DST Field Guide: Reading the Symbols
The first DST post introduced the two axes and turned them loose on 62 people. This one is the field guide: what every symbol means, where the symbols come from, and — more usefully — which ones aren’t pulling their weight yet.
The legend, rendered
Rather than list icon names in a table, it’s far more useful to see them. The full legend renders all eight domains, their 64 sub-domains, and the four scale levels with their actual icons:
Every icon is from Lucide, the open-source icon set (ISC-licensed), chosen because it’s clean at small sizes and has enough breadth to cover 64 distinct sub-domains. Colour does the first pass of recognition — each domain owns one — and the icon does the second.
Where the symbols fall short
A taxonomy is only as legible as its symbols, and v0.1 has some that don’t yet earn their place. Being honest about this is the point of publishing a spec rather than just a pretty table.
The clearest problem is icons doing double duty. users is currently
standing in for three unrelated things — Psychology, Labour Markets, and
Anthropology — which defeats the purpose of a glanceable symbol. activity
covers the whole Kinetic domain and both Dance cells. And globe is the most
confusing of all: it marks the Physical & Natural domain on one axis and the
“International” scale on the other, so the same shape means two different things
depending on where you look.
A few are just weak choices: the activity pulse-line for a domain about
sport and physical performance isn’t obviously athletic, and users for mental
health reads more like a login screen than a clinic.
There are also two duplicate labels, not just icons: D5.4 and D8.4 are both “Military & Security Operations,” and D7.7 and D8.5 are both “Dance & Embodied Performance.” Those need genuinely distinct sub-domains under the Kinetic domain.
The legend page marks every shared icon with a ⚠ so you can see the scale of the cleanup at a glance. All of it is logged in the spec’s open-issues section for v0.2, alongside one colour clash: amber is both the D4 domain colour and the reserved S4 scale colour.
Help wanted
If you’ve a better icon for any of the flagged cells, the taxonomy is CC BY 4.0 and the repository takes issues. Suggestions that resolve a collision and read clearly at 16px are the gold standard.
Roll well.