Visual Engineering Research

An open index of evidence, theory, and practice

Research index

orient

Documents grouped under orient.

research-document

Composition Genome v1

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

decision-framework · DF-COMP-002

Perceptual Evidence Path Review

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

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.

Area
Composition Science
Status
canonical-candidate
Useful for
orient, integrate, reference
Updated
2026-07-22

research-document

Implementation Roadmap

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

research-document

Knowledge Genome

Area
General Research
Status
draft
Useful for
orient, integrate, chronicle
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 Manifest

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

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.

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

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.

Area
Product Genome
Status
complete
Useful for
orient, integrate, 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

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