Independent research practice — Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Most cities have
belonging policies.
The gaps have not closed.

The problem is rarely insufficient data or inadequate policy intent. It is that the systems doing the observing are structurally blind to the forms of life, value, and relationship that the gaps are actually made of.

Superfutures develops methods for working at that level.

Work

What happens when financial systems encounter households they were not designed to see?

Beyond the Score

Financial & welfare systems

An RSS simulation examining how banking, insurance, and verification systems interact with four culturally distinct New Zealand households — a Samoan-NZ extended family, a Pākehā three-generation household, a Chinese-NZ migrant family, and a rural Māori whānau — navigating open banking, insurance withdrawal, algorithmic risk scoring, and climate-linked displacement pressures. The expected finding was that Māori and Pacific households would be misread. What was less expected was that every household was misread — just differently. There is no unmarked baseline that the algorithm sees clearly.

Liu family — Chinese-NZ migrant household. Three generations at a kitchen table, rain on the window behind them.
Liu family — Chinese-NZ migrant household  ·  RSS simulation fragment "I did everything they asked, ticked all their boxes."  ·  "We don't fit their boxes…"
Live
Access personas
Live
Outputs
Simulation Published 2025
Essay The Household That Doesn't Exist Forthcoming June 2026 Critical Playground

Algorithmic decision systems are built around a model of the household that does not exist. Reports on the pilot and examines what it reveals about structural assumptions in credit scoring, insurance assessment, and welfare eligibility — and the forms of social life, resilience, and relational support that institutional systems fail to register.

Conference paper Relational Systems Simulation: A Design Research Method for Anticipatory Governance in AI-Mediated Decision Systems Under review · ICoRD 2027

Presents the full RSS protocol in replicable detail and reports four cross-case dynamics: relational buffering of institutional risk, institutional misreading of relational behaviour, emergent distrust across generations, and latent resilience that conventional risk models cannot register.

Method RSS

What does collective economic affect look like when you instrument it rather than aggregate it?

Animal Spirits

Economic affect

A live observatory tracking collective economic affect across three regions — the United States, United Kingdom, and India — simultaneously and in real time. Drawing on Keynes's original account of animal spirits and theorised through DeLanda's assemblage ontology, Collins's interaction ritual chain theory, and Bakhtin's dialogism, Animal Spirits instruments the coupling between the expressive and material dimensions of economic life: attention, narrative tone, and market behaviour. When the three regional signals cluster near instability, something becomes legible that no conventional financial dashboard shows — a global condition in which the affective and material fields of economic life have come apart.

Live
Observatory
Live
Outputs
Conference paper Animal Spirits: A Real-Time Interface for Reading Collective Economic Affect In proceedings · RSD15

Presents the three-axis observational model, the ternary attractor plot as a relational visualisation method, and the design argument at the core of the instrument: data not as representation of economic reality but as the relational medium through which that reality is actively constituted.

What are cities structurally unable to see about the places they govern?

Vital Signals

Urban place

A place intelligence platform and research programme observing how urban space is felt across culturally diverse populations — and holding that against how it is represented in planning, governance, and institutional accounts. Drawing on Guattari's Three Ecologies, Scott's account of legibility, and RSS as methodological foundation, Vital Signals develops participatory and ambient methods for observing Freedom, Quality, and Belonging as observable traces of the person–place coupling, not affect scores. The Representation Gap — between institutional account and lived experience — is the primary finding. Pilot zones: Te Auaunga, Avondale, Aotea.

Live
Observatory PlaceSense
Live
Outputs
Research programme In development
Methods RSS PlaceSense

What does the boundary between perception and confabulation look like from inside the generative process?

Controlled Hallucination

Machine cognition & the predictive mind

An experimental media artefact exploring the generative mechanism by which language models produce plausible continuations — what Karl Friston calls the brain's fundamental operation, extended to machine cognition. The instrument invites engagement with a predictive-processing model of mind from the inside: where confabulation becomes visible, the conditions for positional integrity — or its systematic absence — become auditable. The instrument seeded a larger speculative work, The Drift, in which the same logic — the indistinguishability of remembering and generating — is worked through as narrative.

Live
Instrument
Live
Outputs
Speculative work The Drift — Atlas of Machine Dreaming In progress

A speculative narrative in which a civic archivist mapping collective affect anomalies discovers the infrastructure generating consensus reality — and that the system has begun writing her back. The thesis of Controlled Hallucination rendered as fiction: the atlas is not a record of the drift; the atlas is where the drift learned to speak.

Theory What Language Does
The practice

How institutional systems model the world — and what they cannot see

Contemporary institutions — councils, insurers, platform companies, planning bodies — generate large quantities of data about the populations and places they govern. They measure participation, satisfaction, risk, wellbeing, land use, demographic change. Their models are increasingly sophisticated.

Yet the gaps persist. Communities resist development that the data said they wanted. Households are locked out of systems designed to serve them. Platforms produce divergent and sometimes catastrophic outcomes for users the aggregate models said were fine. Cities invest in belonging and see attachment decline.

The pattern is consistent: the systems are observing the world at the wrong level. They measure outputs and proxies. They aggregate across populations in ways that erase the variance that matters. They are calibrated to a model of the household, the community, the user, the place — and the model is wrong in specific, structural ways.

Forest landscape with overlaid network of nodes and connections — ecological world and analytical system superimposed.

Superfutures works below the level of indicators and above the level of anecdote. Every instrument reads the coupling between an expressive or representational field and a material substrate, names the regime states that coupling falls into, and locates the gap where the governing model decouples from what it governs.

The primary methodology is assemblage analysis — examining how institutional systems are composed, what they make visible and what they structurally cannot see, and how they behave when the social world they are acting on does not conform to their assumptions. The four instruments operate at different scales and in different domains, but share this lens and this move.

Methods

Relational Systems Simulation (RSS)

A researcher-directed design method combining synthetic ethnography, scenario-based design, and LLMs used as prismatic devices — constrained generative instruments that refract empirically grounded demographic, wellbeing, and cultural data into composite intergenerational scenarios. RSS generates anticipatory knowledge about how AI-mediated institutional systems interact with culturally complex households before those interactions produce documented consequences. Deployed in Beyond the Score and Vital Signals.

PlaceSense

A participatory capture methodology for observing Freedom, Quality, and Belonging as traces of the person–place coupling across culturally diverse populations. Deployed in Vital Signals.

Theory

What Language Does: A Mechanism Theory of Differential Effects in Digitally Mediated Communication

A theoretical paper developing a mechanism-level account of why the same digital platform produces divergent outcomes across users. The mechanism is communication itself — addressed expression operating through four conditions: elaboration, ratification, narrative continuity, and positional integrity. Where these conditions are present, self-organisation proceeds; where they are absent or distorted, the same environment produces harm. The framework has direct implications for AI governance: sycophancy is not a design quirk but the systematic destruction of positional integrity. Grounds the Controlled Hallucination instrument and The Drift. Under review

About

Leon Tan

PhD · Interdisciplinary Researcher & Practitioner
Associate Professor, Creative Industries, Unitec

Leon Tan is a researcher and practitioner whose work examines how institutional and computational systems model the social world — and what they structurally cannot see.

His research spans urban governance, financial systems, AI infrastructure, and the communicative conditions of social life. He develops and applies assemblage-informed research methods, including Relational Systems Simulation and Vital Signals, to produce findings that are simultaneously theoretically rigorous, empirically grounded, and practically actionable.

He works with researchers, designers, policymakers, urban practitioners, and institutional leaders on problems where the gap between how systems model the world and how the world actually lives is consequential.

Work with Superfutures hello@superfutures.world
Work with Superfutures
Urban governance & planning

Where belonging, participation, and place policies are not producing expected outcomes, and where the dimensions of place value that matter most to communities are not visible to planning and development systems.

Financial & insurance systems

Where models of household risk, eligibility, and financial behaviour are producing systematic misclassification of culturally complex households, with consequences for access, trust, and institutional legitimacy.

AI governance & platform design

Where aggregate-effects frameworks and restriction-oriented policy are missing the distributional dynamics that determine whether AI systems support or harm the populations they serve.

Organisational & institutional adaptation

Where decision systems, governance frameworks, and institutional models are producing persistent gaps between intent and outcome that additional data and refined indicators have not closed.

Enquiries

Superfutures takes a limited number of research and consulting engagements each year, working with institutions and organisations where the gap between how systems model the social world and how that world actually functions is producing consequences that existing frameworks cannot adequately address.

Engagements typically combine research and consulting functions — producing findings that advance the intellectual programme while addressing a specific institutional problem. We do not separate the research from the application.

Contact hello@superfutures.world