Why I built this
No sales pitch and no résumé — just the honest story behind I Ching Practice. Why this place exists, and why I keep putting care into it.
A workshop on my own terms
I build concepts and systems; that is my work. This is the one place where I do it without compromise: no client to win over, no deadline squeezing the quality out. What I sometimes have to defend elsewhere is simply allowed to be right here.
I Ching Practice is my workshop — the place where I can build the way I believe it should be done, and where I hold my own ideas to the same scrutiny as anyone else’s. Craft, curiosity, and conviction meet here. Not because everything is finished, but because this is where things are given the time to become good.
The subject is my craft
The I Ching is a map of patterns: how situations change, which forces are at play in a moment, and what movement fits them. That may look far from my daily work, but to me the two sit surprisingly close.
My craft is about understanding situations, recognizing patterns, and building something that fits — not stacking up solutions, but first looking carefully at what is actually going on. That is exactly what the I Ching does too.
My interest in it also has a more personal root. For years I have been drawn to Eastern cultures, philosophies, and ways of looking at the world — not because they hand us answers we lack, but because they ask different questions. They look less at control and more at coherence; less at certainty and more at change.
The I Ching is, for me, one of the most remarkable expressions of that: not only an old book, but a way of seeing that is thousands of years old and still feels surprisingly current. By building around this subject, I practice my craft on something that examines that same craft. The content and the building sharpen each other. I learn a great deal from that.
So this is no side project, but the place where the blade gets sharpened.
A mirror, not a fortune-teller
The I Ching is, in origin, an oracle — I honor that; I do not deny it.
But I do not use it to predict.
The most important choice in this whole project is a limit.
This practice foretells nothing.
It offers no reassurance.
It prescribes nothing.
It describes.
It tries to put a situation into words, so that you do not have to act on reflex alone.
That limit is not a shortfall.
It is the very source of the quality.
Whoever promises less can be more honest.
Whoever fills in less leaves more room for your own insight.
Whoever does not predict can look more clearly at what is really at play.
That distinction — between origin and use — is set out in full in our position.
No prediction. No reassurance. No promise. That is exactly what keeps the practice honest.
What happens when you ask a question
The most striking thing about the I Ching may not be the answer. It begins before that. The moment you put a question into words, something happens that we rarely do in daily life: you lift a thought, a doubt, a worry, or a choice out of the stream of everything running together, and you give it shape.
What was vague becomes concrete. What was only a feeling becomes a question.
Then come the throws, and out of them a hexagram forms: a pattern of six lines that describes a particular situation, movement, or phase of change. It is not about everyone, and not about the future. It arises at the meeting point of your question and the outcome of the throw.
Why that sometimes feels so apt — there are different ideas. Some speak of synchronicity, others of chance, others again of human patterns observed over thousands of years. This practice does not need to settle that. What matters is that a conversation arises between three things:
- your question;
- the hexagram;
- your own insight.
That is where the work happens. Not because the I Ching tells you what to do, but because it helps make visible what is already at play. A good hexagram does not take over your responsibility; it offers a different way of looking. And sometimes that is exactly what is needed.
A slow, honest counterpart
Much of technology is fast, flattering, and certain. It gives an instant answer, tells you what you want to hear, and tries to remove uncertainty as quickly as possible.
I deliberately wanted to make the opposite. Something slower. Something that makes no promises and does not pretend every problem can be solved on the spot — a mirror that does not tell you what you want to hear, but helps you see what is there.
For me this is also a small statement about how technology ought to serve the person, and not the other way around. It is allowed to take some effort to look more slowly. That is precisely the point.
Why I keep working on it
Whether the I Ching is ancient wisdom, a psychological mirror, or simply an unusually good instrument of observation — for the use of it, that ultimately matters little.
What counts is that it helps you look more slowly at your own situation.
That it gives language to what is moving.
That it makes visible patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed.
That it creates space between impulse and decision.
That is what I wanted to build.
Not an answer machine.
Not a fortune-teller.
But a place where a question is allowed to exist for a moment before it is acted on.
Perhaps, in this time, that is more valuable than ever.
That is why I keep working on it.
And that is why this practice will probably always be finished, but never quite done.
If you want to know how this practice reads the I Ching, read the philosophy behind it.
Or just begin.
Do the throws.
And see what comes into movement.
— Rob