A child under the night sky
As a child I would lie under the stars for hours. Not only in wonder, but with a few persistent questions that never really left:
- What is consciousness?
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- What does life mean – and what does death mean?
- What are we to the universe, and what is the universe to us?
Science fiction became my first philosophical language. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov opened worlds in which space, time, technology and consciousness were approached differently than in everyday life. Not as escape stories, but as training grounds for other logics.
Rock ’n’ roll, theatre and light waves
For about twenty years I worked in theatre and the rock ’n’ roll world. Light, sound, smoke, rhythm – everything there depends on waves. Small shifts in phase, timing or intensity can make an entire show either carry or collapse.
One thing became clear: the world is not made of separate things, but of movements. Of patterns of interference. When one wave is off, the whole system falls out of balance. That sensitivity to underlying patterns never left.
Sailing: learning to read what you cannot see directly
Around the same time I learned to sail. I could almost sail before I could walk. On the water I learned a different way of looking: not at an object, but at a field. Wave patterns, currents, wind pressure, clouds, changing air – all of it is information about one and the same system.
If you spend enough time at sea, your perception shifts. You stop looking at separate events and begin to see coherence. A ship is no longer a thing, but a node in a field of forces. Later I started looking at people and organisations in the same way.
Mental health care, experience and the underlayer of systems
In mental health care another layer appeared. As an expert by experience and professional I saw how teams, departments and entire chains behaved like fields: with pressure lines, backlash, noise and zones where nothing could really land.
My sensitivity – often a problem earlier in life – became a precision instrument. I noticed where people had lost themselves, where systems were following their own internal logic instead of their intended purpose, and where words no longer matched what was palpable in the field.
From experience to structure: I · V · O
At some point everything converged: stars, science fiction, waves, sailing, mental health care, systems. For years I had been working with field sensitivity, but there was no compact language to share it.
That language came in the form of three simple letters:
- I – the observer, the point of consciousness
- V – the direction, the bow, intent in motion
- O – the field, the environment in which everything comes together
At first it was an image: my ship as I, the bow as V cutting through the water, and the sea as O – the field of forces in which I move. Later I saw the same structure in conversations, teams, organisations and my own consciousness.
I · V · O was not an invented model, but a summary of something that had been visible for years.
Why this is still the foundation
Everything I do today – from experiments to organisational analyses – flows from this line. A lifetime of looking at waves, fields, systems and consciousness until a structure appeared that shows up everywhere again.
This is why Design by Authenticity is not a method, but a field-based approach. The model is compact. The road towards it was long. The rest of this site unfolds that road: in language, images and experiments.