Universal Version Control

Creative work is collaborative. Scientists co-author papers, writers share their work with their editors, lawyers red-line contracts. We even collaborate with ourselves through acts such as journaling and across our devices as we go through our day. Today, we also increasingly collaborate with LLMs and other AI agents.

The value of collaboration tools is already understood by many creatives. Developers use Git to work in parallel and record history. Writers “Track Changes” in Word to suggest and review edits. Designers copy-paste artboards in Figma to explore variations.

But these tools are very fragmented. Each domain has their set own set of tools that only works in a very limited context. Git is very powerful but it has a steep learning curve and is cumbersome to use. Cloud sofware offers realtime collaboration but lacks more sophisticated tools to review changes and users loose creative privacy.

We want to research universal version control tools that work for everything and everyone.

Every person should be included, whether they are youth, artists, and or technical professionals.

Every medium not just text but also images, videos audio or 3d models should have rich tools to go through the history, review changes and evaluate alternatives.

Every collaboration should be served by a single set of tools. Our collaboration tools should scale from casual synchronous collaborations like writing meeting notes to more formal asynchronous collaborations like negotiating a contract.

Lab Notes

We've kept a habit writing notes during two recent projects: Jacquard & Patchwork.

Projects

Beckett

2025
Version control for students learning to make games with Godot.

Jacquard

2024
Working with empirical scientists to explore how the needs of academic paper writing can inform a new approach to collaboration.

Patchwork

2024
A research project about version control software for writers, developers, and other creatives.

Upwelling

2023
In Upwelling, we design an editing experience that gives authors creative privacy while still ensuring every change can be accounted for.

Cambria

2020
Changing schemas in distributed software is hard. Could adopting bidirectional lenses help?