Candidate Design Principles
- Felt before spoken.
The system should produce immediate felt recognition before explanatory copy is needed. Copy can deepen the work, but it should not carry the whole burden of coherence.
- The real is already meta.
RELiK should not default to virtual spectacle as the highest experiential plane. Physical, embodied, environmental, and ritual surfaces are primary.
- The unknown invites engagement.
The monolith principle: an object, interface, or experience can be familiar enough to approach and strange enough to keep unfolding.
- Effort without tension.
Interfaces, artifacts, and language should feel composed, precise, and capable, not strained, over-explained, or desperate to persuade.
- Sacred texture for contemporary systems.
Technical, operational, and everyday systems can carry ritual, care, epoch, and meaning without abandoning utility.
- Operational seriousness in service of art.
Borrow the discipline, standards, symbolic systems, and performance culture of elite operators and athletes, but redirect them toward XP, design, care, culture, and creative engineering.
- Metafiction is a runtime.
Narrative structures, roles, lore, and symbolic frames can organize attention, process, agent behavior, and human commitment. Use them functionally, not decoratively.
- Integrate, do not imitate.
RELiK can study compromised domains such as military culture, luxury, atomic-age futurism, conspiracy folklore, and institutional power without importing them uncritically.
- Archive is not canon.
Prior experiments, SG0/SG9 lore, Prima, and other narrative systems should be preserved, but they only become public system canon through explicit promotion.
- Symbols should do work.
Pearls, orbs, the lowercase i, patches, monoliths, and
insignia should carry semantic or operational meaning. Avoid symbols
that are only decorative.