Description: Cog & Sprocket investigates the continual evolution of technology and design, exploring signals of the near future and the curious interplay of humans and machines.
Alexis Lloyd on July 24, 2019
About eight months ago, we started a site and gave it a name: Cog and Sprocket. We knew we wanted to do more writing and thinking together, but we didn’t know much beyond that. So we made a blank canvas to throw some paint on. The name Cog & Sprocket reflected a lot of things: our duality, the importance of individual components in larger systems, a sense of mechanical structure. But mostly, it reflected the fact that we didn’t know what the hell it was yet.
Over the intervening months — several posts and many paint splatters later — that focus and purpose has been emerging. Alexis started our Six Signals newsletter as a way of collecting and thinking through the weak signals of the near future she was seeing. About a month ago, Matt starting co-authoring the newsletter. In the meantime, we both started (or are about to start) new jobs. Through our collaboration, we began to rediscover a process we had created at The New York Times R&D Lab for building hypothes