Argued
The commitment, argued.
Position statements on AI, judgement, and how the work of a domain should shape the tools built in it. Four of these carry the whole practice; the rest argue it in specific cases.
The commitment itself
Most people who work do not decide what the work is for. A designer meets that in the first job, and the art world runs on it.
No analytics anywhere, no building toward recognition, and no name for the central decision. What that costs, what still may be known, and why the positions stand where the feedback would have been.
Koher's deepest commitment: keep something real outside the model in the room. Two disciplines follow — judgement in code anyone can read, and the voice between people kept human.
When a tool sits between two people, a model must not become the one they both defer to. Each side gets its own private AI; the talking stays human — the witness half of the commitment.
Argued in specific cases
A detector's score, and the same judgement made without one, put a question about the maker in place of a question about the work. What that costs the person, and what Koher builds instead.
Calling somebody a bot removes a person without answering them. What that says about the one who says it, and where Koher's positions hold against it.
Some work requires a person to perceive accurately and forbids them to conclude. Then a machine arrives that executes better. What Koher builds, and why it sits beside the task rather than inside the decision.
Designing as if the user has nothing better to do is a quiet insult. Attention is a sliver of a crowded day — the demand-side twin of the parameterisation gap.
"Knowing the user" is the parameterisation gap lodged in the founding verb of a discipline. When the parameterised thing is a person, declaring the reduction is not enough — refuse to accumulate it.
Koher's growth law: density is not mass. The number of nodes — tools, conversations, students, occasions — can grow without translating into more weight on any single relationship. The architecture is the mandala, not the tower.