A Machine For Helping You Doodle

Doodling helps cognition — so I built an app based on the strange way I doodled back in elementary school

Clive Thompson
Better Humans
Published in
6 min readNov 4, 2021

--

When I was in grade school, I used to have a very particular style of doodling.

I’d draw a pattern that was governed by five rules, rather like the ones governing an Etch-A-Sketch. They were:

--

--

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net