How institutional systems model the world — and what they cannot see
The systems are observing the world at the wrong level.
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: 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.
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.
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.
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