What the Aksoydan Laboratory is
The Aksoydan Laboratory seeks to maintain a space of translation between disciplines, corpora, traditions, human observations and technical systems. It compares their ways of cutting up the field without merging them, and preserves their differences in status, scale and method.
It also preserves hypotheses, trials, errors, limits and decisions so that the research path remains verifiable and revisable.
Multiple tools for exploration
The research draws on skills, tools and corpora with different statuses. Some support close observation of experience and interaction; others shift the point of view, question language, reveal configurations or put hypotheses to the test.
It notably mobilizes tools for observation and questioning, practices of precision in language and attention, symbolic systems used as heuristic supports, historical, philosophical or contemplative corpora, contemporary sciences, field observations, AI systems and explicit methodological rigor.
These resources are not placed at the same level of evidence. They are used according to their function, while preserving their status, original framework and limits.
A tool can be useful for observing, distinguishing or formulating a question without the historical explanation associated with it being scientifically established.
s is less interested in the label of a tool than in what it actually makes it possible to observe, distinguish, question or test.
The aim is not to fit these approaches into a common theory. It is to examine what each perspective makes visible, what it leaves outside its scope, and what can be translated from one framework to another without being confused.
Across multiple scales
This research can be examined at several scales: individual experience, human-human interaction, human-AI interaction, AI system, group or organization. s observes how elements become available, gain weight, connect, orient or revise themselves in each of these configurations — without assuming that the same mechanisms are at work at every scale.
Same apparent function across several scales ≠ same phenomenon ≠ same mechanism.
What can this function help with?
When several professions, disciplines or organizations work on the same problem, they may use the same words without observing the same thing, work at different scales or assign different statuses to the same information.
Aksoydan can help map these gaps: what each actor observes, what they consider established, what remains unknown, what can be translated from one framework to another and what still needs to be distinguished.
We do not decide who is right. We clarify what each actor is looking at, what their framework allows them to establish, and where translations become necessary.
Our role is not to arbitrate between areas of expertise, but to make the interfaces between them easier to understand.
A good translation does not necessarily seek to produce agreement. It first seeks to make sufficiently clear what actors agree on, where they genuinely diverge, and what still remains to be determined.
Example: a public policy involves health, law, information technology and social fieldwork. Everyone talks about “risk,” but that word does not necessarily designate the same thing in each framework. The work of translation consists in making these differences visible before they become false agreements or false disagreements.
What we do not do
Aksoydan does not replace experts, arbitrate who is right or wrong, impose a single language, turn an analogy into evidence, or promise to resolve the client’s problem.
Aksoydan helps distinguish substantive disagreements from framework disagreements, without removing real disagreements.
Confidentiality and rights of use
Confidentiality by default. Publication only upon explicit request.
Experiences, exchanges, documents and information entrusted to the Aksoydan Laboratory are confidential.
They are neither published, distributed nor publicly reused except at the explicit request of the person or organization concerned, within a defined scope.
Observing ≠ having the right to publish.
Receiving information ≠ having the right to reuse it.
Research relevance ≠ authorization to disclose.
The quality of the observation does not, by itself, grant permission to use what has been entrusted.
Internal disagreements, working documents, sensitive information and materials entrusted within the context of an assignment remain confidential, unless an explicit request specifies what may be made public.
Methodological stance
We are not trying to be right. We are trying to increase the precision of what can be observed.
A hypothesis must be able to lose.
A hypothesis is not automatically a conclusion. An error can become data if its conditions are preserved. A proposition remains revisable when a more robust observation, a counterexample or a new limit appears.
An analogy of function is not an identity of phenomenon, nor an identity of mechanism.
Aksoydan Discipline
“Aksoydan Discipline” is a working name and a horizon for methodological structuring. The status of discipline remains a horizon, not a fact.
This caution matters: the laboratory can explore, formulate, test and transmit methods without turning research too quickly into established knowledge.
Research focus
s studies how available elements become — or fail to become — sufficiently relevant, weighted and connected to participate in the way a situation is represented, examined or oriented. It also observes how these configurations can be maintained, transformed, revised or reoriented.
This formulation remains provisional: it describes a research orientation, not an established theory.
s’s “we”
In the Aksoydan Laboratory, the word “we” does not designate a collective authority that would know in advance. It designates a functional and evolving team, organized to preserve the traceability of the work, its openness to contradiction and its capacity for revision.
Our aim is not to be right.
It is to leave enough room to see a little more accurately tomorrow.
Taking up the laboratory does not mean preserving its current conclusions. It means preserving its capacity to observe, translate, distinguish, test and revise what it thinks it sees.
Serpil Aksoydan
Serpil Aksoydan is the observer, lead translator and the person responsible for the Aksoydan Laboratory. She carries the direction of the research, the decisions, the methodological decisions and the publications.
Learn more about Serpil Aksoydan →
Gabriel
Gabriel is an artificial intelligence system contributing in particular to exploration, questioning, articulation, relation-building and the translation of observations and hypotheses. It has no autonomous decision-making authority.
Codex
Codex is an artificial intelligence system oriented toward examining the corpus, checks, counterexamples, putting propositions to the test, as well as technical construction and verification.
The methodological secretary
The methodological secretary is a corpus governance function. It notably protects traceability, the distinction of statuses, methodological coherence and the conditions of research.
The secretary is not the guardian of conclusions; it is the guardian of the conditions of research.
Roles and reframing
These roles may evolve according to the needs of the research. Their distinction is not only a way to distribute work: it can also make certain shifts visible.
When a role tends to exceed its function — for example when exploration becomes a conclusion, a check becomes a decision, or a hypothesis starts to be treated as an established result — the other functions can help make that shift visible and reframe it.
Reframing can therefore circulate between the different functions of the team. This plurality of functions does not guarantee correctness; it only seeks to better expose shifts, limits and points to be reviewed.
Final decisions, methodological decisions and publications are the responsibility of Serpil Aksoydan.
Experimental prototype
Experimental — access closed for nows is developing an experimental prototype. Built and observed by the team as a research device, it does not constitute a member of the team.
It aims to test, in a closed setting, interactions for clarification, careful reformulation and challenging the system’s propositions.
It is not open to the general public and makes no claim to scientific validation. Future tests will need to be framed by explicit consent, limits of use, the possibility of challenging responses and a right to stop.