Wicked Origami — William Owen
I design and build front ends for the web, and I work with people who would rather have their reasoning examined than agreed with.
What I do
One builds the thing. The other examines the reasoning behind it. Either can be hired on its own.
Front-end design and development, from the type scale to the deploy pipeline. Twenty-five years of designing interfaces and building the code that runs them — as a consultant, a contractor, or the person who leads your front-end team through a rebuild.
Structured, non-directive inquiry for people who make consequential decisions and have nobody positioned to challenge them. Not consulting, not coaching: an hour in which your reasoning is the subject.
Formerly Aporia International.
The connection
An interface fails when it hides the model underneath it. An argument fails the same way. Most of my career has been spent taking something tangled — a product, a codebase, a strategy nobody can quite explain — and making it legible enough to be judged. The medium changes; the work does not.
Proof
William is an exceptional tech lead, developer and designer. It's fairly rare to come across an individual with the range of skills that Will has and was able to bring to bear on delivering this project.
Aporia seem to have an uncanny knack for understanding when to stay quiet and leave you to discover areas of mental conflict for yourself, and when to guide your discovery through thoughtful prompting.
Senior leaders rarely fail because they lack intelligence or effort. More often, they fall into predictable reasoning traps created by organisational structures, cognitive bias, and the pressures of executive decision-making. Understanding these mistakes is essential for building reflective leadership.
Internal reporting systems are designed to give leaders visibility into organisational reality. Yet the structure of incentives, hierarchy, and narrative alignment often transforms these systems into mechanisms that reinforce reassuring interpretations rather than reveal uncomfortable truths.
Corporate strategy often emerges through narrative rather than analysis. While narratives simplify complexity and coordinate action, dominant strategic stories can distort evidence, reinforce assumptions, and produce “narrative capture,” where strategy becomes harder to question.
If you have work that needs designing and building, tell me about it. If you have a decision you cannot get a straight answer about, arrange an introductory call.