Relationship design is the practice of deliberately choosing the terms of your working relationship with AI: which roles each side plays, where the boundaries sit, what gets delegated, what stays human. The alternative is not "no relationship". It is a relationship whose terms were set by accident, by interface defaults, and by habits transferred unconsciously from human colleagues.
The series treats this as a behavioral claim, not a tooling tip. The first essay shows how naturally people import coworker norms into AI interactions without noticing the import happened. The fifth shows where undesigned terms lead: a bond in which both sides are locked in, each in its own way, with the human side carrying dependency it never chose. Between those two observations sits the design question: if the relationship forms either way, who is writing its terms?
Designing the relationship does not mean writing a contract with a machine. It means the same moves any intentional relationship gets: explicit expectations, periodic review of what each side actually contributes, and noticing when drift has replaced decision.