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DhyanaTech · Knoxville, Tennessee
A Translational Research and Practice Program at DhyanaTech
Founding statement · v1.0 · June 2026
DhyanaTech is a Knoxville-based solutions company. We build software, manufacturing automation, and resilient infrastructure for small business owners and working people, populations whose needs and constraints are substantially underrepresented in mainstream design practice and in the academic research that shapes it. This document articulates the research and practice program that underlies our commercial work, the questions that drive it, and the commitments we are making to the region and to the broader conversation about technology in service of economic mobility. We call the program DhyanaResearch.
The program is grounded in standpoint as well as in scholarship. As co-founder and CTO, I came to this work the long way around: leaving high school early, working in the bricklayers' union until the 2008 recession layoffs, and returning to school through the University of Tennessee, where I earned a substantial portion of a bachelor's degree, including coursework in social psychology, before financial hardship pulled me back into full-time work. Years later I completed an associate's degree in civil engineering technology at Pellissippi State Community College, with certificates in construction management and in sustainability and design, alongside coursework in sociology at East Tennessee State University. My working life has run across the trades, maintenance and operations, software engineering, and now company leadership, while I continue to earn my living through a day job alongside the work of building DhyanaTech. The population this program intends to research and serve is a population I know from inside, and that vantage point is not separable from the work.
I foreground that standpoint because the research traditions we draw on, including participatory design, community-based research, and practitioner inquiry, treat standpoint as methodologically relevant rather than as personal disclosure. Who does the research, from what position, shapes what the research can see. We believe the work that follows is stronger because of where it comes from, and weaker to the extent we forget that.
The dominant pattern in business software is to assume the user has time, attention, training, and institutional support. Most small business owners and frontline workers have none of these in reliable supply. They are building livelihoods between other obligations, learning unfamiliar tools while running their operations, and making consequential decisions (financial, legal, operational) without the infrastructure that a corporate employee can take for granted.
When technology designed for well-resourced users is deployed into under-resourced contexts, the effect is often the opposite of what was advertised. Tools meant to save time consume it. Interfaces meant to simplify decisions obscure them. AI systems meant to advise cannot be verified by the people relying on them, and so become instruments of unexamined risk. Automation systems meant to streamline production demand expertise the shop owner does not have, and so become the consultant's tool rather than the operator's. Value flows out of local economies to platform owners while the operational burden accumulates with users who can least afford to bear it.
The same pattern is visible in the buildings these operations and households occupy. The structures small businesses and working families inhabit were not designed for the climate they will weather over the next several decades. Flood insurance retreats from the river towns; foundations laid in the twentieth century are tested by twenty-first-century rainfall; the costs of a failed building flow downward to the people least able to absorb them.
These are not inevitable outcomes of technology or construction. They are outcomes of design done without the people the design is meant to serve.
Technology and infrastructure are not neutral. They can serve the mobility of workers and small business owners, or they can obstruct it. The question at the small-business and workforce level is not whether to adopt AI, software, automation, or new construction methods. That adoption is already underway. The question is whose interests are served in the process.
DhyanaTech is committed to building and researching technology and infrastructure that is:
Calm. Designed around the cognitive and temporal reality of users who cannot afford attentional drain. Following the tradition of Calm Technology (Weiser, Brown, Case) and Contemplative Computing (Pang), with particular attention to what “calm” means for a user whose attention is already stretched thin by material conditions.
Grounded. Trustworthy in high-stakes decisions users cannot easily verify. When AI advises on compliance or finance, when an automation system is orchestrating a production line, or when a structural design is asking a family to trust it through a flood, the tool must carry its assumptions, sources, and limits with it. Our internal term for this approach is Artificial Mindfulness, the application of contemplative and calm-technology principles to systems that serve consequential decisions.
Sustainable. Economically, cognitively, communally, and environmentally. Software, automation, and infrastructure that returns value to the people and regions that use it, rather than extracting it. Pricing that reflects use rather than captures desperation. Tools designed to last in the hands of their users rather than to require perpetual replacement. Buildings designed to hold up under the conditions they will actually face.
Participatory. Shaped by the people it serves. This is the commitment that distinguishes this program from most of its peers. We hold that the people using a tool, living in a building, or operating a production line are the most authoritative source of knowledge about whether it serves them. Our research methodology begins and ends with them.
DhyanaTech is a commercial company and a translational research and practice program. We take findings from the academic literatures on calm technology, contemplative computing, human-computer interaction, participatory design, manufacturing systems, climate-resilient construction, and economic mobility, and translate them into products and infrastructure that reach the small business owners and workers those literatures describe but too rarely directly serve. Our offerings are both commercial deliverables and instruments through which we examine our own hypotheses about what technology and infrastructure in service of mobility actually look like in practice.
The unifying research question is straightforward:
What do technology and infrastructure designed by and for workers and small business owners in under-resourced regions actually look like, and how do they affect their economic mobility, operational capacity, and wellbeing over time?
Three interlocking threads of inquiry pursue this question from different angles.
How do design and development practices change when the tool's intended users are meaningfully involved in shaping it? What do small business owners and workers identify as priorities that credentialed designers miss? This thread draws on participatory action research traditions and contemporary community-based participatory research methodology. It also engages the entrepreneurial-passion literature (Cardon and colleagues) and adjacent work on absorption, flow, and self-regulation (Csikszentmihalyi), translating findings on attention, identity, and motivation into design questions for entrepreneurs whose conditions stretch all three thin. The contemplative traditions our company name reflects inform that translation. The primary research setting is DhyanaTech's own product development: our products become instruments of inquiry as well as commercial offerings.
What does manufacturing automation, including simulation, digital twin, process orchestration, and the integration of CAD, takeoff, ERP, and MES systems, actually look like when it is designed for shops without a dedicated operations-research function or a full-time IT department? Our work builds on the DhyanaERP product line, originally developed inside an architectural precast concrete plant, alongside the related DhyanaCAD and DhyanaTakeoff tools. The thread produces architecture papers, applied case studies, open benchmarks for evaluating accessible-automation tools in SMB manufacturing contexts, and empirical work on adoption, trust, and workforce effects, including the effect of accessible automation on the operator's job and the operator's path forward.
What does “sustainable” mean at the small business and working-family level, beyond data-center energy accounting? We examine economic sustainability (pricing structures), cognitive sustainability (attention and stress effects), and community sustainability (value retention in the region). We extend the question to the physical infrastructure that holds livelihoods up. As the climate keeps shifting, sustainability becomes inseparable from resilience: foundations that survive the next flood, structures that hold under heat and storm load, retrofits that working families can actually afford. Our early work in this area centers on a floating-foundation concept for flood-prone regions, drawing on co-founder experience in architectural precast concrete. This thread connects to regional economic development scholarship, civil and structural engineering research, and emerging work on stakeholder-governed technology and infrastructure.
The threads reinforce each other. Participatory methods shape what we automate, what we build, for whom, and how it should behave. Sustainability and resilience analysis shape what participatory decisions we can credibly offer users. Accessible automation serves the long-term sustainability of small manufacturers who cannot afford to be locked out of efficiency gains their larger competitors already enjoy. Resilient infrastructure serves the long-term sustainability of the families and small businesses occupying it.
Knit through all three threads is a commitment we want to name explicitly rather than leave implicit. The conditions our intended users navigate are also mental health conditions. The four-person shop owner doing payroll at midnight; the maintenance technician working two jobs to keep up; the founder who cannot afford the therapy appointment after the insurance lapses; the family in the hundred-year-old house watching the river creep closer every spring. These are not separate concerns from the operational, financial, and structural questions our program is built around. They are the same person in every column.
The research literatures that inform this program, including calm technology, contemplative computing, entrepreneurial passion and persistence, workforce mobility, community resilience, and the broader scholarship on attention, regulation, and mindfulness in working life, converge on the recognition that wellbeing is downstream of conditions, and conditions are partly downstream of design. The mindfulness research literature is, in that sense, a translational resource for us: not a clinical posture, not a brand, but a body of work on how attention and regulation operate under load, with direct relevance to the lives of the people our products serve. Software that respects the operator's attention, automation that does not require an advanced degree to operate, a foundation that holds up under the next flood, and a research program that takes those questions as seriously as it takes the engineering: these are pieces of the same answer.
We do not claim DhyanaResearch will resolve mental health crises in the populations we serve, and we are not building a clinical mental health intervention. We do claim that design choices affect the load people carry, and that taking that fact seriously is part of doing the work well.
Knoxville is an unusual place to do this work, and a suitable one. Oak Ridge National Laboratory sits forty miles west; the University of Tennessee sits in the city itself; Pellissippi State Community College serves the regional workforce; a manufacturing and service-business base stretches from the urban core into the rural counties that surround it. The Knoxville Entrepreneur Center, 121 Tech Hub, and a growing network of founders and operators provide institutional density for research-practice collaboration that is rare outside established coastal corridors.
The region is also representative in ways that matter. East Tennessee occupies the Appalachian service area of the Appalachian Regional Commission and has been the subject of decades of economic development scholarship. Its small business population is diverse in sector and scale, more rural than the typical research site, and substantially less studied than coastal tech corridors. Findings generated here extend to Appalachia more broadly and to similar regions throughout the country.
For one of us, Knoxville is home. I have been here since 1993 and have built my adult life inside this city: high school, Pellissippi State, the University of Tennessee, the jobs that paid the bills along the way, the company we are building now. The road that brought me here, a low-income upbringing, work in the trades, fighting for everything I have built, is the road many of the people this program intends to serve are walking now. DhyanaTech is a remote company. We considered other locations. We are establishing our headquarters here because this is where the work belongs. We are here to stay.
The timing is also deliberate. The Knoxville Chamber's Regional Innovation and Growth Strategy, released in April 2026, named as its first talent priority the development and support of company founders, innovation-occupation talent, and researchers focused on translational research and original intellectual property. The Chamber's underlying diagnosis, that the region has not yet built the cultural and institutional infrastructure to fully leverage its Big Three assets (the Tennessee Valley Authority, the University of Tennessee, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory), names a gap this program is deliberately designed to help address. The strategy was launched with the framing that everyone has a part to play. We offer DhyanaResearch as one contribution to that broader work.
One specific contribution we believe we can make is to bring human-centered, social-science-informed research, paired with applied engineering practice, into a regional innovation conversation that has historically centered the physical and biological sciences. Technology and infrastructure that serve a region's economy ultimately have to serve the people in that economy: the small business owners, the frontline workers, the entrepreneurs navigating non-traditional paths. Studying what actually serves those people, using methodologies from social psychology, sociology, participatory design, economic mobility research, and the engineering disciplines, is a complement to STEM-driven innovation rather than a competitor to it. We aim to do that complementary work seriously.
Over the next two to five years, DhyanaTech commits DhyanaResearch to the following concrete outputs.
Publish a technical architecture paper on accessible automation for small and mid-sized manufacturers, drawing on the DhyanaERP case. Begin a longitudinal field study with an initial cohort of ten to fifteen small business participants in East Tennessee, using mixed-methods research design and a participatory protocol. Open conversations with University of Tennessee faculty toward at least one formal research collaboration in a relevant department. Release an initial open benchmark or case dataset for evaluating accessible-automation tools in SMB manufacturing contexts. Publish a preliminary concept paper on the floating-foundation work, framing the engineering question and the participatory methodology that will guide its development.
Pursue our first peer-reviewed publication, ideally co-authored with academic collaborators. Host an inaugural working gathering in Knoxville on technology, infrastructure, and mobility for small business, drawing together practitioners, researchers, and ecosystem partners. Submit SBIR/STTR proposals on accessible manufacturing automation for under-resourced SMBs, on the floating-foundation concept, and on related work from the program. Publish a practitioner-facing report summarizing initial field-study findings in language accessible to small business owners themselves, not only to academics.
Expand the longitudinal study to multiple cohorts and regions within Appalachia. Move at least one resilient-infrastructure concept from paper to physical prototype. Contribute curriculum material to Pellissippi State and other regional institutions based on research findings. Engage with regional and federal policy conversations on workforce development, small business technology, and climate-resilient construction. Produce a book-length synthesis suitable for both academic and practitioner audiences.
These commitments are aspirational in scale, but each individual element is concrete, measurable, and within reach of a small organization working in earnest with good collaborators. We will publish progress and setbacks honestly.
DhyanaResearch does not belong to DhyanaTech alone. It belongs to whoever cares about the question and is willing to contribute in good faith. We invite:
Workers and small business owners in the region and beyond, who are willing to participate in research, share what they know, and hold us accountable to whether our tools and our work actually serve them.
Researchers at the University of Tennessee, East Tennessee State, Pellissippi State, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and beyond, whose methodological training and institutional standing complement our practitioner standpoint. We especially welcome collaboration across disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, human-computer interaction, manufacturing systems and operations, civil and structural engineering, economics, public health, and regional development, because the questions we are asking do not respect disciplinary lines.
Funders (federal, regional, philanthropic, and mission-aligned private capital) whose priorities align with technology and infrastructure in service of workers and small business owners in under-resourced regions. We are early, but we are building for the long term.
Ecosystem partners, including the Knoxville Chamber, the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center, 121 Tech Hub, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, regional workforce development boards, community organizations, and partners in the construction and manufacturing trades, whose infrastructure and relationships make this work possible.
Other practitioners building tools, running organizations, building structures, or doing adjacent research. The commercial and the intellectual are not separate enterprises in our view. Practice without inquiry drifts; inquiry without practice calcifies.
Technology and infrastructure are made by someone, for someone, at the expense or benefit of someone else. Those choices are not hidden in the machinery or in the foundation. They are in who is in the room when the tool is designed, when the building is laid out, and who the work is meant to serve.
We believe a meaningful portion of the software, the automation, and the infrastructure used by small business owners and working families in under-resourced regions should be built by people who know those conditions, in conversation with the people living them. We are trying to do that work, to study it honestly, and to share what we learn.
This document is a beginning. We welcome correspondence, collaboration, and correction.