Lexicon
A research house that does not define its vocabulary is asking to be misread. These are definitions of use. Where a term is already in circulation, the entry says what we mean by it and what we are careful not to mean.
The accumulated cost of designs that assumed one cognition and were later adapted. It is paid as parallel code paths, second-class alternative modes, and the ongoing requirement that people disclose a diagnosis to receive sane defaults.
Not Not technical debt by analogy. The interest on this debt is paid by people rather than by engineering teams, which is why it is so rarely on a roadmap.
See also Neurodivergent-first ,Disclosure tax Used in Neurodivergent-First Design
A system most of whose output can be perceived without being attended to. Demanding attention is treated as an expense the system has to justify, against a fixed budget rather than on the merits of each interruption.
Not Not a background process, and not a passive one. An ambient system is making continuous decisions about what not to say.
See also Sensory load ,Presence design ,Recovery cost Used in Sensory & Ambient Wellbeing
A limit that exists in the system as a named, inspectable thing a person can point at, change, and be sure of — not a preference inferred from settings. If a household cannot state the boundary without reading documentation, there isn’t one.
Not Not a permission toggle. A toggle records an answer; a boundary object is the question, the answer, who set it, and what the system does at the edge.
See also Governed intelligence ,Companionable Intelligence Used in Companionable Intelligence
An intelligence designed to be lived beside. The design problem is the relationship over months — presence, restraint, and the boundaries a household controls — rather than the quality of any single exchange.
Not Not a companion app, and not a persona. A persona is a costume worn by a system whose incentives are unchanged; companionable intelligence is a claim about what the system is for.
See also Presence design ,Boundary object ,Governed intelligence Used in Companionable Intelligence
Mistaking material delivered for learning done. A system optimising for coverage will reliably produce a well-covered child, and the measurement it uses will agree with it.
Not Not simply a bad metric. The trap is that coverage is genuinely easy to measure and genuinely correlated with something — just not with the thing anyone wanted.
See also Learning environment ,Regulation-first Used in Learning as Experience
What a person pays to receive behaviour that should have been the default: declaring a diagnosis, requesting an accommodation, identifying themselves as an exception in order to be treated adequately.
Not Not a privacy setting. The cost is social and it is charged before the benefit is delivered, which is why so many people decline to pay it and go without.
See also Accommodation debt ,Neurodivergent-first Used in Neurodivergent-First Design
Treating lived experience — including neurodivergent experience — as primary data with its own standards of rigour, rather than as colour to be validated later by an instrument.
Not Not anecdote, and not a substitute for measurement. It is a claim about what counts as data, not a licence to skip the work of collecting it carefully.
See also Neurodivergent-first ,Unit of publication Used in Neurodivergent-First Design ,Learning as Experience ,Sensory & Ambient Wellbeing
Intelligence that is named, bounded, and answerable to a specific human. Every one of those three is a requirement: an unnamed system cannot be reasoned about, an unbounded one cannot be trusted, and one answerable to no one in particular is answerable to no one.
Not Not AI safety in the research sense, and not compliance. This is a house standard about the systems SigmaClava itself builds and runs.
See also Boundary object ,Named system Used in Companionable Intelligence
Everything a learner meets — pacing, texture, what happens when they are stuck, whether interest is treated as signal — as distinct from the material being covered. The environment is the part that determines whether the material lands.
Not Not curriculum, and not a platform. Generating more material does not change the environment, which is why so much adaptive learning changes nothing that matters.
See also Regulation-first ,Coverage trap Used in Learning as Experience
A system with a stated identity, a stated scope, and a person accountable for it. Naming is the precondition for governance: what has not been named cannot be bounded, audited, or switched off on purpose.
Not Not a product name. A system can ship under one brand and contain several named systems, each with its own scope and its own answerable person.
See also Governed intelligence Used in Companionable Intelligence
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.
Not Not accessible design, which usually begins with a finished artefact and adds relief. Neurodivergent-first changes what gets drawn first, and therefore what gets built.
See also Accommodation debt ,Sensory load Used in Neurodivergent-First Design
The design of what a system is like when it is not being used: when it speaks unprompted, how it behaves in the room during an argument, what it does with silence. Presence is the majority of the experience of anything that lives in a home.
Not Not ambient UI, which describes a display strategy. Presence design is about conduct, and most of its decisions are about what not to do.
See also Companionable Intelligence ,Ambient system Used in Companionable Intelligence ,Sensory & Ambient Wellbeing
What an experience costs after it ends: the time and capacity a person needs before they are able to do the next thing. Two experiences that feel identical during can differ sharply here, and only one of those differences shows up in a session metric.
Not Not fatigue in the ergonomic sense. Recovery cost is measured after the fact, deliberately, because measuring during the task is what hides it.
See also Sensory load ,Ambient system Used in Sensory & Ambient Wellbeing
The stance that a dysregulated learner is not learning slowly but not learning, so the correct response is to change what the environment is doing rather than to press harder on the task.
Not Not behaviour management. The subject of the intervention is the environment, not the child.
See also Learning environment ,Coverage trap Used in Learning as Experience ,Companionable Intelligence
The demand an environment or interface places on a nervous system — sound, light, motion, simultaneity, interruption — treated as a quantity a design spends rather than a preference a person is asked to tolerate.
Not Not sensory preference. A preference can be accommodated; a load has to be budgeted, because it is being spent whether or not anyone is counting.
See also Recovery cost ,Ambient system ,Neurodivergent-first Used in Neurodivergent-First Design ,Sensory & Ambient Wellbeing
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.
Not Not a paper, a post, or a demo. A demo is a claim about a system that does not have to survive contact with anyone.
See also Experience as evidence
A note on coinage
Almost none of these words are ours. Most are in general use, and the entry exists because general use is loose enough that two people can agree on a sentence and disagree about everything in it.
Where we have narrowed a term, we have said what we narrowed it to and what we cut away. Where we are using it in the ordinary sense, there is no entry — a lexicon that defines everything defines nothing.
