Viability Studies & the Working Repository: An orientation & situated starting map for comparative enquiry into form persistence and change

Reality appears saturated with recurrent but non-identical patterns. Distinguishable regularities give grounds to investigate constraints on possibilities and the dynamics through which configurations arise, persist, change and dissolve. The Teabag Test justifies selective reverse engineering: a purpose-relevant reconstruction can support enquiry or participation without an exhaustive causal history. Minimum relational legibility floors identify what must become sufficiently intelligible for that purpose and what would require further reconstruction. Viability Studies is proposed as a field of comparative enquiry into these relationships across domains, scales and boundaries. The Working Repository supplies a substantive initial instance: a candidate map and an architecture for accumulating situated relational accounts, their evidence, limits, comparisons and revisions. Specialist participation is constitutive of its development. Contributions need not report new discoveries; organising knowledge already dispersed across specialisms may expose relationships, consequential differences and further questions. Each instance remains partial, while maintaining and comparing its records can develop the resolution available for enquiry. Participants can extend the architecture or build independent instances from the public orientation; comparisons between builds can investigate what organising choices reveal or obscure. Sustained availability and stewardship exceed the current author's capacity. The Repository is subject to the constraints and dynamics it investigates, including the effects of its own categories and uses on participation. Increased legibility does not guarantee desirable emergence. The contribution is the connected orientation, substantive map and cumulative comparative architecture. Close antecedents inform its assessment; historical distinctiveness and additional utility remain open. No specialist pilot or implemented governance is reported.