Stimpunks connects lived experience, explanatory models, and practical design tools into a single ecosystem for understanding and improving neurodivergent life.
Across the site, knowledge develops in three layers. These layers mirror how many fields of knowledge evolve: observation, theory, and practice.
Experiences ↓ Patterns ↓ Design
This structure allows people to move from recognizing their experiences to understanding them and ultimately changing environments.
The Stimpunks Knowledge System is one layer of a larger project: exploring how environments and institutions can evolve into a neurodivergent civilization.
Subpages
The Stimpunks Knowledge Architecture
The Stimpunks ecosystem connects lived experience, explanatory patterns, design principles, and real-world environments into a single system for understanding and improving neurodivergent life.
Experiences ↓ Patterns ↓ Design ↓ Environments ↓ Systems
Each layer builds on the one before it. Experiences reveal patterns, patterns guide design, design shapes environments, and environments influence larger systems.
1. Observation: Lived Experience
The first layer of the Stimpunks knowledge system begins with lived experience. Many people arrive here trying to understand feelings, struggles, and strengths that do not yet have clear language.
These pages focus on recognizing and naming those experiences.
- Experiences of Neurodivergent Life
- Sensory Overload
- Deep Attention
- Processing Time
- Social Exhaustion
- Everyday Neurodivergent Realities
- Glossary
This layer answers a simple but powerful question:
What is happening in my life or environment?
2. Theory: Patterns and Models
Once experiences are recognized, the next step is understanding why they occur. The Stimpunks pattern language identifies recurring structures of neurodivergent life.
Patterns help explain how attention, energy, sensory load, and environment interact.
- Core Patterns of Neurodivergent Life
- Pattern Library
- Pattern Atlas
- Pattern Graph
- The Stimpunks Canon
- The Stimpunks Stack
- The Neurodivergent Civilization Stack
This layer answers the next question:
Why do these experiences keep happening?
3. Practice: Design and Action
The final layer focuses on applying knowledge to improve environments and systems.
Instead of trying to change individuals, this layer focuses on changing environments.
- The Stimpunks Design Method
- Neurodivergent Design Principles
- Collaborative Niche Construction
- Pattern Recipes
- Designing Neurodivergent Environments
- The Neurodivergent Design Field Guide
- The Neurodivergent Design Standard
This layer answers the practical question:
What can we change so that more kinds of minds can thrive?
How the System Works Together
These three layers create a learning loop.
Experience ↓ Patterns ↓ Design ↓ Better Environments ↓ New Experiences ↓ Better Patterns
Over time, this cycle produces a growing body of knowledge about how environments can support neurological diversity.
Zooming Out
The Stimpunks Knowledge System is one layer of a larger project: exploring how environments and institutions can evolve into a neurodivergent civilization.
The Neurodivergent Knowledge Forest
Stimpunks can be understood as a living ecosystem of ideas, patterns, and environments. Like a forest, it grows from underground networks of knowledge and spreads upward into the spaces where people live, learn, and work.
THE FOREST CANOPY
(Civilization & Culture)
Education Workplaces Communities
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
Classrooms Organizations Social Worlds
THE TREES
(Designed Environments)
Cavendish Spaces
Neurodivergent Classrooms
Inclusive Meetings
Accessible Workplaces
▲
│
│
THE MYCELIUM
(Patterns in Action)
Environment Fit ─ Regulation First ─ Social Energy
│ │ │
Sensory Load ─ Energy Accounting ─ Burnout Threshold
│ │ │
Deep Attention ─ Processing Time ─ Energy Recovery
▲
│
│
THE RHIZOME
(Concept Networks)
Monotropism Spiky Profiles
Neurodivergent Identity
Communication Access
Double Empathy Problem
Weird • Punk • Chosen Family
▲
│
│
THE SOIL
(Lived Experience)
Neurodivergent Lives
Bodies and Nervous Systems
Everyday Realities
Culture and Community
How to read the forest
- The soil represents lived neurodivergent experience.
- The rhizome represents networks of ideas and concepts.
- The mycelium represents patterns that connect experiences and environments.
- The trees represent designed spaces and practices.
- The forest canopy represents the larger social systems that grow from these environments.
Together these layers form a living knowledge ecosystem: a rhizome of ideas, a mycelium of practices, and a forest of environments where neurodivergent life can flourish.
Explore the System
Stimpunks connects lived experience, explanatory patterns, and practical design so that environments can evolve to support more kinds of minds.
The Stimpunks Universe
SYSTEMS
(institutions)
↑
│
ENVIRONMENTS
(real spaces)
↑
│
DESIGN
(methods & recipes)
↑
│
PATTERNS
(structures of neurodivergent life)
↑
│
EXPERIENCES
(lived reality)
