Hackquire™: Why Work Needs Pictures Again
From doodles and memes to Hackquees, how an illustrated non-fiction book helps people read the gray-areas of modern work
A Short Hackquire™ Lexicon
Gray-areas
plural noun
The parts of work that sit between policy and reality, where outcomes are shaped by tone, timing, power, visibility, credit, silence, and social reading.
Hackquee
noun
A named workplace pattern from the gray-areas of work. A Hackquee is part behavioural cue, part visual archetype, and part practical move.
Hackquire™
noun
An illustrated non-fiction book and workplace field manual for the gray-areas of modern work. Built around 100 Hackquees, it combines satire, behavioural observation, visual storytelling, career development, and professional skills.
Situation, Solution, Action
noun phrase
The three-part Hackquire™ method. Situation helps the reader recognise the moment. Solution explains the move. Action gives one practical next step.
Visual handle
noun
A picture, doodle, illustration, meme, sticker, or other visual cue that makes an abstract workplace pattern easier to recognise, remember, and share.
Workplace field manual
noun phrase
A practical guide designed for repeat use before, during, or after real work moments, rather than a one-time motivational read.
Article Guide
1. Visual culture is already how people understand work
2. Doodles are not decoration, they are handles
2.1 What is a Hackquee?
3. The gray-areas are where work actually happens
4. From meme to method
5. Why this is a book
6. Who is behind it
7. What Hackquire™ is trying to change
8. Closing note
Most people are taught how to work, but not how to read work.
That is a problem, because modern work is not only made of tasks. It is made of signals.
A late reply. A calendar block. A camera turned off. A meeting face. A profile picture. A reaction emoji. A phrase repeated too often. A bag placed on a table. A screenshot sent without context.
A work chat message that arrives at 22:47 and somehow says more than the words inside it.
Work is full of these moments. Some are obvious. Most are not.
The official handbook might explain annual leave, conduct policy, expenses, software, reporting lines, and where to find the brand deck.
It rarely explains how credit drifts, how meetings bend, how power hides in language, how people perform confidence, how silence becomes a message, or why a harmless “quick chat?” can ruin a day.
That is where Hackquire™ begins.
Hackquire™: Hacks Do Work is an illustrated non-fiction book about the gray-areas of modern work. It sits across career development, professional skills, workplace culture, business communication, organisational behaviour, popular culture, humour, and practical self-help. Not self-help in the shiny-mug sense. Self-help in the “how do I get through this meeting without losing my mind, my credit, or my chance to speak?” sense.
The book is built around 100 Hackquees: named workplace patterns that turn everyday professional ambiguity into characters, language, and action.
A Hackquee is part behavioural cue, part visual archetype, part practical move.
The point is simple: when people can see a pattern, they can name it. When they can name it, they can discuss it. When they can discuss it, they can use it.
That is why work needs pictures again.
Reference: Microsoft’s Work Trend Index has repeatedly shown how much modern work is shaped by meetings, email, chat, and digital collaboration, including findings that employees spend a large share of their work time communicating rather than creating.
1. Visual culture is already how people understand work
Modern work pretends to be rational, but much of it is interpreted visually.
People read each other before the meeting starts. They notice the background, the lighting, the posture, the tiny delay before someone answers, the objects just inside the frame, the camera angle, the expression held a fraction too long.
Hybrid work made this sharper. We now meet colleagues as people, thumbnails, avatars, handles, headshots, status dots, and message bubbles. We are present and pixelated at the same time.
The workplace became a screen culture.
And screen culture thinks in images.
Memes, GIFs, stickers, doodles, emojis, screenshots, reaction images, profile pictures, and visual shorthand are not side noise. They are how people compress meaning when language is too slow, too formal, or too risky.
A good meme is not only a joke. It is a tiny social theory people can recognise without a meeting.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines an internet meme as an image, video, piece of text, or similar item passed quickly from one internet user to another, often with humorous changes. That definition matters because it shows how visual language has become a repeatable, remixable form of cultural communication.
That matters for work because organisations are full of repeated behaviour. Patterns spread. Phrases spread. Meeting styles spread. Bad habits spread. So do useful tactics.
Hackquire™ uses that reality, but makes it practical.
A meme can say: we all recognise this.
A Hackquee says: we all recognise this, and here is what to do next.
Reference: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, “meme”; Nielsen Norman Group’s research on online reading also supports the point that people scan digital environments visually, looking for cues of relevance rather than reading everything word by word.
2. Doodles are not decoration, they are handles
Doodles are often treated as evidence that someone is not paying attention.
That is not always true.
In a 2009 study, Jackie Andrade found that people given a simple doodling task while listening to a dull phone message recalled more information afterwards than those who did not doodle. The smarter takeaway is not “doodling makes you brilliant.” It is more precise: light visual activity can sometimes help attention stay anchored when the mind might otherwise drift.
That distinction matters.
Hackquire™ is not interested in random decoration. It is interested in visual handles.
A handle lets you pick something up.
That is what an illustrated workplace archetype can do. It gives a slippery behaviour a shape. It turns “that strange thing that keeps happening in meetings” into a named pattern.
Once something has a shape, people can carry it.
Once people can carry it, they can share it.
Once they can share it, it can become part of workplace language.
This is why Hackquees are illustrated.
Not because pictures are easier.
Because some ideas are easier to remember when they have a face, a body, a pose, a label, and a little absurdity attached.
Reference: Jackie Andrade, “What Does Doodling Do?”, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2009.
2.1 What is a Hackquee?
A Hackquee is a named pattern from the gray-areas of work.
It might be a behaviour, a tactic, a signal, a trap, a survival move, or a workplace creature you already know but have never had a name for.
Examples include:
Bag Branders
The subconscious branding signal of the daily work bag, whether it appears in a meeting room, on a commute, or half-visible on a video call.
Feedback Frogs
The strange theatre of performance reviews, where language, power, politeness, and vague feedback can turn into a professional pond.
These are not random jokes. They are patterns.
Each Hackquee uses the same frame:
Situation: recognise the moment
Solution: understand the move
Action: take one practical step
That structure is important.
Without action, a workplace insight stays as commentary. With action, it becomes useful.
Reference: Hackquire™ book proposal and sample material.
3. The gray-areas are where work actually happens
Most career advice focuses on visible behaviours: communicate clearly, manage your time, build your network, be confident, set boundaries, lead well.
Those things matter.
But they are often too broad to help in the exact moment.
What do you do when someone repeats your idea as if it was theirs?
What do you do when a meeting has no purpose but still controls the decision?
What do you do when feedback sounds friendly but contains no usable information?
What do you do when a group chat becomes the real workplace?
What do you do when your contribution disappears because nobody wrote it down?
These are the gray-areas.
They sit between policy and reality.
They are where workplace culture, organisational behaviour, business communication, professional skills, self-presentation, humour, power, and popular culture collide.
They are also where many people lose confidence, credit, energy, and momentum.
Hackquire™ treats these moments as readable.
Not simple. Not always fair. Not always fixable.
But readable.
That is the first move.
Reference: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace research shows that employee engagement, stress, and workplace experience remain major organisational issues, which supports the need for clearer everyday workplace language and behaviour-reading tools.
4. From meme to method
The best workplace language travels.
People repeat it because it helps.
That is why phrases spread inside teams. Some are useful. Some are awful. Some become tiny corporate ghosts that haunt every meeting room.
Hackquire™ wants better workplace language.
Language that is memorable, visual, and usable.
A meme can make people laugh because it reveals a shared truth.
A GIF can carry tone faster than a paragraph.
A doodle can make an abstract idea easier to hold.
A sticker can turn a feeling into a quick signal.
An illustration can make a pattern stick.
A Hackquee brings those forces together and attaches them to a practical move.
That is the method.
Image plus name plus situation plus solution plus action.
The goal is not to make work cute.
The goal is to make work legible.
That is where Hackquire™ moves from observation into book structure.
Reference: Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture describes internet memes as items such as jokes, rumours, videos, and websites that spread from person to person online, often through remix, parody, and user-created variation.
5. Why this is a book
Hackquire™ is being built as a book because books still do something the feed cannot.
A feed fragments attention.
A book organises it.
A feed shows moments.
A book builds a system.
A feed reacts.
A book returns.
Hackquire™ is designed as an illustrated non-fiction book in career development and professional skills because the subject needs more than advice posts. It needs a repeatable structure readers can come back to before a meeting, after a strange interaction, during a career shift, or when they feel something happening at work but cannot yet name it.
The book format also matters because the Hackquees work as a collection.
One Hackquee might help with a single moment.
A hundred Hackquees build a vocabulary.
That is the ambition: not another list of tips, but a portable workplace language.
Reference: Nielsen Norman Group’s research on how people read online shows that web users often scan rather than read every word, which supports the argument that a structured book can organise attention differently from a feed.
6. Who is behind it
Hackquire™ Studio is the creative and research frame around the project.
Etie is the author and conceptual lead.
Hela H contributes research, reading, synthesis, and workplace wellbeing perspective.
Lucia B contributes systems thinking, structure, testing, and operational logic.
Em C contributes visual culture, creative interpretation, and narrative framing.
Lubo D contributes commercial reality, feasibility, and pressure-testing.
This matters because Hackquire™ is not only a personal opinion about work. It is a book-shaped system built from observation, lived experience, research direction, visual experimentation, and practical testing.
The voice is satirical.
The aim is useful.
The subject is serious.
Reference: Hackquire™ Studio internal project notes and contributor roles.
7. What Hackquire™ is trying to change
Work advice often assumes people need more discipline.
Sometimes they do.
But often they need better pattern recognition.
They need to understand the room.
They need to see how credit moves.
They need to know when a phrase is a warning.
They need to spot fake urgency.
They need to protect attention.
They need to ask cleaner questions.
They need to keep work on the record.
They need to know when humour is hiding a power move.
They need to know when the meeting is the decision, when the chat is the meeting, and when the silence is the answer.
That is not only business and economics.
It is not only organisational behaviour.
It is not only business communication.
It is not only self-help, personal growth, success, humour, essays, or social science.
It is all of those things, because work is all of those things.
Work is a system.
Work is a culture.
Work is a performance.
Work is a screen.
Work is a language.
Work is full of roles, signals, routines, and performances, even when nobody calls them that.
Hackquire™ gives those patterns characters.
Then it gives the reader a next move.
Reference: Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports that modern employees spend a large share of their work time communicating across meetings, email, and chat, making communication overload and workplace interpretation central to how work now happens.
8. Closing note
Hackquire™ starts from a simple belief: people already notice more at work than traditional career books give them credit for.
They notice tone. They notice timing. They notice who gets heard, who gets skipped, who gets copied, who gets credit, and who gets quietly edited out of the story.
The challenge is not always motivation. Often, it is language.
Hackquire™ gives those moments names, images, and actions.
A field manual for modern work.
A visual system for workplace patterns.
An illustrated non-fiction book for the gray-areas people already live inside.
That is why work needs pictures again.
Reference: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace research frames work as a major part of people’s wellbeing and organisational productivity, which supports the need for more practical ways to understand everyday workplace experience.