the real one. 5. **Write it before you know who is taking it.** A scaffold written for a particular person is an assignment with the labels changed, and they will be able to tell. --- ## Three ways it goes wrong **The topic leaks in.** Usually through an example, or through a substrate described with one obvious application already attached to it. The person then does that application, faithfully, and the whole withholding was decorative. **It is taken unaltered and nobody says anything.** The failure is silent and it surfaces at the end, when the work is asked what in it was theirs and the answer is the execution. Ask the question early — *what in this is not yours, and what are you changing* — while there is still time for the answer to be different. **THE STOP acquires a reason.** Written as *the object stops here, which protects the person's judgement*, the line has become the argument, and the argument was the assignment. The stop is a location. What it is worth is somebody else's to establish. --- *Prayas Abhinav. Licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.*