What we built, what we learned, what we’re doing next. This newsletter pulls from our Now page, where we work in public.
Read the Now Page · Get Help · Donate
🧠🌈 May at Stimpunks
From framework to fabric. From survival to belonging. From the maps we drew to the paths you wear.
May was a month with two motions running at once. We built architecture — a series hub, a /space/ design system, an evidence base citable enough to hand to a funder. And then we learned the harder lesson the architecture exists to serve: the test of a map is not how well it’s drawn. It’s whether anyone walks it. So we stopped guessing the route and read the path already worn.
May, in a sentence: we built the structure, then rebuilt it around where people actually go.
⚡ In 30 Seconds
- We gave the site five named series and a hub to find them, then turned the education section into a single argument: broken → marketed → built.
- We built the
/space/ecosystem into a citable design system — McGoldrick et al. (2025) and Helen Edgar’s SPACE-TIME framework woven through Cavendish Space and Learning Space, with three new alignment and synthesis pages. - We rebuilt the site’s navigation on thirty days of traffic data. The Glossary Map grew from 22 entries to 91. Education Access — the fifth most-visited page on the site — was surfaced everywhere it had been missing.
- We named the method underneath that rebuild: the desire line. Watch the paths, then build for them.
- We built belonging infrastructure — a library economy, a Mutual Aid series with a front door, the Penguin Pebbling connection game, and fiscal sponsorship of Lilypad Library.
- We added new vocabulary — Affective Injustice, Attachment Theory, Echophenomena, Safe Food, Epistemic Enablement — and deepened Belonging, Peer Support, Neurominority, Dolphining, and Embodiment.
- We made 2026 research load-bearing: Cheng et al. in Science on sycophancy, Vertesi et al. at FAccT on AI as power concentration, Fielding et al. on mainstream schooling, Dark’s NCTIM, Potts et al. on healthcare language, and more.
Stimpunks now has a design system citable enough for funders, a navigation honest enough to follow the data, and belonging infrastructure to match the survival infrastructure.
📊 Impact Snapshot
📈 Reach
- 5,100+ Bluesky followers
- 70+ Google Scholar results
- Education Access — the fifth most-visited page on the site, and the anchor of May’s navigation rebuild
- The Glossary remains the search-driven backbone; the Glossary Map grew from 22 entries to 91 to match where people actually arrive
- Stimpunks Social launched — a short-form home for brief, real, ours
🧾 Publishing Output (May, Weeks 19–22)
- 4 changelog posts published
- 5 new glossary entries (Affective Injustice, Attachment Theory, Echophenomena, Safe Food, Epistemic Enablement), plus ten-plus major glossary expansions
- 3 new
/space/design-system pages (a crosswalk, an alignment, a synthesis) - 5 series and overview pages, anchored by the new /series/ hub
- 4 Campfire Learn Together sessions and 4 Infodumplings documented, plus a new Watering Hole Hangs event page
- 1 short-form site launched (Stimpunks Social)
- 1 connection game launched (Penguin Pebbling) with a practitioner guide
- 1 fiscal sponsorship begun (Lilypad Library)
- A site-wide navigation rebuild — Glossary Map, Orientation Map, Start Here, Everyday Realities, and the global footer all rewritten on thirty days of traffic data
🔖 Headline Publications
- Cavendish Space, SPACE-TIME, and The Stimpunks Design Method — the synthesis page for educators and funders
- Autistic SPACE for Inclusive Education: A Cavendish Space Crosswalk
- SPACE-TIME and Cavendish Space: Shared Roots, Mutual Extension
- Our Series: Sustained Inquiry into Broken Systems — the new series hub
- Education Series: Broken by Design, Sold a Fix, Owed Justice
- We Need a Library Economy — expanded into a model, not a metaphor
- We Are Fiscal Sponsors of Lilypad Library
- Mutual Aid: Real Help Against the Onslaught — Series Overview
- Designing Cavendish Space — desire lines and lines of flight alignment sections
- Glossary Map — rebuilt from 22 to 91 entries
- Affective Injustice and Epistemic Enablement
- Penguin Pebbling: A Game of Creating Belonging (with Autistic Realms)
✨ The Month in Themes
May had four movements. Here’s how they fit together.
Week 19 — Architecture and Surface: Series Become Navigation
Week 19 did two things at once: it built structure, and it rewrote pages to do the argumentative work they always promised.
The site got five named series and a hub to find them.
The new /series/ page surfaced all five — Building Anti-Ableist Learning Space, Enable Dignity, the Education Access Series, Facts, Fire, and Feels, and Learning Space — under one conceptual roof: sustained inquiry into structural failure, with navigation. The homepage gained an “Our Series” block with a cracked accessibility symbol and a line that says what the format is for: we follow problems all the way through.
The education section became one argument.
Three pages — Education Access, We Don’t Need Your Mindset Marketing, and Fix Injustice, Not Kids — were each restructured to work as a sequence, then bound together by the new Education Series landing page: broken → marketed → built. Education Access alone gained eleven bridge paragraphs and a reordering that tracks from harm to cause to what becomes possible when pressure lifts.
The glossary kept growing. Echophenomena published from Yergeau’s Authoring Autism. Safe Food published as access, not failure. Dolphining was refreshed, and Exposure Anxiety gained design responses. The Now page added a “What We’re Not Doing Right Now” section — honesty about limits, which too few nonprofits practice.
Broken systems, not broken people. Week 19 made that argument more legible at every level.
— Week 19 Changelog, Stimpunks Foundation
Week 20 — Frameworks Find Each Other: The /space/ Design System
The /space/ pages had always held a coherent design philosophy. Week 20 gave that philosophy a citable spine.
Peer-reviewed research grounded the design logic.
McGoldrick et al. (2025) extends the Autistic SPACE framework — built for clinical settings — into schools, around the same spatial and relational principles Cavendish Space has used from the start. Integrating it wasn’t a stretch. It was recognition. The Flow States section closes on a sentence that earns its weight: flow isn’t the goal we’re working toward — flow is what happens when we stop breaking it.
SPACE-TIME joined the ecosystem.
Helen Edgar’s SPACE-TIME framework — nine elements of neurodivergent-affirming space — now anchors the Learning Space page and has its own alignment page mapping its relationship to Cavendish Space. The frameworks don’t compete. They extend each other. Three new pages landed: the Autistic SPACE crosswalk, the SPACE-TIME alignment, and the synthesis page written for educators and funders.
The glossary deepened. Hari Srinivasan’s 2026 loneliness research gave Belonging its “Presence Without Belonging” section. Peer Support gained a systematic-review section. Neurominority and Performative Neurodiversity were restructured. Affective Injustice and Attachment Theory published.
Nothing about us without us. Not as a slogan. As a method.
— Cavendish Space, SPACE-TIME, and The Stimpunks Design Method, Stimpunks Foundation
Week 21 — Survival Is Belonging: Connection Has Its Own Infrastructure
Week 21 built survival infrastructure and connection infrastructure at the same time — because for neurodivergent and disabled people, they are the same project.
Connection got named as infrastructure, not sentiment.
The Double Empathy Problem Campfire guide, built around Damian Milton’s INSAR 2026 keynote and Helen Edgar’s extension of DEP into DEEP, put the finding to work as a design principle. Infodumplings: Everyday Carry for Mortal Coils made a case the site hadn’t made explicitly before: disabled people are the original life hackers, and EDC isn’t optimization theater — it’s survival infrastructure. Watering Hole Hangs got its own page. The Individuals and Organizations pages got intros, and the rhizome finally has a labeled entrance.
Something new landed at Autistic Realms. The Penguin Pebbling Game, created by Helen Edgar and Ryan Boren, built around the Five Autistic Love Locutions. No winners. No pressure to perform. Stimpunks Social launched alongside it.
The pages got what they were owed. Communication & Interaction Access was rewritten from scratch. Why Sheets gained 27 new ideas and two framing sections. Direct Support to Individuals was expanded with the benefits cliff and what cash actually reaches. Mutual Aid got intros for all seven sections. The Dolphining entry grew its most philosophical section yet.
The question was never why some people Dolphin, but why everyone else learned to pretend they don’t.
— Dolphining, Stimpunks Foundation
Week 22 — Desire Lines: Reading the Path Already Worn
Week 22 did the same thing in two registers — a navigation overhaul rebuilt on traffic data, and a design vocabulary that names the logic behind it. Both watch where people actually go, then build for them.
The site got rebuilt around where people actually go.
The largest structural work of the week ran on a single input: thirty days of traffic data. The Glossary Map grew from 22 entries to 91. The Orientation Map, Start Here, Everyday Neurodivergent Realities, and the global footer were all rewritten on the same evidence. Education Access — the fifth most-visited page on the site, and previously absent from the map, the educator path, and the footer — was surfaced everywhere it had been missing. Start Here was cut from a 38-minute maze to eight sections of verified links.
The method got a name.
Designing Cavendish Space gained two alignment sections — desire lines and lines of flight — that make the method explicit. Both trace to Fernand Deligny’s literal mapping of Autistic children’s wandering paths. The Campfire: Lines of Flight in the Classroom session carried the genealogy into the classroom. The inversion is the whole point: where the classroom model centralizes relay switches in the teacher, Cavendish Space distributes them to each person.
Belonging got an economy and a front door. We Need a Library Economy expanded with Elinor Ostrom’s commons principles, modes of use, and a refutation of “you’ll own nothing.” Stimpunks became fiscal sponsor of Lilypad Library. The Mutual Aid series got an overview and a front door. The Embodiment entry gained an “Embodiment and Systemic Suppression” section, and the new Epistemic Enablement entry named what Stimpunks enacts.
Connection is infrastructure — and infrastructure costs something.
— Week 22 Changelog, Stimpunks Foundation
🗺️ New to Stimpunks? Where to Start in May’s Work
May produced a lot. Here’s a guided path through it.
If you’re a funder or educator who wants the evidence base:
→ Cavendish Space, SPACE-TIME, and The Stimpunks Design Method
→ Autistic SPACE for Inclusive Education: A Cavendish Space Crosswalk
→ Education Access
If you want to understand the design method:
→ Designing Cavendish Space
→ The Stimpunks Design Method
→ Learning Space
If you’re looking for community and belonging:
→ We Need a Library Economy
→ Mutual Aid: Real Help Against the Onslaught
→ Penguin Pebbling Game
If you came here for language:
→ Glossary Map
→ Affective Injustice
→ Epistemic Enablement
If you want to follow a single argument all the way through:
→ Our Series
→ Education Series: Broken by Design, Sold a Fix, Owed Justice
🧭 From Prescription to Desire Lines
The most significant thing about May wasn’t a single publication. It was a method becoming conscious of itself.
For weeks we built architecture: a series hub, a /space/ design system, a glossary with named sections and peer-reviewed grounding. Good architecture. Then Week 22 asked the question the architecture exists to answer — not what we thought people needed, but where they were already going. Thirty days of traffic data rebuilt the navigation. The Glossary Map quadrupled. Education Access, the fifth most-visited page on the site, turned out to be missing from the map, the educator path, and the footer.
That’s the desire line. A desire line is the path worn into the grass where people actually walk, ignoring the paved route the planner drew. The lesson is the same whether the terrain is a campus lawn or a website or a classroom: stop guessing the route and read the path already worn.
It’s not a metaphor we borrowed. It traces to Fernand Deligny’s literal mapping of Autistic children’s wandering paths — the genealogical root that connects desire lines, Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flight, and the five zones of Cavendish Space. The classroom model centralizes the switches that route a person’s movement. Cavendish Space hands them back. The navigation rebuild and the design philosophy turned out to be the same move in two registers.
Broken systems prescribe the route. We watch the paths, then build for them.
Receipts: Working in Public
We default to open whenever we can.
🔭 What We’re Doing Next
🤝 Mutual Aid and Grants
- Continue the DIF Collaborative Grant work with Human Restoration Project on Neurodivergent Design and the ARLES method for K–12 educators
- The Mutual Aid Grant pipeline opened its June window; select grantees as funds allow
- Keep building out the Mutual Aid series now that it has a front door
📚 Library and Belonging Infrastructure
- Support Lilypad Library as fiscal sponsor and help build the ARLES method into its format
- Develop the Belonging glossary page further, including community-developed framing
- Carry the library economy from model to practice
🤖 AI Ethics Depth
- Keep Cheng et al. and Vertesi et al. load-bearing across the AI Collaboration and AI and Disability Justice pages
- Continue developing both pages as new 2026 research arrives
🧭 Navigation and Glossary
- Keep refining navigation against real traffic — desire lines, not prescriptions
- Expand the Glossary Map and the glossary itself as people find their way to new language
💸 Funding & Sustainability
- Strengthen funder documentation through the synthesis page and Impact
- Expand recurring and employer-matched support through Give
We are building the infrastructure we wish existed. If this work matters to you, help fund it, partner with us, or share the tools with someone who needs them.
One Good Line
The principle is the one a desire line teaches: stop guessing the route and read the path already worn.
— Week 22 Changelog, Stimpunks Foundation
📚 Three Things Worth Revisiting
In case you missed them — or they’re newly relevant:
- Cavendish Space, SPACE-TIME, and The Stimpunks Design Method — the synthesis page that brings three frameworks together for educators and funders, with the evidence base and what the method looks like in practice. Hand this to anyone who needs to understand the design system before they can support it.
- We Need a Library Economy — usufruct, the irreducible minimum, Ostrom’s commons principles, and a refutation of “you’ll own nothing.” The library stops being a metaphor and becomes a model.
- Designing Cavendish Space — the desire lines and lines of flight alignment sections that name the method underneath May’s entire navigation rebuild. Start here if you build environments and want to stop prescribing the route.
How You Can Help This Month
Need help?
Support the work
Share
- Forward this to one educator or funder who needs the design system as evidence: Cavendish Space, SPACE-TIME, and The Stimpunks Design Method.
- Share one link: We Need a Library Economy — the case that connection is infrastructure, and infrastructure costs something.
- Play a round of Penguin Pebbling with your people. No winners. No pressure to perform.
Stimpunks Foundation · stimpunks.org · Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People
Leave a Reply