Gentle Structure Lab
Core Question
What structural features of technology design create the experience of being contained — held? How can psychoanalytic thinking become not just content distributed through technology, but structure built into the medium itself?
The Gentle Structure Lab investigates how software design and AI can support processes of working through without controlling them. It asks what happens when the design principles come not from UX conventions or behavioural psychology, but from clinical psychoanalytic practice — from the experience of what it means to hold someone while they think.
Intellectual Lineage
This programme draws on a specific constellation of thinkers who have each, in different ways, asked what technology could be:
Alan Kay — computing as a medium for thought, not merely a tool for tasks. The computer is a metamedium: its real power lies in enabling forms of thinking that did not exist before.
Yuk Hui (许煜) — cosmotechnics. Different epistemologies produce different technologies. The question is not how to use technology better, but what kind of technology a given worldview would produce.
Bret Victor / Dynamicland — philosophy as space. The environment itself should embody the principles, not just deliver content about them.
Ian Bogost — procedural rhetoric. Systems make arguments through their rules, not just through their text or images.
An Under-Explored Intersection
There are technologists who think philosophically. There are psychoanalysts who write about technology. There are designers who invoke "empathy." But the intersection of active clinical practice, psychoanalytic theory, and hands-on technical building remains under-explored. This programme works from that intersection, asking: what would technology designed from psychoanalytic clinical experience look like?
The Core Insight — Clinical Methods as Design Methods
The guiding hypothesis of this programme is that clinical psychoanalytic methods can be systematically translated into software design principles. The clinical situation already knows how to hold someone through difficult thinking. The question is whether that knowledge can be structurally encoded — and what is lost or gained in translation.
| Clinical Method | Design Principle | |
|---|---|---|
| Containment (Bion) | → | AI never touches user's text |
| Holding environment (Winnicott) | → | Structure without control |
| Clinical process stages | → | Different emotional registers per interface stage |
| Free association | → | Brain dump (Enough Today) |
| Session ending / containing anxiety | → | "That is enough for today" |
| Auxiliary ego functioning | → | Product provides structure when user is overwhelmed |
Each row represents a proposed structural translation: the same function, attempted in a different medium. The research investigates which of these translations hold, which break down, and what the breakdowns reveal about both psychoanalytic theory and technology design.
Products as Experiments
Each product is a research site — a designed experiment testing whether specific clinical principles can be structurally encoded in software.
Palimpsest
Container-oriented design for academic and reflective writing. AI assists structure and reflection; the user's text remains untouched.
Enough Today
Anti-to-do-list. Brain dump everything → AI says "that is enough" → structured reflection. Designed to contain anxiety rather than optimise productivity.
PrototypePEP Plugin
Makes psychoanalytic literature's own biases visible during reading. Surfaces the theoretical commitments and blind spots embedded in clinical writing.
Developed · not yet launched博雅精神分析
Course as gentle structure. Subscription-based psychoanalytic education designed so that the course structure itself models the process it teaches.
Active · 260+ subscribersMethodology
Research through Design (RtD)
Knowledge generated from the act of designing. Each product iteration produces designerly knowledge — not just a better product, but new understanding of what containment means in a technological context.
Psycho-social Methods
Free-association narrative interviews (FANI), researcher countertransference as data, attention to defence mechanisms in the research encounter. The user's experience is studied psychoanalytically, not just behaviourally.
Strong Concept
Following Höök & Löwgren: "gentle structure" as a strong concept — design knowledge that is more abstract than a particular instance but more concrete than a theory. Transferable across products and contexts.
The Recursion
The method itself is an instance of the thing being studied. Studying gentle structure through a research process that is itself gently structured. The methodology models its own object.
Container-Oriented Design Principles
Current working principles, derived primarily from Palimpsest development. These are provisional — the research programme is designed to test, refine, and extend them.
- AI never touches user's text — every word is theirs. The system may reflect, question, or structure, but the user's expression remains inviolate.
- Protective friction — intentional friction that protects thinking. Not all smooth flows serve the user; some slowdowns create space for reflection.
- Stage awareness — different stages carry different emotional registers. A brainstorming interface should feel different from a revision interface, because the psychological work is different.
- Methodology as structure, not rules — the user defines "good." AI reflects their commitments back to them rather than imposing external standards.
- Mode switching externalised as conscious user choice — the system does not silently change its behaviour. Every shift in mode is visible and chosen.
- Transparency is a condition of containment — you cannot feel held by something you do not understand. The system's logic must be legible.
Research Stages
Experiment Documentation
Design reflections for each product — documenting what was built, why, and what was learned. Making tacit design knowledge explicit.
First User Inquiry
Pilot psycho-social conversation with a first user (Enough Today). FANI interview method. What does "being contained by software" feel like from the inside?
Iteration Cycles
Redesign based on user feedback, 2–3 documented rounds. Research question: what design changes affect the experience of containment? Product outcome: user-driven improvements.
Cross-Product Comparison
Annotated portfolio across all products + framework paper. Which principles hold across writing tools, daily containment, critical reading, and education? Product outcome: design principles for all future products.
Theory
Connect findings to Yuk Hui's cosmotechnics, Alan Kay's metamedium, and the broader question: what kind of technology does psychoanalytic epistemology produce?
Companion Writing
A Psychoanalytic Vibe Coder
Not documentation and not marketing — but reflective writing that runs alongside the building process. Each piece asks: what am I learning about psychoanalysis by trying to encode it in software? What am I learning about software by approaching it psychoanalytically?
Roots
Gentle Structure Lab formalises a line of practice that began with game design in 2011 and shifted through psychoanalytic training toward tool-building. The move from games to software tools in 2026 was not a pivot but an evolution — the same question (how does designed experience create emotional space?) applied to a different medium.
Game design MA
Game Design and Creative Practice at Communication University of China. Early research on emotional experience in interactive media.
indienova
Experimental game demos exploring emotional experience. Continued creative practice in game design.
Psychodynamic training begins
Started personal analysis and psychodynamic training. Began thinking about games × psychoanalysis. Wrote game design proposals combining clinical thinking with interactive experience.
Games as psychoanalytic practice
QPHU game development begins. Experimental game demos exploring dissociation and trauma through interactive design.
From games to tools
Shift from game design to tool design. Palimpsest, Enough Today, Returning Path (Buddhist app), PEP plugin launched. A Psychoanalytic Vibe Coder Substack begins. Programme formally established.