Where does context disappear?
Identify the boundaries where history, intent, constraints, or responsibility fail to travel.
Opening inquiryInvestigation 01Model v0.1
The Coordination Tax
When systems forget,
people become the database.
Across fragmented services and organizations, people repeatedly reconstruct context that the system cannot carry. This inquiry asks where that work accumulates—and which interventions could remove it without sacrificing trust, privacy, or human judgment.
Research postureWorking hypothesisNot yet a measured finding
Two-minute brief
The interface between institutions is often a person.
When ownership, data, language, or incentives stop at an organizational boundary, someone still has to carry the situation across. That person may be a patient, caregiver, caseworker, employee, customer, or manager. The repeated explanation, reconciliation, and follow-up are a coordination tax.
Software is relevant where it can preserve context, clarify responsibility, or reduce repeated work. It is insufficient where the real boundary is authority, trust, incentive, or care.
01 · System model
Follow one need across five points of friction.
Select each stage or trace the handoff. This is an explanatory model for directing research—not a claim about the frequency or severity of any specific domain.
Illustrative model · v0.1
Trace how responsibility and context move through a fragmented system.
Context thinsHandoff
The richest context rarely crosses the boundary. The person repeats, reconciles, and carries it forward.
02 · Research questions
Four questions before proposing a product.
The inquiry begins with lived work and institutional structure. Technology enters only after the boundary is understood.
Who repairs the gap?
Document the invisible work performed by affected people, front-line staff, families, and informal coordinators.
Why does the boundary persist?
Examine incentives, permissions, policy, procurement, data structure, trust, and organizational ownership.
What intervention is credible?
Separate changes software can enable from changes requiring institutional authority, relationships, or new rules.
03 · Claims and limits
What this inquiry does—and does not—claim.
Working proposition
Fragmented boundaries create human coordination work.
The research program will look for where that work occurs, who performs it, and whether it is avoidable or necessary.
Explicit limit
Shared context is not automatically desirable.
Privacy, consent, professional judgment, safety, and institutional separation can be legitimate. Better coordination cannot mean indiscriminate data movement.
Open unknown
Which boundary offers the highest-leverage first intervention?
That decision requires domain evidence, affected-person interviews, and partners with authority to test a change.
04 · Research program
A living inquiry with visible gates.
Current gateFrame + listen
No build recommendation until a domain boundary is evidenced.
- NowFrame + listen
Refine the model with affected people, front-line practitioners, and domain researchers.
- NextMap + compare
Document handoffs, existing workarounds, incentives, and previously attempted solutions.
- Gate 03Choose leverage
Select one boundary where a bounded intervention is ethical, testable, and useful.
- Gate 04Build + report
Prototype with a partner, measure what changes, and publish the result and limitations.
05 · Participate