Cavendish Space: psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, flow states, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction.

Cavendish Space is a psychologically and sensory safe environment where people can focus, rest, collaborate on their own terms, and shape their surroundings together. It includes different kinds of spaces — caves for quiet reflection, campfires for small-group learning, and watering holes for social exchange — and is designed to support human bodies and minds rather than demand adaptation to the environment.

Cavendish Space describes psychologically and sensory safe environments designed for deep focus, intermittent collaboration, flow states, and collaborative niche construction. It draws on timeless learning patterns — caves (quiet reflection), campfires (learning with an expert), and watering holes (peer social learning).

This concept models humane, embodied contexts where people — especially neurodivergent and disabled bodyminds — can work, think, learn, and contribute without being forced into environments built against their needs. It connects tools like sensory safety, learner safety, embodied regulation, cognitive and somatic liberty, and neurological pluralism.

“Stimpunks addresses the idea of how education may provide ‘psychological & sensory safe spaces’ that simultaneously provide opportunities for ‘intermittent collaboration’, rather than enforced large group interactions, and ‘collaborative niche construction’.”

Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering (The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture) (p. 179).

The Life of Henry Cavendish

DESPITE HIS ECCENTRIC COUTURE and the strange totem rising from his backyard, Henry Cavendish was not a wizard. He was, in eighteenth-century terms, a natural philosopher, or what we now call a scientist. (The word scientist wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century, when it was proposed as a counterpart to artist by oceanographer and poet William Whewell.) He was not only one of the most ingenious natural philosophers who ever lived, he was one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 21). Penguin Publishing Group.

Since reading NeuroTribes, we think of psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work as “Cavendish bubbles” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privileges of nobility afforded room for his differences, allowing him the space and opportunity to become “one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.” (Silberman, NeuroTribes, p. 21)

Like Cavendish, we’re autistic. We relate to much of his personal and professional life. He needed his bubble, his cave, his sensory and social cocoon.

Cavendish also needed, occasionally, the company of a small set of his Royal Society peers. The Royal Society Monday Club was his campfire, his place where he could lurk at the edges and collaborate intermittently with a small group on his terms.

The source of this apparent shyness was social anxiety so intense that it nearly immobilized him in certain situations.” (Silberman, NeuroTribes, p. 24) “It is not true, however, that he wanted to remove himself entirely from the company of his peers; he just wanted to stand off to the side, soaking everything in.

(Silberman, NeuroTribes, p. 25)

Cavendish was very uncomfortable in the public eye. He formed an alliance with Charles Blagden, an extroverted and outgoing Monday Club peer, whereby Blagden introduced Cavendish and his ideas to wider audiences. Blagden brought Cavendish to the creative commons, to the watering holes of science and naturalism.

Together, the two men forged a mutually indispensable alliance. Cavendish became Blagden’s human Google, answering any query that came up in his own work. The elder scientist’s guiding hand was visible in six of the ten papers that Blagden published in Philosophical Transactions. In return, the reclusive lord was able to keep up with the state of his art without having to schmooze his way through the eighteenth-century equivalent of TED conferences. Through Blagden, his life was richly interwoven with the lives and work of a global community of thinkers who were kept at a safe and comfortable distance.

(Silberman, NeuroTribes, pp. 25-26).

Cavendish’s life illustrates the autistic need for caves, campfires, and watering holes as well as intermittent collaboration.

A Home of Opportunity

Cavendish’s life also illustrates the need for what educator Ira Socol calls “Homes of Opportunity”. (Socol)

A school struggling with the ravages of American poverty has to first be a home — the kind of home the children may not have at home. A place that is relentlessly safe, that is both calming and exciting, that offers unconditional love, and that offers boundless opportunity.

That ‘home’ must be supportive and accepting, loving and encouraging, and it must provide the biggest possible window on to the world, on to the universe.

A home of opportunity.

What does opportunity look like? First, it looks like trust. It looks like freedom. And it looks like choice.

(Socol, You must see your school as a home of opportunity, https://irasocol.medium.com/you-must-see-your-school-as-a-home-of-opportunity-6c7532b43e6f)

Trust and embodied freedom. Those are the heart of Cavendish Space, Neuroqueer Learning Spaces (NQLS), and homes of opportunity.

If Henry Cavendish hadn’t had a home of opportunity that suited his sensory and social needs, we would have lost him and his world-changing revelations to an asylum. “One of the greatest scientists in history might have ended up on a ward at the Bethlem Royal Hospital (commonly known as “Bedlam”).” (Silberman, NeuroTribes, p. 34)

So too for neurodivergent kids in school today. We are losing so many to school-induced anxiety due to neuronormative environments designed against their neurology, their flow states, their ways of being, and their well-being.

Let’s build homes of opportunity that meet the sensory and social needs of all humans. Cavendish’s life shows us the way. Cavendish’s life shows us how to build a home of opportunity that flows for everyone.

Designing to maximize flow has impacted our work to modernize district facilities. It’s essential to moving teachers away from the dominant teaching wall that defines American‐built schools. We see flow happening in a newly built multiage elementary space designed as a home of opportunity for 120 K–5 learners and six teachers.

(Socol, Ira; Moran, Pam; Ratliff, Chad. Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, p. 213)

He (Cavendish) transformed his whole environment into a playground for his keenly focused senses and intellect.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 28). Penguin Publishing Group.

Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes

What worked for Henry Cavendish works for everyone. Let’s build Cavendish Space for all. Let’s build the caves, campfires, and watering holes that nurtured Henry Cavendish into our learning facilities.

Futurist David Thornburg identifies three archetypal learning spaces— the campfire, cave, and watering hole—that schools can use as physical spaces and virtual spaces for student and adult learning.

Australia’s Campfires, Caves, and Watering Holes: Educators on ISTE’s Australian Study Tour Discovered How to Create New Learning and Teaching Environments where Curriculum and Instructional Tools Meet the Digital Age, UNCG NC DOCKS (North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship)

“Campfires in Cyberspace” explored the idea that humans have always occupied one of four primordial learning spaces at any given time, ranging from the Campfire (home to the presentation of information by a teacher) to the Watering Hole (the domain of social learning from peers), the Cave (home of reflective construction) and Life (home to the construction of artifacts based on what we have learned).

In Cavendish Space, learners move between these spaces on their own, and computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.

When students have developed a little bit of metacognitive language around their learning spaces, they are also able to take control of their learning and their learning spaces – they can move to the space that best fits the type of learning that they are doing, and be able to explain exactly why this space is going to help them in achieving their learning goals.

Re-imagining Learning Spaces to inspire contemporary learning – Part One: Models for Change – Linking Learning

We provide caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite from an intense world designed against us.

Caves, campfires, and watering holes are…

• necessary to providing psychological safety and sensory safety.
• necessary to positive niche construction.
• necessary to intermittent collaboration.
• necessary to designing for neurological pluralism.
• essential to our conception of Cavendish Space.

In schools, we find that the cave form of learning is never a priority. This is a serious problem because the millions of dollars spent on many new schools will do little to improve educational outcomes if they are built without cave spaces. 

The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

Developed by an alumni of Xerox PARC in its R&D heyday, “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” have spread to progressive education, progressive workplaces, and the neurodiversity movement. Stimpunk Ryan helped create and run a multi-billion dollar company and a global Open Source community using the ideas that would become Cavendish Space. “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how the creative teams Ryan worked on for 30 years operated.

“Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how creative teams work.

Stimpunk Helen was a classroom teacher working with kids with “Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD)” for 20 years. Helen with her classroom experience and Ryan with his tech team building experience were both working with caves, campfires, and watering holes and intermittent collaboration all those years.

At home, Ryan always liked small spaces. As a kid, he read books under the bed. The small space distanced him from the overload of his physical reality while stories transported him to fantasies and realities beyond his life, body, and experience. His pocket universes, though small in this world, possessed the depth and breadth for a book to unfurl.

He hid in closets. He created pillow and blanket forts and set up house in tool sheds. He sought and created small spaces in a big world of sensory and social overwhelm. He found room to be himself in edges, underneaths, and in-betweens.

…it is in solitude that students assimilate, synthesize and internalize learning so that it becomes knowledge and (sometimes) wisdom. 

(Nair, Prakash. The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools)

Likewise, Helen and her family spent years building niches in their home, building sensory spaces suitable to their bodyminds leveraging Helen’s classroom experience.

We were both making Cavendish Space long before we developed the language for it.

We independently re-discovered the “Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces” that have been with us all along.

Cavendish Space can be found in PMLD/SpEd/SEND classrooms as well as in tech companies. What works for early years children also works for adult professionals, of all neurotypes, profiles, and abilities.

What worked for Henry Cavendish works for everyone.

These are timeless patterns of human learning and collaboration that cannot be stifled without harm.

Dedicated to Steve Silberman

We are philosophically and practically indebted to Steve Silberman’s work uncovering and telling the story of Henry Cavendish and his autistic ways of being. Cavendish’s story as told by Silberman in NeuroTribes was revelatory to us. It illuminated our own ways of being. We saw ourselves in Cavendish. We recognized his patterns in how we worked and collaborated over the course of our professional careers as teachers and technologists. We dedicate the concept of Cavendish Space to the memory of Steve Silberman, a true ally to our community.

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Cavendish Space is a collaboration between Ryan Boren of Stimpunks and Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms.