Research Brief: A Protocol for Candid Transparency

Intent: An Independent Research Sprint

This document is a proposal for a self-funded, five-week immersion in your New York office. My intent is one of candid transparency: to apply a proven architectural methodology to a shared, high-value challenge and create a verifiable audit trail of the work. This is an act of applied research, not a sales engagement. As a resident of the greater New York area, I plan to be present three days per week to be a true, contextual partner.

Background

The central design challenge of the next decade is not building better apps, but architecting a more coherent, intent-driven reality for the user. My work is focused on the primary bottleneck to this future: the cognitive friction inherent in information-driven organizations.

This research is born from a personal necessity. As a neurodivergent founder of a sovereign enterprise, I faced the problem of extreme cognitive overhead. To solve it, I architected the Atlas C.O.S., a working protocol that is now the operational system for my own company. This sprint is not a theory; it is a proposal to test a working system's core principles against a world-class problem set, focusing on [the epistemology of high-stakes decision-making / the physics of human-AI collaboration].

The Protocol: A Five-Week Immersion

The process is a rigorous and transparent rhythm of discovery and synthesis. Each phase produces a tangible artifact.

• Week 0: Immersion (Context)
• Objective: To understand your world by doing the foundational work.
• Deliverable: An Internal Document Assessment to build a context map before engaging with your team.
• Week 1: Discovery (Friction)
• Objective: To map the existing territory of cognitive load through candid, confidential conversations.
• Deliverable: A Cognitive Load Heatmap—a visual diagnosis of the specific points of friction.
• Week 2: Definition
• Objective: To frame the problem with honesty, acknowledging the full context and relational asymmetries.
• Deliverable: A Problem Architecture Blueprint, proving a holistic understanding of the challenge.
• Week 3: Development
• Objective: To design a solution with humility, creating an artifact that invites critique.
• Deliverable: The Dialogue Object—a curated collection of sketches and models designed as a catalyst for a peer-level conversation.
• Week 4: Delivery
• Objective: To consolidate all findings and present the final architectural framework.
• Deliverable: A private, in-person presentation for critique and to discuss the value of a potential collaboration.

Researcher Bio

Sichen Ying is the founder of Ink Aether, a studio focused on a single mission: to architect the cognitive shelters for a constructive future. Ink Aether offers public explorations into this work at inkaether.com. The first phase of this research began in 2021 as a personal inquiry into the architecture of the mind, documented in real-time at @seeing.storm.