Deterministic perspective instrument · Public sector

The same issue, re-rendered at every analytical altitude.

OrbitalScene changes where you are looking from, not what you are looking at. It shows how the distribution of power, resources and responsibility changes as the viewport rises — and states plainly what each altitude can no longer see.

Built for local government and public-sector teams making decisions across departmental, organisational and system boundaries.

View the Scene The method

24 canonical service areas · 5 orbits · 120 authored scenes

Core logic

01Altitude determines the viewport.
02The viewport determines the unit of analysis.
03The unit of analysis determines the stakeholder universe.
04The stakeholder universe reveals where experience, power, responsibility and resources sit.

Method

An instrument, not an opinion.

Fix the altitude

Nothing is analysed until the altitude is chosen. The same issue examined from two altitudes is two different objects, and the instrument refuses to blur them.

Render the viewport

The altitude selects a viewport: what is inside the frame, what sits at the edge, and what has been left outside it entirely.

Read the distribution

Inside the viewport the instrument locates experience, power, responsibility and resources — which are almost never held by the same party.

Disclose the loss

Every altitude sacrifices something. Each scene states what has lost resolution, so the output is never mistaken for the whole picture.

The Orbits

Five altitudes. One issue. Five different distributions of power.

The orbit model is fixed. It does not vary by council, service or political administration — only the viewport moves.

Altitude axis · 05 highestRange widens ↑ · Resolution falls ↑

05
Strategic Orbit
The settlement unit. National policy, funding regimes, markets and multi-year structural drift.
The rules of the game, and who writes them.
Contextual range5 of 5
Individual res.1 of 5
04
Civic Orbit
The place unit. The council alongside health, police, housing providers, schools and residents.
A whole place and every institution acting inside it.
Contextual range4 of 5
Individual res.2 of 5
03
Authority Orbit
The corporate unit. Directorates, budgets, statutory duties and the whole-council ledger.
The authority as a single accountable organisation.
Contextual range3 of 5
Individual res.3 of 5
02
Service Orbit
The delivery unit. Caseloads, queues, thresholds and the practitioners holding them.
One service's demand, capacity and decision rules.
Contextual range2 of 5
Individual res.4 of 5
01
Household Orbit
The lived unit. One person, one family, one address, one continuous experience of the system.
A single life, framed end to end rather than service by service.
Contextual range1 of 5
Individual res.5 of 5

View the Scene

Select a service area. Choose an orbit. View the scene.

Every output below is an authored mapping held in the codebase. The same pair always returns the same scene — no model, no inference, no request leaves your browser.

Rendered: Temporary Accommodation · Household Orbit

Altitude 01 of 05

Household Orbit

Temporary Accommodation / Household Orbit / Altitude 01

One family, one room, one placement

At the lowest altitude temporary accommodation is not a tenure but a room, a shared kitchen and a countdown of nights that never quite becomes a home.

Viewport: One household placed in nightly-paid or leased temporary accommodation, from the night of placement through however many moves follow before settled housing or eviction.
Unit of analysis: The household's continuous experience of one or more TA placements, including every internal move between rooms, boroughs and providers.
Stakeholder universe: The household and its children; the TA provider or managing agent; the placements officer; the school losing or gaining a pupil; a health visitor; occasionally an environmental health officer.
Where experience sits: Dominates this altitude: the shared bathroom, the ban on cooking, the two-hour journey back to the old school, the fear that the next inspection ends in a further move.
Where power sits: Sits with the provider who can end a licence with short notice and with the placements officer choosing where capacity exists, not where suitability is best.
Where responsibility sits: Formally the council's suitability duty; in practice diluted across a managing agent, a superior landlord and sometimes a company several steps removed from either.
Where resources sit: A subsistence rate, a school transport arrangement if the family is persistent enough to secure one, and whatever the household can carry between moves.
What enters the viewport: The compounding cost of instability — missed school days, disrupted GP registration, the exhaustion of packing a life into bin bags more than once.
What loses resolution: Whether this placement is typical of the stock the council uses, or an outlier that should trigger a contract review.
Resolution disclosure: This altitude renders one household's lived conditions precisely and the provider market not at all. Do not use it to judge overall TA quality.

Open this scene on its own shareable page →

Why Deterministic

Because a public decision must be reproducible.

Every scene in OrbitalScene is written by a person and held in the codebase as an explicit mapping. Selecting a service area and an orbit performs a table lookup — nothing is generated, sampled, ranked or inferred.

The instrument therefore behaves the same way in a scrutiny committee as it does in a workshop: identical inputs return an identical scene, this year and next.

Reproducible
The same pair always returns the same scene.
Auditable
Every scene is readable, versioned source, not a model output.
Local
No API call, no database, no telemetry, no inference.
Honest
Each altitude discloses what it cannot resolve.

Raise the altitude, and the argument changes shape.