SOOT

People draw maps of what they cannot hold in their heads, and the drawing is what makes the vastness usable. Creative work accumulates faster than a filesystem can organize it, and the tools built for that accumulation sort by folder and by metadata, which record where a file sits and when it arrived rather than what it holds. SOOT runs multimodal vector search over thousands of images, videos and references so that curators and enterprise creative teams can organize a library on content instead. The controls for that did not exist yet: no one had worked out how a person browses a library that organizes itself.

Two questions, worked out with SOOT, UNNAMED and Two.much Studio across months of prototypes: what parts does a library that sorts itself actually need, and how do you make depth legible on a screen that has none. Nothing got named until something survived being built.

The research turned up three kinds of user, and Focus answers one. The original content creator already has the work; what they lack is a way to look at one piece closely without losing the pile it came out of, find any of it at a moment's notice, and send it somewhere final rather than into a feed.

Eight parts carry the whole thing: Spaces, Views, search, focus, metadata, upload, selection and sharing. Drop in a Drive link, a Figma file, an Are.na board or an entire YouTube channel and it maps while it loads; See Similar then searches by colour, composition and feel rather than by filename. Under that sit Liquid Metal, a parts library loose enough to prototype a screen in an afternoon, and the Z-index, which stacks things in depth so where something sits tells you what it is.

Liquid Metal is the part that outlived the brief. It is loose enough that a new screen assembles out of parts the team has already agreed on, which is what kept the route through the product legible as the product grew: the same controls in the same places, rather than a fresh decision taken screen by screen.

The more useful finding was about who stayed. Following up with the people who kept coming back showed they were not running searches across a private archive so much as publishing a collection outward, to an audience they already had, and they cared most about how that collection was presented once it left their hands. Search was how the collection got assembled rather than the reason to open the product. SOOT WORLD, the public directory of Spaces, is where that reading is easiest to see.