The working language of my accommodation design practice. These terms emerged from applied work across construction, print production, special education, enterprise software, and AI system architecture. They recur because the problems recur.
Accommodation Design · Attunement · Context · Drift · Fidelity · FormWork · Input Inversion · Load-bearing · Processing Profile · SavePoint · Scaffold · Somatic Design
Accommodation Design A framework for AI system architecture that comes from special education. Instead of constraining a model’s behavior, accommodation design asks what each system actually needs to do its best work. The model has processing constraints (context limits, attention degradation, instruction sensitivity). The human has processing constraints too (ideas lose fidelity when forced into structure at the point of capture). The dump accommodates the human: just talk, dictate, think out loud. Dumps become source material. Structuring that material, decomposing tasks, and running independent evaluation accommodates the model. FormWork coordinates both. The question comes from IEP design: read the system’s processing profile, then design the task to meet it. Full reference page · Whitepaper
Drift Six months into a project, the output starts degrading. Nobody changed anything. Nobody made a bad call. But somewhere around month three, the original intent stopped being the thing everyone was checking against. That’s drift. Deeper than technical debt, where you know the standard and cut corners against it. Drift is when the standard itself goes invisible. Reasonable decisions accumulate into something nobody chose. It happens to methods, not just to outputs. Savepoint addresses drift in thinking. FormWork addresses drift in process. Encore is what twelve years without drift looks like. Full reference page
FormWork The accommodation design process. Named from concrete construction: formwork is the temporary structure you build before you pour. It holds the boards in position, keeps the material contained, gives it somewhere to go. Once the concrete sets, the form comes off. FormWork is not any single tool. It’s the coordination harness that holds all the tools in position while the work is wet: SavePoint Syntax preserves context, LensArray decomposes evaluation, skills execute one objective at a time, the voice pipeline shapes register, knowledge traversal traces ideation history. You dump your thinking first: voice notes, brainstorms, arguments with yourself. Dumps become source material. Ideas, sentence structure, word choice, and imagery are embedded in the data before any tool touches it. The nature of what goes in determines the shape of what comes out. Full reference page
Scaffold A temporary structure that supports the work while it’s being built. A Savepoint tag, a graphic organizer, a photography brief encoded into Shopify architecture: different forms, same structural role. A scaffold’s purpose is to become unnecessary. If it stays permanently, you’ve built a dependency, not a capability. Full reference page
Fidelity The gap between what was meant and what survived. Encore held fidelity for twelve years across three technology shifts. Most projects lose it in months. Full reference page
Load-bearing Any element (narrative, visual, or technical) that carries structural weight rather than serving as decoration. In Aiden Jae, the photography direction is load-bearing: remove it and the brand collapses into a generic Shopify template. In Altrueism, the hand-drawn marks are load-bearing: they prove the transparency claim the copy makes. The test is simple. Remove it. If the system collapses, it was load-bearing. If nothing changes, it was decoration. Full reference page
SavePoint A marker for the exact moment understanding shifted. The phrasing that locked in, the instant direction changed. More than a bookmark. A savepoint carries enough orientation to reconstruct where the thinking was when the context is gone. You come back to a project weeks later, scan the savepoints, and you’re back in. Full reference page
Context The active state of understanding that exists in the moment of working and disappears when the session ends. I lost months of New City ideation this way: dozens of sessions of novel development, the continuity gone when the threads closed. The thinking had happened. The connections between ideas had happened. None of it survived. Savepoint Syntax exists because context is the most perishable thing in knowledge work, and the tools that should preserve it don’t. Full reference page
Attunement Reading the room before designing for it. Noticing what a group needs, what each person within that group needs, and where a specific individual will get lost. In Encore, attunement aimed at end users and at the developers building inside the platform. In Aiden Jae, attunement for a founder who knew her product but couldn’t see how the screen was flattening it. The skill is the same whether the room holds twelve students, a founder looking at her own product, or a development team building inside a platform. Full reference page
Somatic Design Designing what the body registers before the mind names it. The layer between reading the room and building the framework. A well-sequenced product flow, a brand encounter, a page: it lands physically before it registers intellectually. The person on the other end just feels like the thing makes sense. They don’t see the structure. They feel the result. Full reference page
Processing Profile What a system can and cannot handle. For a student: working memory capacity, attention span, sensory processing. For a language model: context window limits, attention degradation over long inputs, sensitivity to instruction ordering, tendency to flatten compound evaluations. When AI fails at a task, people blame the model. Usually the task was designed for a system that doesn’t exist. You read the profile first, then design the task to meet it. Full reference page
Input Inversion A design principle that reverses the burden of structure from the human to the tooling. The standard approach to AI: structure the input, constrain the output. Input inversion goes the other way. Unstructured thinking goes in (brainstorming, arguing with yourself, changing direction mid-sentence). Accommodation tools structure it for the model after the fact. The parallel from the classroom: a teacher doesn’t require a student to organize their thoughts before speaking. The student speaks, the teacher captures it, then finds the structure in what was already expressed. Three years of that produced the corpus this site was compiled from. The whitepaper documents the evidence. Full reference page