A Maison TergaDo company
The future of human experience is a research problem.
SigmaClava is the human experience research house of Maison TergaDo. We research, design, and build the systems people will live, learn, feel, and create inside. We begin from the human, not the machine.
The thesis
Most AI research asks what machines can do. The rarer question is what living with them should be like: for a child learning, for a family communicating, for a mind that works differently than the software assumes.
SigmaClava exists for that question. We treat human experience as the primary research surface, and intelligence as the material. By experience we mean attention, emotion, learning, dignity, connection.
We begin from the human, and build outward.
Programs of inquiry
- term 01
Companionable Intelligence How AI presences earn a place in family life: emotional regulation, trust, boundaries, and presence design. Active, internal - term 02
Neurodivergent-First Design Interfaces and systems designed from AuDHD and neurodivergent cognition outward, rather than retrofitted. Active, internal - term 03
Learning as Experience AI-shaped curricula and learning environments that adapt to the child, not the child to them. Active, field - term 04
Sensory & Ambient Wellbeing How environments, media, and machines can lower the human nervous system’s cost of living. Forming
Programs are long. We publish when there is something true to say.
Principles
-
The human is the constant.
Technology is the variable. We never design a person around a system.
-
Experience is evidence.
Lived experience, including neurodivergent experience, is primary data rather than an edge case.
-
Nothing ungoverned.
Intelligence in our work is always named, bounded, and answerable to a human.
-
Built things are arguments.
We research by building. A working system is our unit of publication.
-
Understatement.
We claim what we can defend, and nothing else.
The method
We live with a question at family scale, we build to make the argument, and we publish only what clears the bar. The loop is closed on purpose: most of what it produces stays inside it.
Governance
Intelligence in our work is named, bounded, and answerable to a specific human. All three, or it is ungoverned.
This is a house standard rather than a position on the field, and it is written to be checkable. It has ruled work out: we do not build systems that optimise for attention, we do not charge a person a disclosure to receive sane defaults, and we do not deploy anything into a household that the household cannot switch off.
The lexicon
A research house that does not define its vocabulary is asking to be misread. Each entry says what we mean, and what we are careful not to mean.
- Companionable Intelligence
- An intelligence designed to be lived beside. The design problem is the relationship over months, covering presence, restraint, and the boundaries a household controls, rather than the quality of any single exchange.
- Neurodivergent-first
- A design sequence, not a feature set. The first sketch assumes variable attention, sensory sensitivity, and unreliable executive function; the conventional case is derived from that. The order is the whole claim.
- Sensory load
- The demand an environment or interface places on a nervous system, covering sound, light, motion, simultaneity and interruption, treated as a quantity a design spends rather than a preference a person is asked to tolerate.
- Unit of publication
- A working system. The house’s position is that a built thing is an argument: it states its claim by functioning, and it can be disagreed with by being used.
How we operate
Six commitments the house holds itself to, each published where it can be checked against the work rather than taken on trust.
-
AI-assisted, human-authored
Generation is used throughout the work and is never the last step. A named engineer is accountable for every line that ships, and review capacity is scaled with output rather than behind it.
-
Nothing ships unreviewed
Generated code is treated as a draft. Review is for coherence and for the properties no single file is responsible for, because those are the ones generation does not operate on.
-
Named, bounded, answerable
Every intelligence in a system we build has a stated identity, stated limits, and a specific person accountable for it. All three, or we treat it as ungoverned.
-
WCAG 2.2 AA
Targeted and measured rather than assumed. Contrast over imagery is checked against the brightest pixel behind the text, and known limitations are published as they are found.
-
No trackers, no analytics
This site sets no cookies, loads nothing from a third party, and measures no one. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.
-
Stewarded, not abandoned
Commissioned work is assessed before it is proposed, built in visible increments, and stewarded afterwards. Nothing is deployed before it is understood.
The House
SigmaClava is a house of Maison TergaDo, holding one mandate within a family of ventures. One family; separate mandates.
From research to the world
Where our research becomes commissioned work, it is delivered through Point It Here, SigmaClava’s development division for commercial engagements. Vendor documentation, security practices, and engagement structure live there. If you need a website or software for your business, that is where to go.