A look into design as a craft through the lens of neuroqueering.
I remember reading Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality at a strange threshold: in my mid-twenties, a few years into design as a profession, still in a pandemic haze, and on the precipice of what felt like great change. I was discovering a world where fellow neurodivergent thinkers and authors pushed boundaries, revealing a space of possibility beyond the dominant narratives.
That rather prolonged period of personal discovery later coincided with a rapid shift in my role toward design leadership. I found myself seeking guidance not solely as a craft expert, but as a not-so-experienced mentor and coach. Fresh into this new reality, I felt a lot of insecurity in my own aptitude to be the design leader I wanted to be, and still need to be. That insecurity manifested itself both as an internal force and as a response to the general state of anxiety amongst designers of the mid-2020s. I still think about this piece by Sara Wachter-Boettcher every day.
At times, it was hard for me to connect this personal state of being (a queer, autistic person just trying to figure it out) with my work as a new design leader (a manager and coach really trying to figure it out). But recently, I’ve found even more reinforcement and inspiration in the critical work exploring neurodiversity and queerness. Such work reaffirms and reshapes how we think of our bodyminds, and has plenty to offer to our design practice too.
In Neuroqueer Heresies, Dr. Nick Walker introduces “neuroqueering” as a practice of subverting, disrupting, or defying the neuronormative and heteronormative structures. With its roots in Queer Theory, the concept explores how these power structures reinforce each other, and how we may find collective liberation through engaging in interconnected practices that challenge them. The definition is broad, but Dr. Walker sees neuroqueering as an action first.
That underlying idea of subversion and transformation is one that I recognise in design itself. To me, design, with its many shapes, has always been just that: a transformative and mediating force between people, technology, and futures.
The greatest joy I’ve found in my work recently came from close partnership with fellow design professionals. It’s also come from truly seeing just how much of a changing force design can be, as an inherently explorative discipline which looks forward in time. The paths towards the futures diverge, and there’s nothing more challenging and rewarding than trying to make sense of it as a collective, for the collective.
The routes into design can diverge greatly, too. People come from traditional and non-traditional educational backgrounds, shift trades, and learn on their own. Regardless, we share something in common: we want to create and solve something, to make our days as humans lighter or more enriching.
Returning to Dr. Walker’s framing of neuroqueering as an action, I wondered if there was a way for me to translate this philosophy into practice that we can employ as designers. To me, the underlying themes are about challenging essentialism, conventional form, and determinism.
To flourish, we must challenge normalcy and binary thinking. In other words, it means rejecting the idea that there’s a boundary within which our craft must correspond to what the dominant power systems consider the appropriate way to craft a design or experience a design. The neurodiversity paradigm is in direct opposition to the pathology paradigm: the former sees variations of brain function and behaviour as a natural part of human diversity, while the latter perceives neurodivergence as a disorder.
Chapman explores this further in Empire of Normality, tracing how the pathology paradigm intertwines with the illusion of normalcy as a scientific, economic, or social truth, a myth that has perpetuated great harm (including but not limited to the popularisation of eugenics and white supremacist rhetoric), especially for marginalised communities.
We see the language of marginalisation deeply entrenched in design practice. Consider the term “edge case”, a concept describing a supposedly unlikely scenario of how a person uses a design. When actively employed in craft, such thinking can reinforce our biases and assumptions to varying degrees of exclusion, regardless of intent.
In Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher reframe “edge cases” as “stress cases”. This shifts the burden away from people experiencing the design towards responsible and considerate action on the part of designers. “Stress case” as a concept communicates urgency, as it highlights how a design may not correspond to the context in which it’s meant to exist.
“Dark patterns” is still a widely used metaphoric expression for deceptive, extractive, or simply difficult design patterns — despite it aligning with harmful, anti-Black sentiments which draw parallels between “darkness” and “maliciousness”. Lately, designers have been reaching for “deceptive patterns” as a natural descriptor for such phenomena, which also communicates the concept much more clearly without covering it in metaphor.
Language, of course, shapes how we understand our craft, but design as a discipline can also be bound by conventional form. We can understand conventionality as patterns and principles firmly rooted in our understanding of design, be that in its interaction, or in visual presentation. Such forms may be informed by the actions of dominant players in the field, groupthink, or simply trends that seek to benefit the few rather than the craft itself.
Determinism, in both what and how we craft, is the antithesis of design. Take for instance the push of AI as an unavoidable technology, one that will embed itself in every facet of our craft. It’s a discourse dominated by the urgency of a conviction: get on board now, or be left behind.
We’ve seen it before. Technology changes. Because design is a mediating force, its core is about building a deeper understanding and connection between our craft and the world it inhabits. Such determinism forces us to teach each other the wrong lesson: that our craft’s worth amounts to speed over reflection, or tool prowess over judgement and intentionality.
This year, my team and I have worked on formulating what great design means to us. Although we’ve been working together for months, years in some cases, we hadn’t really stopped, together, to build consensus around what great design actually is. Our conversations were revealing: alongside human-centricity, reflection, and delight, we kept returning to systems-thinking as the thread that ties great design together.
Each principle plays its own part in our philosophy. Systems-thinking specifically raises an interesting duality: convention can be both a guideline and a signal for change. Systems change. We want to abstract and extend the conventions that work, but remain alert to the parts of a system that create barriers or mismatches in experience. That’s where we complement systems-thinking with design that centres people, that is in dialogue with its context, and that seeks moments of lightness and joy.
To me, this is what neuroqueering design practice is: the radical idea that there is no normalcy, that how we do design and what we design are subject to exploration and subversion, to design for people, for dignity, and for purpose.
Kristina (she/they) is a design leader based in Finland. Kristina writes about inclusive design, being autistic at work, and thinking in systems.
Acknowledgements and references
Thanks to Rae, Jenni, and my team for helping this piece see the light of day. ❤
- Robert Chapman: Empire of Normality
https://www.plutobooks.com/product/empire-of-normality/ - Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you.
https://medium.com/nice-work-from-active-voice/hey-designers-theyre-gaslighting-you-e02e5a4d9cff - Nick Walker: Neuroqueer Heresies
https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-heresies/ - National Autistic Society: Autism and neurodiversity
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/identity/autism-and-neurodiversity#What%20is%20the%20neurodiversity%20paradigm? - Eric Meyer, Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Design for Real Life
https://abookdeparts-dfrl.netlify.app/ - Intuit: Anti-racist language
https://contentdesign.intuit.com/accessibility-and-inclusion/anti-racist-language/
Neuroqueering design practice was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
