Building Tools for Collective Impact
Coordination isn’t just a human capability—it’s a kind of technology. We believe complex coordination can’t be prescribed from the top down; it evolves from simple, well-designed rules applied consistently over time.
At Henkaku Center, we design and build coordination tools we actively use—treating them as living systems: emergent, adaptive, and continuously refined to support cooperation at every scale. Our work is grounded in rigorous research of ontological, institutional, and technological precedents, ensuring that each tool is developed with awareness, humility, and respect for the lessons of those who came before.
Coordination Technology refers to tools, methods, and systems designed to enhance human cooperation, collective action, and organizational effectiveness. The field is inherently applied, directly informing the development of practical tools, software platforms, governance mechanisms, institutional designs, and incentive structures for groups—from small teams and large institutions to entire jurisdictions—to adaptively, transparently, and accountably achieve shared goals.
We have a particular interest in exploring coordination technology in an antidisciplinary context, where boundaries between fields are intentionally blurred.
Projects are intentionally finite, mission-driven endeavors with clear goals, collaborators, outputs, and measures of success.
An antidisciplinary member registrar and affinity graph to map and connect participants across our network, making relationships and shared interests visible.
A system for instantiating and tracking projects and initiatives, ensuring clarity, accountability, and adaptability from inception to completion.
A collaborative, wiki-like system integrated with note-taking tools and AI assistants, enabling dynamic, accessible knowledge capture and synthesis across our community.
A system for aligning participation, contribution, and recognition across our network. The Incentives Platform integrates with our publication, funding, and evaluation processes to ensure that impactful work is rewarded, documented, and made visible—supporting a culture of sustained collaboration and excellence.
A publishing platform to disseminate peer-reviewed antidisciplinary research, showcasing the language, methods, and tools emerging from our community while fostering dialogue across disciplines and institutions. This work builds upon the existing Journal of Design & Science (JoDS).
A project dedicated to illuminating historical and contemporary precedents for novel organizations that demonstrate advanced techniques for incentivizing effective human coordination. This includes an introspective element—using our own research center as a living laboratory to test and refine these approaches in practice.
A project to develop a shared linguistic ontology for the emerging field of antidisciplinary coordination. This project maps the primitives, principles, agents, relationships, structures, and tools that define our vision. The dictionary serves as both an internal exercise—clarifying and aligning our own terminology—and an external resource, offering a common language that enables broader participation and understanding beyond our institution.
A project to derive open-source principles for operating an antidisciplinary organization. This charter will articulate foundational values, governance models, and operational practices that can be adapted and adopted by other institutions committed to crossing disciplinary boundaries.
CTC will be an institution in and of itself, incubated within Henkaku Center. CTC aims to:
Eventually, CTC will spin out into a separate organization—but it starts here.