Design By Zen — Evidence Architecture for AI
Design By Zen is a New Zealand AI lab building governed decision intelligence: evidence-bound AI that turns decisions into auditable receipts you can revisit and prove over time. Founded in 2007 by David Harvey in Tasman, New Zealand, the lab has built SHE ZenAI, powered by Omega* — a from-scratch ecosystem made from user-focused modules, not a single Large Language Model.
Built by Design By Zen, an NZ AI lab.
Evidence, not confidence.
The public entry point is Ask Omega
The public entry point is Ask Omega, an evidence-bound decision tool that turns a question into a structured decision record — clarity, certainty, key factors, risk notes, and recommended next actions.
But a decision rarely stays where it started. A hernia diagnosed in 2022 isn't just a health event — it becomes a decision about work capacity, a question about cover and cost, a strain or a strengthening of the people around you. A shift in how you plan for what's next.
By the time surgery was undertaken in 2024, due to the "system", I was in a far worse condition; the original question had touched Wellbeing, Economic, Social and Security — not in a straight line, but as a set of bonds that keep acting on each other over time. Some of what changes is loss. Some of it, only visible in hindsight, is not.
Figure 1 shows the Six-Domain Human Systems Model.
One life. Six domains. Every bond acts on the others over time. The domains are equal; the nearer ones appear larger only because they sit closer in this view. Illustrative, not data.
Ask Omega is built for that shape of problem, not just the moment of decision. Every record it creates is evidence-bound and revisitable — so when one domain shifts, you can trace what else it touched, and what to do next. The Comfort Index measures not a single score at a single moment, but whether the whole picture — across Wellbeing, Economic, Social, Security, Smart Living, and Planet/Emergencies — is genuinely improving over time.
The same architecture extends into MTN-1, a study management layer for wearable-informed research and source-of-truth verification.
It also powers the patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) Clinical Intelligence Ecosystem, for patients, surgeons and physiotherapists working from a shared near-real-time health pathway; and Unified-1, a boutique Health, Wealth and Connectivity app for professional users.
Instead of asking a chatbot to be the whole system, SHE ZenAI separates the LLM as the voice from OmegaSense as the evidence-bound memory. The result is a governed intelligence ecosystem for decisions, clinical workflows, personal data and integrated user utilities.
For media, manufacturing and partnership enquiries
Why Design By Zen exists: the gap between confidence and evidence
On 22 February 2011, a severe earthquake struck Christchurch at 12:51pm. GeoNet records it as M 6.2; 185 people died.1 David Harvey's wife was in the house when it struck. The building exploded with the shaking. The microwave went through the opposing wall. She survived — but with PTSD that took years to resolve, measured in part by data from a Fitbit wearable: heart rate, ECG, temperature, sleep. The nervous system as an honest witness to recovery.
David watched as her confidence and her actual physiological state decoupled and slowly — over years — reconnected. He recognised what he was seeing: the gap between felt safety and evidenced safety is measurable. Closing that gap, with real data over time, is what recovery actually looks like.
Confidence without evidence is not safety. It is performance.
David Harvey, founder, Design By Zen
That insight became the Comfort Index — a deterministic model measuring the alignment between confidence and evidence for any entity: human, clinical, organisational or artificial. It underpins everything Design By Zen builds.
1 Public records differ slightly in shorthand reporting: GeoNet lists the event as M 6.2, while other public summaries refer to the Canterbury earthquake sequence as magnitude 6.3. The official death toll is 185.
Thirty-five years, one coherent arc
The Comfort Index is calculated across eight ethical dimensions. Each contributes to the overall constant — weighted by context, updated by evidence events, and governed by a protocol that determines how and when the constant may change.
Design By Zen builds a governed intelligence platform that separates the LLM as the voice from OmegaSense as the evidence-bound memory. Each layer has a defined role. No layer is asked to be the whole truth.
Date | Event | Overview |
|---|---|---|
2026 | Evidence Architecture Trilogy published. | Three reference-backed articles. Homepage repositioned. Ask Omega study open to the founding cohort. ComfortIndex.org launched. EQ1 partnership sought. |
2023–25 | The ecosystem converges. | OmegaSense Kernel. Ask Omega. Unified-1. Comfort Index calculus formalised. Clinical pilot deployment with an orthopaedic surgeon in Nelson. Apple M4 mesh node architecture defined. |
2023–24 | Q* calculus to COR — the cementing step. | The ethical decision operator Q* applied to the Comfort Index constant. The result is the COR, or Comfort Output Ratio, the central algorithmic element of the Omega* ecosystem. Calculus to code to experience and back to calculus. |
September 2023
| The breakthrough — Comfort Index calculus introduced | Introduced as an untested mathematical signal. Not derived from a dataset, not trained on examples. A proposition: that the alignment between confidence and evidence for any entity could be expressed as a single, dynamic, updatable number. |
2018–22 | R1 and R2 — the scalar form emerges. | A return to the 1991 FOREX foundations. Two crude scalars, R1 and R2, are derived. Not elegant, not complete, but directionally correct. The shape of the solution becomes expressible in mathematics.
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2011 | February earthquake — Christchurch. 185 deaths. | Wife survives. PTSD follows. The house is destroyed. The Comfort Index insight emerges from lived experience. |
2011–14 | EQ1 designed and crystallised. | A dining table engineered as earthquake shelter, mesh server node and communications hub. The design process ran from 2011 through to 2014, when the renders crystallised. Commercial quantities of NZ-sourced Oak in stock. |
2007 | Design By Zen founded | The Shed Studio, Tasman, New Zealand. Technology, design and long-game thinking. |
2005 | Driving & Flying Simulation | Research and development of the SimRoom brand & VisionRacer VR3 simulator. |
2000 | Architectural Restoration | The restoration of Fellworth House, built in 1876, took eight years. The mansion house was the original home of the Cawthron Institute. |
1991
| FOREX algorithm development — the mathematical origin. | The earliest expression of the Comfort Index problem space. Currency markets are pure confidence-versus-evidence systems: every trade is a bet on the gap between a predicted state and an evidenced one. |
What SHE ZenAI powered by Omega* actually is
Design By Zen builds a governed intelligence platform that separates the LLM as the voice from OmegaSense as the evidence-bound memory. Each layer has a defined role. No layer is asked to be the whole truth.
Title | Components of Omega* Unified Ecsosystem |
|---|---|
SHE ZenAI | The Social Harmony Engine. The governed framework. Designed for clinical and high-trust domains. |
Unified-1 | Personal intelligence for professional users. Health, Wealth, Connectivity. Comfort Index governed. |
OmegaSense | Deterministic substrate. Evidence-bound memory. Operates without an LLM call. |
Omega* | The algorithmic engine. Ethical calculus, Comfort Index, decision system. |
Maya | Voice persona. Designed to render from substrate facts rather than inventing its own memory. |
Ask Omega | Evidence-bound decision intelligence. Study cohort — 1000 founding practitioners. |
The Q* ethical calculus applies weighting across all eight to produce the Comfort Output Ratio (COR) — the live constant for any registered entity.
The Evidence Architecture Trilogy
Three reference-backed articles published in May 2026 documenting the architectural argument in full.
The EQ1: a dining table engineered as an earthquake shelter
Designed by David Harvey between 2011 and 2014 in direct response to the Christchurch earthquake sequence. The EQ1 is a precision-engineered dining table that functions simultaneously as an earthquake shelter, a mesh communications node and a local Comfort Index server appliance.
It is not a bunker and it is not survivalist equipment. It is the most civilised possible response to uncertainty — a piece of furniture you sit around at dinner, designed to help keep your family safer if the world changes overnight.
EQ1 — Design By Zen. A dining table, work desk or holiday home desk engineered as shelter, mesh node and communications hub.
EQ1 — Elevation. The structure is engineered to shelter occupants during seismic events. Oak and structural steel. NZ materials held at The Shed HQ, Tasman.
EQ1 — In context. A piece of furniture that earns its place in any home, and keeps the people in it safer when the ground moves.
EQ1 specification
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Design origin: David Harvey, Design By Zen, 2011–2014
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Structure: Engineered solid oak and structural steel. Arch-form shelter. Load-bearing design prepared for formal engineering validation.
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Features: Lift-top storage. Slide-down shutters. Internal access to essentials and communications.
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Technology: Comfort Index mesh node cavity. Apple M4 appliance ready. Local seismic sensor integration. Passive monitoring.
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Production: CAD/CADCAM status to be confirmed. NZ materials available. Prototype conversations initiated.
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IP status: Design By Zen. Available for licensing. NZ manufacture preferred. International licensing open.
Context
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20,000+ — earthquakes located globally by the USGS each year. Many more occur but are too small or remote to be detected consistently.
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2011 — the year the EQ1 was designed.
Manufacturing and licensing partners sought for the EQ1
Design By Zen holds the design IP and NZ-sourced materials for the EQ1. We are not seeking investment to build units ourselves. We are seeking manufacturing and distribution partners who understand what they would be building — and what connects it to the Comfort Index mesh ecosystem.
Manufacturing partner — New Zealand
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CNC-capable furniture or kitchen manufacturer
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Takes possession of NZ materials for the first production run
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Builds under Design By Zen licence with an NZ craftsmanship guarantee
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Named NZ production partner on product and press materials
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Prototype cost to be established — conversation open
Manufacturing partner — New Zealand
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Furniture, emergency preparedness or smart home manufacturer
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Licenses the EQ1 design for their market territory
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Each unit ships with a Comfort Index node pre-configured to the ComfortIndex.org registry
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Design By Zen obligation: IP, craftsmanship standard, Comfort Index node integration
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Licensee obligation: productionisation, distribution, market development
Comfort Index mesh deployment partner
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Hospital, school, government facility or emergency management agency
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EQ1 as institutional shelter and local Comfort Index mesh node
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Connected to the ComfortIndex.org registry and civil defence alert systems
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Family mesh subscription: home, work, holiday home, parents, children nodes
The EQ1 was designed ten years before the world needed it. It is the physical node in a governed Comfort Index mesh that no other furniture manufacturer can offer.
NIST's AI Risk Management Framework defines trustworthy AI in terms of validity, reliability, accountability, transparency, explainability and fairness. ISO/IEC 42001 frames responsible AI as an operating-system question rather than a model question. The Comfort Index is proposed as the dynamic constant those frameworks identify as necessary but do not specify.
Design By Zen: a boutique lab by deliberate choice
The Omega* core is built to scale. Design By Zen's commercial decision, however, is to work deeply with a small number of clients and partners for whom the distinction between confident AI and trustworthy AI is not academic — it is consequential.
The proposed path is to work with an initial group of 100 early clients, drawn from an eventual cohort of 1,000. These clients participate by using the system, helping improve real outcomes rather than simply validating a mass-market user model. The same principle applies to manufacturing and distribution partners: one right partner is worth more than twenty convenient ones.
Design By Zen at a glance
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Founded 2007 — David Harvey, Tasman, New Zealand
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Legal entity: VRI (NZ) Limited, trading as Design By Zen
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Location: "The Shed" AI Lab HQ, Tasman, Nelson region, New Zealand 7175
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Positioning: Boutique AI lab building governed decision intelligence for high-trust domains.
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Mathematical lineage: FOREX algorithms (1991) → R1/R2 scalars (2019–22) → Comfort Index calculus (September 2023) → Q* → COR (2023–24)
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Clinical partner: Orthopaedic surgeon, Nelson, NZ. Active Clinical Intelligence Ecosystem deployment.
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Advisor: Ian Williams, UK Director. Former CTO and healthtech co-founder.
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Media: TVNZ · Wired · T3 Magazine · North & South · The Gadget Show
Contact Design By Zen
Media
Feature stories, interviews and background briefings on the Comfort Index, the EQ1 or evidence architecture. dbz@zenig.nz
Manufacturing
EQ1 New Zealand production partnership, international licensing, Comfort Index node integration. Materials available. dbz@zenig.nz
Partnership and development
Ask Omega enterprise, Unified-1, Comfort Index mesh deployment, ComfortIndex.org registry. dev@zenig.nz
designbyzen.com · comfortindex.org · askomega.org · Tasman, New Zealand
Applications of the Comfort Index - Appendices
From governed state to governed actions - User Intent & Request → Payment/Entitlement → CI Kernel Evaluation → CI Invariant Gate → Q5 Decision Maker → Governed Decision Output → Commit & Audit.