Scenario. Claire has been seeing the same therapist, Marcus, for four years. When they started, his practice was solo, he took insurance, and a session felt like a conversation with someone who remembered her. This year his practice was acquired by a venture-backed group that has standardized intake, introduced a new note-taking system, and set session limits the clinicians themselves didn't agree to. Claire still wants to keep seeing Marcus. Marcus still wants to keep seeing her. But both of them feel the thing they had is slipping. They need a way, on their own terms, to articulate what their work together has been for — and to hold each other to that, regardless of what the practice around them now requires.

Challenge: Design a mandate-making practice by which two parties in an ongoing pairing (employment, care, therapy, long collaboration) make enough of their shared purpose explicit to hold each other to it, and produce the articulation format, the revision procedure, and the boundaries of what stays unarticulated.

Evaluation. Strong designs find an articulation dense enough to catch drift but sparse enough not to collapse the relationship into a legalistic contract, and keep revision from becoming a renegotiation triggered by every moment of dissatisfaction.