Welcome to the latest iteration of my newsletter

new and improved and now on substack!

I know, I know, everybody’s doing it. 

But really, I’m not so much here to hang out with the cool kids*. Rather, I’m here mostly because I’m cheap. The platform I was using to send my newsletter was expensive because it offered all sorts of bells and whistles I didn’t need.

And Substack is free—as is this newsletter. 

Unlike the sort of random and inconsistent newsletters I have sent out in the past, however, this newsletter has a theme—divergent design—and a schedule—I’m aiming for once a week. But if you know my work at all, you know that I actually love randomness (divergent design is cleverly open-ended, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure I can fit just about anything I want to write under that umbrella!). And I am a shameless believer in Spiral Time, so no promises on the schedule.

In fact, the main reason I want to write more is not for the sake of consistency or focus or productivity … it’s really just because I want to write more. I used to be a serious and prolific writer, and I haven’t been in awhile, and I miss it.

And after my ideas on divergent design were featured in Dr. Devon Price’s book Unmasking Autism, there has been quite a bit of interest in this concept, and I’d really like to develop my thinking on it more. I have a bunch of big ideas inside of me about what might be possible at the intersection of disability and design, and a lot of stories—both my own and others’—that explore and illustrate those possibilities. I’m a big believer in writing as a form of thinking and exploration, but, alas, I’m all out of practice (which, actually, is part of the story I would like to tell you in this newsletter) So really this newsletter is mostly me, practicing. If any of this is interesting to you, I’d love to have you as my community and sounding board! 

If you are new to my work, you may be wondering:

What is Divergent Design anyway?

Funny you should ask. The thing is, I’m not a designer by training or trade. I really just stumbled into design as a concept a few years ago (another story for another issue!), and something profound clicked. 

It wasn’t just that I love beautiful things, or that I enjoy playing around with colors and shapes and spaces, or that it pleases me when things work well—though all of that is true. And it wasn’t just that I have come to believe we can design objects and spaces and even lives to accommodate our needs and facilitate our well being as disabled people—though it was certainly that too. 

Rather what clicked was a sudden vision of design as a paradigm that could counter much of the pathologizing inherent in the mainstream medical/psychiatric models of disability. A paradigm that could offer an alternative to the ways we are “supposed” to think and be that are meant to make us more “normal.”

Of course, none of this is new. I’m not suddenly an expert in any field of design or design thinking. Many more qualified and credentialed people are thinking about the role of design in disability theory. A few huge influences on my own emerging ideas have been Sara Hendren’s book What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, as well as the concept of DeafSpace as developed at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. When it comes to my own theorizing about divergent design, I’m really more following a hunch and learning as I go. 

But my hunch is that design has radical possibilities for how disabled people (and specifically neurodivergent disabled people) create and inhabit our interior spaces, both physical and metaphorical.

To me, divergent design is more a sort of relationship than it is a blueprint. It’s a way of thinking and being that is more fitting and more flattering than the neuronormative paradigms demanded of us from the moment we draw our first breaths. It offers an antidote to “executive dysfunction” and “rejection sensitive dysphoria” and “sluggish cognitive tempo” and “maladaptive daydreaming” and “demand avoidance” and “oppositional disorder” and all the other pathologies imposed on our nonnormative (read: quirky, freaky, weirdo) mindbodies.

Divergent design is a paradigm of liberation, one that is unspooling in the lives and minds and bodies and communities of so many of us, all over, every day. I didn’t invent it, and it’s not mine to prescribe how it may emerge in your life. I’m just trying to name my own vision and tell the stories of my own embrace of a liberatory, new-to-me way of being.

This newsletter, then, is really just me thinking out loud in real time. Infodumping my special interest, if you will. And telling my own story in the hopes that some of it might resonate for you.

And all of that is more fun in conversation and community, so I hope you will comment and reply with your own thoughts and experiences—and share this newsletter with anyone you think might be interested!

* One of the coolest** kids on Substack is my friend and colleague Jesse Meadows, who designed all the artwork for this newsletter (isn’t it so pretty!?), and held my hand through setting it all up, and whose own substack Sluggish is really must-read.

**And by “cool” I mean weird, deviant, and creepy-crawly.