Let us call this goal “fidelity”, as it tries to make the formal system as true to the world as possible and contrasts with “optimality”. Yet, as the same time, they must recognize that whatever they design, it will fail to capture critical elements of the world. In order to allow these failures to be corrected, it will be necessary for the designed system to be comprehensible by those outside the formal community, so they can incorporate the unformalized information through critique, reuse, recombination and broader conversation in informal language. Let us call this goal “legibility”.

Noguidance was given to the participants regarding what topography or function of behavior to choose, nor which client tochoose. The BIPs that were submitted included a wide range of behavior topographies and functions, as depicted inTables 2 and 3. The ages of the clients ranged significantly, but were roughly equivalent across the two groups, witha mean age of 8.75 years (range = 3–19) in the treatment group and a mean age of 7.75 years (range = 4–10) in thecontrol group. It seems reasonable that due to reactivity, participants would choose to send a BIP that they believedwas good-quality, however, this reactivity was likely to be equally distributed across groups. Each BIP was then scoredas the pre-test data for that participant. For participants in the control group, the participant was then asked to updatetheir BIP however they see fit over the next 24 h and resubmit it. For participants in the BIP builder group, they wereasked to update their BIP using the BIP builder within the next 24 h. No further instructions were given to theparticipants.