Input-First Design
The system should accommodate the human, not the other way around.
Before the enterprise work, I taught special education in Brooklyn. A self-contained classroom, twelve students, every subject. The whole job was reading each student: what they actually needed, what the system was asking of them that they couldn’t give, where the accommodation had to happen for them to get through the material.
That skill transferred directly into everything I’ve built since. Every system I design starts by reading the person on the other end before designing anything. What does the system receiving this actually need?
AI tools get this backwards. They want structured input: organized prompts, formatted requests, clear parameters. But creative thinking doesn’t arrive structured. It arrives raw, partial, connected to things you haven’t articulated yet. If you have to organize your thinking before the tool will accept it, you’re doing the tool’s job for it. The accommodation is flowing in the wrong direction.
FormWork reverses that. You dump your thinking raw. The structure comes after, not before. The system accommodates how you actually work. The friction is removed at the point of input, not at the point of thought.
System
FormWork is the coordination harness. Named after concrete formwork: the structure that holds everything in position while the work is wet. The forms come off when the concrete can hold itself.
Research
Accommodation Design is the principle: build structure that accommodates without requiring anyone to explain what they need. Input Inversion is the mechanism: reverse the direction of accommodation so the tool serves the human.
Evidence
Encore: thirteen years of accommodating a platform through technology shifts, keeping structural coherence while everything around it changed. Lionfish: diagnosing what happens when nobody designs the accommodation layer and the system breaks.