Research Note 001 · Charles Mindful Wellness Research Program · August 2026
A condition has to be named before it can be altered.
These are the working names of the Research Program: twelve families of condition, thirteen operations that can be performed on one, and the eight steps an encounter moves through. Everything below is transcribed from the program's master specification. The names carry no findings yet. Findings come from running encounters, and the first public iterations are still ahead.
The marks carry the argument too. A condition family is drawn inside a circle, because a condition is something you are inside. An operation is an open form, because an operation is a move somebody makes. The eight steps share one line that runs edge to edge, and only the eighth turns back, because without refinement the grammar is a line and not a loop.
Layer one
Twelve condition families
A condition is an existing or designed arrangement that shapes what participants can perceive, do, expect, express, interpret, choose, refuse, or become within an encounter. Conditions can be explicit rules or quiet background structures.
What receives notice and how long attention is sustained.
What can be sensed and the intensity or mode of sensing.
How an encounter unfolds in time.
How bodies, objects, and activities are arranged.
How media, tools, objects, and surfaces shape action.
How meaning is framed before or during encounter.
How making is structured and evaluated.
How bodily presence is engaged.
What actions are possible, expected, permitted, optional, or refused.
How people encounter one another.
How authority, legitimacy, ownership, and responsibility are distributed.
How systems mediate action and information.
Layer two
Thirteen operations
An operation is what gets done to a condition.
Layer three
Eight steps
Name the familiar condition, perform one operation on it, and the encounter moves through eight steps.
- 01
FAMILIAR CONDITIONthe arrangement already in place - 02
ALTERATIONone condition changed on purpose - 03
EMBODIED ENCOUNTERthe group meets the change in a body - 04
RECOGNITIONsomething previously background becomes perceptible - 05
QUESTIONINGthe group asks what else was optional - 06
REIMAGININGan alternative arrangement gets rehearsed - 07
TRACEthe encounter leaves a record - 08
REFINEMENTthe condition is revised, and the grammar closes into a loop
Evidentiary tag: program framework · source: CMW Research Program Master Specification, sections 5 and 8
The Research Program page holds the thesis this vocabulary serves, the standards every stream answers to, and the two streams now running.