Welcome to Animacy

Stop trying to resolve the tension of being curious about everything in a world that rewards knowing one thing. Create inside it.

Mission

If you want to build {ideas, businesses, systems, products, yourself}, Animacy is for you.

Every week you get one of two things:

• An essay that shifts how you see something. Whether you're building a product, a system, a company, or a concept. Ideas that don't stay in their lane.

• A prototype that shows what happens when you actually try bringing the concept to life. Code, data, design explorations, whatever form the idea demands. Scrappy on purpose, because that's where the learning lives.

I share what I’m learning along the way, so you don’t have to do it alone.

If you spend enough time here, you’ll:

• have clear words for patterns you’ve always observed but couldn’t articulate

• understand the behavioral science underneath the decisions you’re already making, and the ones you’ve been putting off

• think more clearly about building in a world where the tools are changing faster than the frameworks

• build and think with more clarity and courage

You’ll feel at home here if you:

• think across disciplines and refuse to stay in one lane

• want to understand why people think and act the way they do

• are building something and want to think more clearly about it

• believe curiosity and courage are skills worth practicing

• don’t need the finished answer, you just need to know someone else is figuring it out too

Not sure where to begin? Start here.

Who’s writing this?

Hey, I’m Eve-Marie. Welcome!

I'm a research psychologist who builds products. Currently at Shopify, where I've spent years building internal tools and programs across UX, data, and software development.

But I didn’t plan to end up here.

Two things have driven everything I’ve ever done: understanding what makes people exceptional, and the need to share what I find along the way.

Not just understand in theory, but really deconstruct it. What makes a person reach their potential? What happens in the mind when someone grows, creates, or finally does something they didn’t think they could?

This mission brought me to a sports performance lab in undergrad, trying to understand optimal experience. That question pulled me into a Masters, then a PhD where I researched imagination, daydreaming, and how the stories we construct about ourselves shape who we become.

But I couldn’t stay in the lab. I’ve never wanted to just theorize.

So I built university courses on creativity and innovation and taught them. Started a consulting company helping startups apply the creative process to real problems. Found my way into organizational design in the public sector. Then Shopify and tech.

For years I carried the tension of not belonging fully to any world. The kind of person who gets called “interesting” by people who aren’t sure which box to put you in.

Then one day it clicked.

The courage to stay curious. The courage to build before you're sure. The courage to work in the spaces between disciplines and call it home. That was the thing I'd been doing all along, I just hadn't named it yet.

I got really good at it. And that's exactly what I want to teach you: stop trying to resolve the tension of being curious about everything in a world that rewards knowing one thing. Create inside it.

That’s Animacy.

My promise to you

• I’ll bring the research, not just the hot take

• I’ll name things precisely, even when the vaguer version is easier

• I’ll build in the open, rough drafts, failed prototypes, and half-formed ideas included

• I’ll tell you what I don’t know as clearly as I tell you what I do know

One thing in return: don’t just read. Bring your own questions. Make something with what you find here. Curiosity only matters if it turns to action.