research-document
Architecture as a Foundation for Composition Science
Architecture serves as a foundational source of evidence for discovering universal laws of composition.
Research index
integrate
Documents grouped under integrate.
concept
Architecture
research-document
ATLAS-0001: Proximity and Relative Separation
concept
Attention
concept
Cognition
concept
Color
concept
Component Architecture
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.
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Composition Genome v1
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Composition Science: Architecture Research - Human Scale and Proportion
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Composition Science Repository Governance Specification
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Composition Science Research Library
Evidence library
Composition Science Research Library
research-document
Composition Science Research Library
research-document
Composition Science Research
research-document
Composition Science
concept
Composition
research-document
Decisions
Architecture and Decision Framework · DF-ATLAS-COLOR-005
Atlas Perceptual Measurement Layer
decision-framework · DF-COMP-002
Perceptual Evidence Path Review
decision-framework · DF-CS-ATLAS-001
Composition Science Atlas Research Framework
This framework turns Project Atlas from a collection of discipline reports into a governed evidence network. It defines common research questions, stable records, evidence evaluation, cross-disciplinary translation, contradiction handling, principle synthesis, and update rules. Its central safeguard is that apparent agreement across disciplines is not treated as independent confirmation until shared intellectual ancestry, duplicated evidence, and domain mismatch have been examined.
evidence
Evidence
evidence
Evidence
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.
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Experiments
concept
Hierarchy
concept
Human Factors
hypothesis
Hypotheses
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.
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.
research-document
Knowledge Genome
concept
Knowledge Graph
concept
Learning
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Masters vs. Modern Science 01: Michel-Eugène Chevreul
research-document · ONT-001
Composition Science Ontology
concept
Ontology
concept
Perception
concept
Product Design
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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.
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.
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Project Atlas Autonomous Research Report 001
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Project Atlas - Color Vocabulary and Mechanism Taxonomy
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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.
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Project Atlas - Masters vs. Modern Science 02: Josef Albers
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Project Atlas: Perceptual Color Genome
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Project Atlas – Ribbon Comparative Study v0.1
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Project Atlas Rosetta Stone: Cross-System Design Mechanism Map
research-document · REP-ATLAS-0002
ATLAS-0002 Relational Legibility Envelope
Current synthesis · REP-ATLAS-0004
Visual Design Research Consolidation
Start here · REP-BDE-0001
Beautiful Digital Experiences — Territory and Evidence Foundation
research-document · REP-VE-COL-001
Color, Contrast, Low Vision, and Color-Vision Deficiency
Measurement foundation · REP-VE-EVL-001
Evaluation, Measurement, and Experimentation Foundation and Falsification
Start here · REP-VE-ITTEN-001
Johannes Itten Revisited — Seven Color Contrasts Through Modern Vision Science
research-document
Repository Manifest
concept
Research Methodology
research-package · RP-ATLAS-COLOR-004
Albert Munsell vs. Modern Perceptual Color Spaces
research-package · RP-ATLAS-TYPO-TRANSFER-001
Typography Cross-Layer Transfer and Adaptive Reading
This research package investigates when improvements to glyphs, fonts, spacing, size, width, and weight transfer to higher-level outcomes such as word recognition, continuous reading, comprehension, navigation, memory, and action. The research rejects a simple upward-transfer model. Typography changes can improve local perceptual capacity without improving reading, can preserve reading speed through increased compensatory effort, or can improve reading for some individuals while harming others. The strongest emerging theory is that transfer occurs when three conditions align: the manipulated typographic property affects the active bottleneck, the benefit survives interactions with layout and language, and the measured outcome is sensitive to the cost being reduced. Atlas should therefore model typography as a personalized adaptive control problem rather than search for one universally optimal typeface.
Start here · RP-CCE-0001
Clinical Communication Engineering Foundation Research Execution Package
research-package · RP-CLF-002
Semantic Durability Across Interface Contexts
This package defines the next foundational investigation for the component library: whether one durable semantic content model can support substantially different editorial, application, mobile, marketing, low-vision, and print presentations without inaccessible reordering, presentation-specific markup, or variant proliferation. Preliminary standards evidence supports semantic stability only when meaning and interaction remain stable. The package therefore treats stable markup as a bounded hypothesis, establishes competing models, measurable failure thresholds, evidence schemas, and handoff instructions for executing the study before production component APIs are designed.
research-package · RP-COMP-005
Visual Scene Construction, Predictive Processing, and Active Perception
Evidence supports a hybrid account in which rapid feedforward processing produces provisional scene and object hypotheses, recurrent and contextual interactions refine them, and active sampling obtains additional evidence. Prediction is important, but predictive coding is not established as the unique neural account.
research-package · RP-PROD-002
Operationalizing Product Legibility
Product Legibility can be measured, but not responsibly as a context-free aesthetic score. The evidence supports a task-, population-, and environment-specific profile built from six gates: action possibility, discoverability, interpretability, executability, feedback closure, and consequence comprehension. A single average is unsafe because severe failure in one critical dimension can be concealed by strength elsewhere. This REP replaces the proposed additive score with a gated measurement architecture, distinguishes diagnostic metrics from outcome metrics, and provides a repeatable Product Legibility Evaluation Protocol. It also finds that classic predictive laws such as Fitts' and Hick's are useful locally but cannot serve as universal product-quality laws without checking their assumptions.
research-package · RP-WC-0001
Cross-Project Web Component Framework Research Execution Package
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.
concept
Spacing
research-document · SPEC-001
Composition Science Knowledge Graph Specification
theory · TH-COMP-005
Active Inference Composition Theory
research-document · THY-CCE-0001
Clinical Communication Engineering Theory Registry
research-document · THY-WC-0001
Web Component Framework Theory Registry Update
concept
Typography
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.
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.
concept