Visual Engineering Research

An open index of evidence, theory, and practice

Research index

research-document

Documents grouped under research-document.

research-document · ADR-WC-INDEX-0001

Web Component Framework ADR Set

Area
General Research
Status
verified
Useful for
decide, reference, chronicle
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Agent Instructions

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
apply, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Build Pipeline

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
decide, apply, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

Research foundation

Component Library Foundations Research Report

The evidence supports a hybrid, native-first component library rather than a web-component-only architecture. Semantic HTML can remain relatively stable across substantial visual redesign, but only when markup represents durable information relationships rather than current visual groupings. Different categories require different ownership and encapsulation strategies. Native controls should remain native unless measurable requirements cannot be met; light DOM is favored for content-rich, composition-sensitive structures; Shadow DOM is favored for tightly bounded behavioral widgets whose internal invariants require protection. CSS should own presentation and contextual layout, while component logic owns only intrinsic behavior and state. Design tokens should encode decisions through a layered dependency model, but must not become a universal escape-hatch API. Implementation should begin only after a small set of targeted validation experiments confirms these rules in the project’s actual product contexts.

Area
General Research
Status
research-baseline
Useful for
integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Composition Genome v1

Area
General Research
Status
Working Draft
Useful for
orient, integrate, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Composition Science

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Decisions

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
reference, integrate
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Executive Summary

Multi-cycle investigation of typography as a constrained visual communication system. The work tested information-theoretic, geometric, crowding, spacing, contextual-inference, familiarity, and functional-aesthetic hypotheses. The strongest conclusion is that typography cannot be optimized with one global readability score. It is an adaptive, layered inference system whose active bottleneck changes with observer, environment, task, language context, and consequence of error. Glyph-level robustness remains measurable and important, but improvements transfer upward only when glyph recognition is the limiting factor. The proposed Atlas model therefore combines conditional confusion networks, degradation curves, language redundancy, eye-movement adaptation, and task-weighted error costs.

Area
General Research
Status
completed research phase
Useful for
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Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Experiments

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
reference, integrate
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Implementation Roadmap

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, decide, apply
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Intake Preservation

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
reference, chronicle
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Intuitive Is Just Familiar

Familiarity is a major source of what users call intuitive, but it is not the whole phenomenon. Repetition increases processing fluency, liking, confidence, speed, accuracy, and automaticity. It can therefore make an initially mediocre interface feel natural and, for practiced users, perform well. However, familiarity cannot reliably repair poor task structure, excessive physical effort, weak feedback, hidden state, preventable errors, or dangerous mappings. The report proposes that perceived intuitiveness is an inference generated from processing fluency and prediction success, while durable design quality depends on separate dimensions: immediate legibility, learnability, practiced efficiency, error resistance, transferability, and adaptability. Familiarity is best modeled as a performance multiplier and switching-cost generator, not as evidence that the underlying design is good.

Area
General Research
Status
research-complete
Useful for
integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Intuitive Is Just Familiar

Familiarity is a major source of what users call intuitive, but it is not the whole phenomenon. Repetition increases processing fluency, liking, confidence, speed, accuracy, and automaticity. It can therefore make an initially mediocre interface feel natural and, for practiced users, perform well. However, familiarity cannot reliably repair poor task structure, excessive physical effort, weak feedback, hidden state, preventable errors, or dangerous mappings. The report proposes that perceived intuitiveness is an inference generated from processing fluency and prediction success, while durable design quality depends on separate dimensions: immediate legibility, learnability, practiced efficiency, error resistance, transferability, and adaptability. Familiarity is best modeled as a performance multiplier and switching-cost generator, not as evidence that the underlying design is good.

Area
General Research
Status
research-extension-complete
Useful for
integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Knowledge Genome

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, integrate, chronicle
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Letter-Confusion Data Audit and Measurement Plan

Audit of existing letter-similarity, letter-confusion, visual-span, and synthetic glyph datasets. The main finding is that these data classes answer different questions and must remain condition-aware.

Area
General Research
Status
research draft
Useful for
verify, reproduce
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Metadata Standard

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Migration Plan

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, decide, apply
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document · ONT-001

Composition Science Ontology

Area
General Research
Status
working
Useful for
orient, integrate, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Product Genome Autonomous Research Report: Run 01

This research run rejects minimalism as a universal product-design law and replaces it with a stronger model: products should minimize unnecessary interaction cost while preserving the complexity required by capability, safety, expertise, and context. The most defensible cross-domain principles concern compatibility between controls and user expectations, perceptible action possibilities, closed feedback loops, biomechanical fit, error-resistant constraints, and support for maintenance over time. Rams and Sapper are best understood not as opposing aesthetics but as different strategies for managing complexity. Rams tends to externalize order and suppress nonessential signals; Sapper often internalizes technical complexity while preserving direct manipulation and mechanical intelligibility. Repairability and emotional durability appear related to product lifetime, but current evidence does not justify treating either as independently sufficient. The report proposes a Product Legibility Model and a Complexity Allocation Model for future testing.

Area
General Research
Status
active
Useful for
orient, integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

Start here

Product Genome: Project Atlas Research Framework

Product design is treated here as the design of sustained physical interaction between humans, objects, systems, and environments. The Product Genome will not begin as a catalog of famous designers or stylistic movements. It will identify recurring variables, constraints, interaction patterns, and perceptual effects, then map how individual designers and product categories weight those variables differently. The goal is to distinguish biological and functional regularities from cultural conventions, manufacturing artifacts, brand language, and temporary fashion.

Area
General Research
Status
active
Useful for
orient, integrate, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Project Atlas: Comparative Color Framework

Color disciplines appear to conflict partly because they optimize for different outcomes: physical measurement, perceptual prediction, search performance, accessibility, expression, spatial experience, or narrative. The comparison supports reorganizing Atlas by perceptual mechanism and functional outcome rather than by profession. Traditional design concepts remain useful, but they should be treated as applied heuristics built on lower-level mechanisms such as adaptation, contrast, grouping, salience, ecological familiarity, and learned meaning.

Area
General Research
Status
working-draft
Useful for
orient, integrate, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Project Atlas

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Repository Architecture

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
decide, apply, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Repository Manifest

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, integrate, chronicle
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Risk Assessment

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
decide, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document · RPT-GN100-001

Autonomous Research Report: Perception as the Foundation of Composition

The investigation rejects simple linear and threshold-based models of composition. Perceptual performance is better modeled as task-dependent competition among object organizations, shaped by eccentricity, grouping, similarity, attention, search history, and required representational precision.

Area
General Research
Status
working
Useful for
integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Search Architecture

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
decide, apply, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Structured Content Layer

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Title

Optional one-paragraph executive summary.

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
apply, reference, reproduce
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Visual Density, Crowding, and Perceptual Separation

Five iterative research cycles tested whether a universal minimum spacing exists for visual composition. The fixed-spacing hypothesis was rejected. The strongest quantitative regularity is that critical spacing for peripheral identification grows approximately in proportion to eccentricity, but the coefficient varies by target, observer, meridian, grouping, and display configuration. Global grouping can worsen or relieve crowding, and clutter cannot be predicted from element count alone. The resulting model treats perceptual separation as a relationship among visual angle, eccentricity, grouping compatibility, feature competition, task, viewing time, and observer capability. The report proposes a Perceptual Separation Envelope and a practical design-testing protocol rather than a universal pixel rule.

Area
General Research
Status
research-draft
Useful for
integrate, verify
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Visual Information Transfer: Foundations for the Typography Genome

Typography can be usefully modeled as a noisy visual communication channel, but Shannon information cannot be equated with comprehension or meaning. The strongest measurable foundation is a layered model: physical signal preservation, perceptual discrimination, symbolic recognition, linguistic interpretation, and task success. Existing vision research already measures letter recognition in bits through confusion matrices and visual-span profiles, supporting the idea that type systems can be evaluated by information retained under degradation. However, alphabet fitness cannot be reduced to maximum geometric distinctiveness because familiarity, frequency, context, word structure, spacing, and reading strategy provide redundancy and alter the cost of individual confusions. Atlas should therefore measure conditional communication performance: how much task-relevant uncertainty a visual system removes for a defined reader, environment, and task.

Area
General Research
Status
research draft
Useful for
orient, integrate, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Website Architecture

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
decide, apply, reference
Updated
2026-07-22