Work Four instruments
Financial & welfare systems

Beyond the Score

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

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…"
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Access personas
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Outputs
Simulation Published 2025
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
Economic affect

Animal Spirits

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

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.

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Observatory
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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.

Urban place

Vital Signals

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

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.

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Observatory PlaceSense
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Outputs
Research programme In development
Methods RSS PlaceSense
Machine cognition & the predictive mind

Controlled Hallucination

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

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.

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Instrument
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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