About

Who

Champignon is made by one person. It began as an attempt to settle an argument in one household with something better than assertion, and turned into a two-year reading of the literature on domestic cognitive labour, a scored library of 402 tasks, and an app.

It is not a company, not a startup, and not funded by anybody. It will never be a subscription, because an app that has to keep a household coming back to pay its way is the wrong shape for this problem.

Why the reasoning is public

Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

Because the category doesn't. The apps in this market explain nothing. They present a number and ask you to accept it. Ours would be no more trustworthy than theirs if it arrived the same way.

Because a number two people argue over should be checkable. If you are going to sit next to someone and look at a reading of your household, you are entitled to know what produced it, which parts of it are measured, and which parts somebody chose.

Because there is no validated instrument for any of this. Not in English, not in French. The whole field is short of measurement, and anyone building something here is making judgement calls. The only honest response is to publish them as judgements and let them be argued with, rather than presenting a choice as a finding.

How it is made

Slowly, and in written arguments. Every decision has a log entry saying what was decided, when, and — mostly — what was rejected and why. The task library was scored against anchors and rank-checked, not assigned by feel. The design's colour system was chosen by measuring every pair it could produce against colour-vision deficiency, because the app's most-viewed image is two colours next to each other and there was no version of guessing at that.

Most of the interesting decisions in this project are refusals: no gamification, no streaks, no accounts, no analytics, no population statistics inside the product, no language that makes one person the problem. They are in the brief as non-negotiables, and they have each cost something.

What is genuinely unfinished

The library. It is the part where somebody else's household knows more than this one does, and the contribution routes exist to get at that.