Dr. Diamond Rashad, OTD, OTR/L
I recently had the privilege of joining a panel discussion following Vesper Moore’s presentation on inclusive design and the conversation that unfolded has been living in my head ever since. The panel was called Imagining Systems That Feel Like Home, and that phrase alone deserves to be unpacked. Home isn’t just a layout. Home is sensory, relational, cultural, and structural all at once. And for neurodivergent children and their families, most of the environments they move through every day were never designed with them in mind.
What I Notice When I Walk Into a Space
As an OT, I’m always reading a room. Before a session even begins, I’m observing what the space is telling me about who it was designed for. Here’s what I look for:
- Acoustics and Lighting
- Spatial predictability
- Crowding and corridors.
- Transition spaces
The Gap Between Frameworks and Lived Experience
We have a lot of language in our field right now. Universal Design. Trauma-Informed Care. Neuro-affirming Practice. Inclusive Design. The biggest gap I see is around conflicting needs. Theoretical inclusion tends to imagine a single “everyone” that spaces are being designed for. But real inclusion requires sitting with the fact that what works for one person might not work for another, and then doing the harder, slower work of actually figuring that out together. Open-plan classrooms are a perfect example. They’re theoretically inclusive. In practice, they’re often anxiety-inducing for neurodivergent learners who rely on predictability and clear structure. “Flexibility” can be a mask for not having made a decision at all.
You can also tell an institution is co-opting inclusive language without doing the structural work when inclusion still looks like integration into a separate class within a mainstream school, the optics of belonging without the reality of it. It shows up when DEI statements mention representation but never say the word “neurodiversity,” or when intervention goals are still organized around masking, normalizing, and compliance rather than a child’s self-determination and quality of life. And it shows up when practitioners call themselves neuro-affirming but their practice still centers on remediating what’s “wrong” with the child rather than modifying the environment. The environment is always part of the equation.
What Power Inversion Actually Requires
One of the central claims of the panel was this: meaningful change requires not consultation, but leadership from the people most impacted by barriers. For design professionals and clinicians, it means acknowledging that our training has not given us expertise in neurodiversity, and that the actual experts are neurodivergent people and their families. It means giving up the savior mentality, the paternalism, the instinct to center our own professional judgment. It means the process gets slower, messier, more iterative, and more conversational. It also means using tools like virtual reality and digital models so that neurodivergent people can experience a proposed space before it’s built, rather than being asked to approve a floor plan they never had the context to evaluate. It means watching how neurodivergent individuals already modify and redesign their own environments to meet their needs, and treating those adaptations as valuable data. True co-design is not a workshop or a focus group. It’s an ongoing, back-and-forth relationship that takes twice as long as you planned for and produces something neither party could have made alone.
What “Home” and Third Spaces Actually Requires
From my work and from this conversation, here’s what I keep coming back to: the community. Third spaces require relationality and brave space. It’s earned through consistency, respect, and the absence of shame. It requires acknowledging different sensory preferences and pathways for connection and communication. Neurodivergence is understood as a natural variation of human experience, not a deficit to be remediated. Biophilia, access to nature, connection to community. Third Spaces that say: you are not a problem to be solved.
A Final Thought
The panel title asked us to imagine systems that feel like home. I think what that really means is: imagine systems that were built for you to begin with. Built with you, by you, because your experience of the world is valid and worth designing for.
Have thoughts? I’d love to hear from you. Connect with me on Instagram or reach out through the connect page.
If you’re a parent navigating sensory and environmental needs with your child, check out my Sensory Processing Introduction course or browse the resources page for more support.