[raelovejoy]

Develops Coherent Design as standalone exploratory research about unburdensomeness, coherent defaults, optional complexity, accommodation, conflict negotiation, plural representations, and recursive design.

The canonical home is research/coherent-design/: a working synthesis, methods/research questions, and sources/evidence limits. Research-index and Human(e) Design links provide navigation; the existing Human(e) Design Review remains the shared review practice. No conversation archive, chat reference, personal profile, or interaction history is included.

The explicit clarity/curiosity/permission principle distinguishes three responsibilities: ask when meaning, preference, scope, or authority is unclear; investigate uncertain facts; explore alternatives together when the person is also unsure. Meaningful consent includes understood consequences, voluntary and scoped choice, practical refusal, and revision. Curiosity describes inquiry behavior without presuming artificial subjective experience. Research or confidence cannot supply someone else's intention or permission, and already-clear authority should not require repetitive confirmation.

Retains the tofu and other design metaphors, capability-versus-obligation distinction, displaced burden, non-conformity, five conceptual functions, twelve representation lenses, and unexecuted comparisons. This is AI-assisted, author-review pending work, not a validated framework or a novelty claim. The source register records targeted inspection limits; image-specific first publication and reuse license remain unresolved. The third-party raster stays in the private simulation reference.

Validation: reader-document check passes for 250 Markdown files; Idea Trail graph/index is valid/current; all 11 existing website tests pass. Personal-reference and privacy-boundary checks, local links, new-prose whitespace, and uploaded blob/tree integrity are checked. Website, runtime, schema, visibility, and fiction canon are unchanged.

Root #45, #50, and #55 also touch the research index; reconcile their independent entries before any merge. No unmerged substance from those PRs is imported. Author/source/methods review, participant work, project adoption, implementation, merge, and deployment remain separate.

• Standalone design documentation with sources and explicit limits.
• Nearby navigation updated without a duplicate framework or backlog.
• Clarification, shared inquiry, and meaningful permission made explicit.
• Author and methods review.

Related inquiry: Coherence Without Uniformity / Contextual Coherence, PR #57. A focused README paragraph links its shared-protection/local-rule analysis at source commit 3ab27534c555185bcdde9467356587ea9b5a05a2; the canonical treatments remain distinct. This 2026-10-29 navigation addition is AI-assisted. Reader-document and Idea Trail checks and all 11 existing website tests pass for this updated candidate; the linked inquiry remains a separate review draft.