Programs of inquiry · term 02
Neurodivergent-First Design
Interfaces and systems designed from AuDHD and neurodivergent cognition outward, rather than retrofitted.
The question
Most software assumes a mind it was never tested on. What do interfaces look like when they are designed from AuDHD and neurodivergent cognition outward, rather than retrofitted with accommodations?
What is at stake
Accessibility work usually begins with a finished design and adds relief to it. The result is a system whose default is one cognition and whose alternatives are second-class. Designing from neurodivergent cognition outward is not a moral upgrade to that process — it produces different structures, and frequently better ones for everybody.
Why it is ours
Lived AuDHD experience inside the house — this program’s primary data is not borrowed.
We are building interaction patterns and system designs that treat attention, sensory load, and executive function as first-class design inputs, not edge cases.
How we work on it
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Design from the margin inward.
The first sketch assumes variable attention, sensory sensitivity and unreliable executive function. The typical case is derived from that, not the other way round.
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Cost, not preference.
Sensory and cognitive load are treated as quantities a design spends, like bandwidth or money — not as tastes a user can be asked to tolerate.
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State you can leave and return to.
Interruption is the normal condition, not the exception. A design that punishes a person for coming back an hour later is broken for most people and unusable for some.
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No disclosure tax.
Nothing in the system should require a person to declare a diagnosis to get behaviour that would have been better as a default.
What would count as an answer
A program is not finished when it produces results. It is finished when these are true, and can be shown to be true by someone who did not run it.
- The neurodivergent-first path is the path everyone uses, because it is the better one — not a mode selected in settings.
- Time-to-resume after a long interruption is short enough that leaving is not a decision.
- A design change that lowers sensory load does not cost legibility elsewhere in the system.
- No feature requires disclosure to work correctly.
Illustrative studies
These describe the kind of study this program runs. They are illustrations of method, written to make the approach concrete — not work that has been completed, scheduled, or funded, and not findings. When something has actually been established, it appears in the Library with its method and its limits attached.
- 01
Resume cost
- Design
- The same task is abandoned mid-way and returned to after minutes, hours and days. What the system preserves — and what it makes a person reconstruct — is recorded at each interval.
- What it would read
- Whether interruption is designed for or merely survived. We would expect the honest number to be worse than the designed one.
- 02
The default question
- Design
- Interface variants built neurodivergent-first are offered to a general audience without labelling, alongside conventional variants.
- What it would read
- Whether the design most people prefer is the one built from the margin. If it is, the case for accommodation as a separate track weakens considerably.
- 03
Load accounting
- Design
- A running estimate of sensory and cognitive load — motion, sound, simultaneous demands, decisions per screen — is kept for a design as it is built, the way a performance budget is kept.
- What it would read
- Whether load behaves like a budget that can be governed during design, rather than a complaint received after release.
Terms this program uses
- Neurodivergent-first
- A design sequence, not a feature set. The first sketch assumes variable attention, sensory sensitivity, and unreliable executive function; the conventional case is derived from that. The order is the whole claim.
- Sensory load
- The demand an environment or interface places on a nervous system — sound, light, motion, simultaneity, interruption — treated as a quantity a design spends rather than a preference a person is asked to tolerate.
- Accommodation debt
- The accumulated cost of designs that assumed one cognition and were later adapted. It is paid as parallel code paths, second-class alternative modes, and the ongoing requirement that people disclose a diagnosis to receive sane defaults.
The principles that bear hardest on this program are Experience is evidence. and The human is the constant. — see the principles and how intelligence is governed here.