🌟 Greet the DAHN: The Human Experience of the MAP¶
DAHN and the Visualizer Commons¶
The MAP is a living ecology — a space where relationships, resources, and meaning co-evolve through sovereign interaction. Your experience of the MAP is shaped by how you perceive, navigate, and interact with the holons and relationships that make up the living graph of shared meaning.
This experience is delivered through two entangled layers: - Visualizer Commons — a federated network of commons, each of which stewards a set of visualizers -- components used to render properties, values, holons, collections, graphs, and dashboards, as well as buttons, menus, and tool bars, that allow you to invoke dances. - DAHN — the Dynamic, Adaptive, Holon Navigator, which generates your experience on the fly by dynamically selecting and configuring visualizers from the commons.
Together, they empower you to see, feel, and move through the MAP on your own terms.
DAHN is a person-centered navigation layer. It adapts to your context, reflects your choices, and brings coherence to everything you engage with across the MAP. Rather than imposing a fixed view, DAHN renders the living graph of the MAP — holons, offers, agreements, flows — into expressive forms that evolve with you. It’s how you see, sense, and shape the ecosystems you participate in.
Earlier, we explored how the MAP inverts the dominant social contract of digital interaction — shifting from platforms that extract value from you, to spaces where your sovereignty is foundational. This section reveals another key dimension of that inversion: your digital experience — how you see, move, and interact — is no longer controlled by the application or provider. It is yours to shape.
This may be hard to grasp at first, because most digital systems today follow a familiar pattern: each app has its own interface, its own view of your data, its own way of shaping your interactions — and its own agenda.
The MAP breaks this pattern entirely. There are no dedicated, application-specific interfaces. No design decisions made on your behalf by distant providers.
Instead, the MAP offers an integrated, sovereign, and continuous experience under your control — an interface layer that spans all your AgentSpaces, services, agreements, and relationships, across all MAP applications (mapps) and data types.
This isn’t just a UX framework. It’s a new social contract of experience:
One that delivers experiential sovereignty — the ability to shape how you see, sense, and interact with your world — while honoring data sovereignty.
That interface layer is called DAHN — the Dynamic, Adaptive, Holon Navigator — and it’s powered by a growing ecosystem of contributed visualizers, curated in a federated network of Visualizer Commons.
Greet the DAHN: The Dynamic, Adaptive, Holon Navigator¶
A shared interface layer for sovereign coordination at scale¶
DAHN is how you experience the ecosystems enabled by the MAP. It is a shared, adaptive layer of presentation that renders the holons, relationships, and actions of the MAP into a form that is navigable, meaningful, and personal. Your preferences shape what you see. That experience remains coherent across every part of the MAP — not because it’s standardized, but because it’s yours.
🔍 Unpacking the Acronym: What is DAHN?¶
The MAP interface layer is Dynamic, Adaptive and is a Holon Navigator. Each component speaks to a core capability of the MAP interface layer.
Dynamic¶
The central design challenge of DAHN is this:
How do you create a meaningful, usable human experience of a system whose structure and semantics are open-ended and ever-evolving?
Most digital systems avoid this problem by fixing the structure and interface in advance. Their UI is hardwired to a known data model and a limited set of operations. But in the MAP, there is no fixed schema — every object is a self-describing active holon, and every interaction is a dance defined at the level of the holon itself.
DAHN meets this challenge by dynamically generating the experience on the fly (i.e., at runtime). It selects visualizers — modular interface components — based on the type, structure, and context of the holon you’re engaging. That selection isn’t random or uniform. It favors the most specific and appropriate visualizer available. So if a designer has contributed a custom rendering for a given holon type — say, an ecological commons, a governance proposal, or a personality profile — that’s what you’ll see. If none exists, DAHN gracefully falls back to more generic visualizers that can still meaningfully display any holon in the system.
This means you can see and interact with anything in the MAP, no matter how novel — but not at the expense of depth or quality. The interface doesn’t flatten your experience to a lowest common denominator — it elevates it through precision, context, and radical personalization.
Adaptive¶
DAHN adapts — not only to the type of holon, but to you. As you explore the MAP, every interaction you make — choosing one visualizer over another, rearranging how things are shown, hiding what doesn’t matter, zooming into what does — becomes part of your personal configuration. DAHN remembers. It applies your choices consistently, honoring your preferences across sessions, spaces, and mapps.
But DAHN doesn’t just adapt to individuals. It also adapts collectively. Each time an agent selects a visualizer, it counts as a vote. DAHN aggregates those votes — locally and across the network — and uses them to guide default experiences. This creates a kind of crowd-sourced design and functional curation, where the most resonant visualizers rise organically through use, not top-down decisions. This shared intelligence shapes the default interface others encounter — especially newcomers — offering them starting points that reflect the living, evolving preferences of the ecosystem.
In short, DAHN adapts through two symbiotic processes: personalization and collective resonance. You shape your experience — and your experience helps shape the MAP.
Holon Navigator¶
DAHN is referred to as a holon navigator because its underlying metaphor is empowered agents navigating a multi-dimensional graph, where the nodes of the graph are self-describing, active holons of any type (e.g., agents, offers, governance models, vital capital) and the links are holon relationships (e.g., the spaces an agent belongs to, the promises of an offer, the author of a book). In other words, ALL of the data stored by whatever mapps you bring into a space is represented a knowledge graph. The self-describing nature of MAP holons means that when you visit a node you can discover its holon type and from that discover the set of properties that node has, the set of dances you can do with that node, and the set of relationships that can be traversed from that node.
As one moves through the MAP information graph, there are choices to be made. For example, I can choose which of a node's actions I want to invoke and/or choose which of its relationships I want to navigate. The result of navigating a relationship is often a collection of holons (all the promises of an offer, reviewers of a book). When presented with a collection, I may choose to filter that collection down to a subset of holons I care about (e.g., only those reviewers that have reviewed at least 5 other books). Note that regardless of whether the node is a person, an idea, an enterprise, a book, a community, a service, or any other holon, navigating the graph is possible with a very small number of primitive actions -- visiting a node, invoking actions (including editing holon properties and adding/removing related nodes), traversing relationships, and filtering collections.
Just as there are choices to be made in navigating an information graph, presenting information to human agents involves a cascading set of presentation choices regarding layout, themes, language and cultural conventions (i.e., internationalization/ localization), widget selection and configuration, and more. DAHN decouples information navigation choices from presentation choices. This separation of information from its presentation is powerful because it means the same information graph can be visualized a variety of different ways.
The navigation choices for any journey through the MAP can be expressed as a graph expression that can be saved for subsequent replay.
DAHN allows the way people visualize and interact with the MAP to continuously evolve without depending upon a centralized designer (or centralized team of designers). In keeping with the spirit of the rest of the MAP, DAHN is, itself, self-organizing. It empowers people to personalize their own experience and, in so doing, contributes to the crowd-sourced emergent design. Thus, the default visualization that is available for literally everything in the MAP is continuously evolving and reflects the collective contributions of prior MAP explorers. These explorers include HI developers who may create highly specific visualizations they have seeded into Visualizer Commons. The ability to shape their experience in highly personal ways is available to every MAP explorer. And, in doing so, they are indirectly evolving the collective experience.
And because visualizers can express multiple forms — timelines, graphs, 2D canvases, immersive journeys — DAHN supports multi-perspective navigation.
DAHN doesn’t just show you the MAP.
It helps you feel it — as a living, traversable landscape of meaning and relationship.