Find The Threshold
Vary one amount until it changes kind; cross the point from both sides and mark exactly where it is.
Formerly Threshold
99°C is hot water; 100°C is steam.
Seen in Bridget Riley, Movement in Squares, 1961
Try it on your work
Find a physical boundary in your situation (a doorway, an edge, the line where one material meets another) and station yourself or your work exactly on it for ten minutes. Record what crosses, in which direction, and what turns back.
Attend to the exact moments a conversation changes state (greeting to business, business to real) and mark each one as it happens, even just with a dot on paper. The dots are a map of doors.
Identify where, precisely, something enters your project: the exact step where outside becomes inside. Describe everything that happens at that step and nothing else. Most control lives there; most attention doesn't.
How it has been used
Find where quantity becomes quality: one more grain and it's a heap, one degree and it's ice, one more person and it's a crowd. The move forces you to cross the point from both sides and mark it: knowing roughly where it is doesn't count; the threshold is a location, not a region.
Where it leads
Grouped under Let me find out what holds up