I have this concept I want to explore and figure out.

I often think about things in terms of legibility. Legibility in the sense of Seeing Like a State – kind of “can people understand this thing/wrap their heads around it”.

But there’s a similar concept or idea or whatever to that which I also think about, and the only term for it I’ve been able to come up with is a “handhold”.

So it’s this idea of a way for people to be able to grasp onto, enter into, whatever, an idea/area/be able to think about or discuss something or explore an idea space with other people.

I want there to be a better name for this, though! I need a succinct way to express this.

This weekend I read Visa’s essay on scaffolding and that pokes at part of what I’m trying to express.

Scaffolding in the way he described sort of serves as a way to hold a frame that allows you to create a thing that would otherwise be too cumbersome to create.

So scaffolding is maybe a sibling to the concept I’m trying to express, in that it gives you a frame and a way to engage with building something. I think the difference maybe is that I’m thinking about a thing that gives you a way to engage with something mentally/intellectually/emotionally. Of course, on saying that, I’m now thinking that well, what are you doing when you engage with some concept if you’re not building on it? Any meaningful exploration, discussion, etc. probably is building in some way, right? You’re discussing something with someone, and you’re building further in the idea space around that thing; fleshing out your shared understanding of it and probably going off on tangents and rabbit holes.

So maybe scaffolding is closer to the truth of the thing than I at first thought. I still suspect there’s a difference, hmm. Maybe it’s that the handhold thing I want to describe is more like a welcoming, a way to introduce someone to an idea or make it palatable to them to engage with. Not palatable as in they’d think it’s distasteful otherwise, more like mapping it to a part of their already understood idea-space. “Hey, you already are familiar with oranges, yeah? Well, grapefruits are similar to oranges in a way.” Now you’ve got something to map the expected sensations to.

I think a lot of why I like playing with metaphors so much is that they can serve as really great handholds. Of course what I’ve described above is more akin to an analogy (“x is like y”), but metaphors are aesthetically much more pleasing, and I believe when they work well they’re far more meaningful and impactful than analogies. They taste better.

Ok, coming back around. Legibility is a good and useful concept. I almost feel like it’s too big for what I’m describing though; like it refers to altering an entire thing, or wrapping an entire thing up and packaging it in a way to make it understandable. A handhold is more like just a small piece of legibility, so that someone can just get started with a concept, and proceed from there and engage with the thing as it is, not repackaged in an easier way. The picture that keeps coming to mind is the first handhold on a climbing route being a bit easy, so you can just get started. I don’t climb and I have no idea if that’s even a thing, but it works in my head.

Ironically I’ve been struggling to articulate this idea, and so I’ve needed a handhold to give to people to engage with it. Perhaps this essay can serve as that handhold.