The Neurodivergent Knowledge Garden

Stimpunks is not just a website.

It is a knowledge garden — a growing landscape of ideas, patterns, tools, and environments that help people understand and design for neurodivergent life.

Instead of organizing knowledge as a rigid hierarchy, the site grows more like a garden ecosystem.

Ideas spread, connect, cross-pollinate, and evolve.

Readers can move through the garden in many directions. Skimming, skipping, and stopping partway are all fine here.

Table of Contents

• A Different Kind of Knowledge System
• The Garden Structure
• Navigating the Garden
• Rhizomes and Mycelium
• The Garden Is Alive
• How the Garden Is Tended
• How to Explore the Garden

Nothing here needs to be read in order.

A Different Kind of Knowledge System

Traditional knowledge systems often look like this:

Subjects
↓
Categories
↓
Articles

This structure works well for encyclopedias.

But neurodivergent life is relational and ecological, not neatly categorical.

The Stimpunks system instead grows like this:

Experiences
↓
Concepts
↓
Glossary
↓
Patterns
↓
Recipes
↓
Environments
↓
Systems

Each layer grows from lived experience.

The Garden Structure

The Stimpunks knowledge garden has several interconnected regions.

Vocabulary Garden

Shared language grows here.

Explore:

• Glossary
• Glossary Map

These pages help people find words for experiences that often go unnamed.

Pattern Garden

Patterns describe recurring structures in neurodivergent life.

Explore:

• Core Patterns of Neurodivergent Life
• Pattern Library
• Pattern Atlas
• Pattern Graph
• Pattern Clusters

Patterns are like plants in the garden — each describing a recurring ecological relationship.

Recipe Garden

Recipes translate patterns into practical actions.

Explore:

• Pattern Recipes

Examples include:

• Designing Attention Sanctuaries
• Designing Flexible Participation
• Designing Sensory-Safe Spaces
• Designing Recovery Cycles

Recipes help people apply the ideas in real environments.

Environment Garden

These pages explore environments designed for cognitive diversity.

Explore:

• Designing Neurodivergent Environments

Examples include:

• Neurodivergent Classrooms
• Neurodivergent Workplaces
• Neurodivergent Libraries
• Designing Cavendish Space

These environments align attention, energy, and environment.

Framework Garden

Frameworks help scale ideas across institutions and systems.

Explore:

• The Stimpunks Framework
• The Stimpunks Stack
• The Neurodivergent Operating System
• The Neurodivergent Civilization Stack

These pages explore how neurodivergent design might reshape institutions.

Navigating the Garden

Several maps help readers navigate the landscape.

Explore:

• The Three Maps of Stimpunks
• The Stimpunks Universe Map
• The Pattern Atlas
• The Pattern Graph

Each map shows a different perspective on the system.

Rhizomes and Mycelium

The structure of the knowledge garden resembles both a rhizome and a mycelial network.

Explore:

• Autistic Rhizome
• A Mycelium and a Rhizome

Ideas do not grow in straight lines.

They spread sideways, form networks, and connect across domains.

The Garden Is Alive

The Stimpunks knowledge garden is not finished.

Four things have grown here, and they are the honest answer to what a knowledge garden is for.

• A vocabulary we maintain in public. The glossary is 448 terms deep and human-authored. It is the spine the rest of the garden is keyed to — when a word changes there, everything downstream follows.
• An index of ideas rather than files. A list of what you own tells you nothing about what you understand. So there is a second index, one page per glossary term, gathering what the whole garden holds on that idea from every corner at once.
• Sites of their own. Some ideas outgrow a page. Cavendish Cards, Penguin Pebbling, the Map of Monotropic Experiences, ★ stuff, and Queering.Earth all started here and now live somewhere of their own — made with Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms and More Realms.
• A practice other people can copy. None of this needs our budget or our tools. Start Your Own Knowledge Garden is the version written for you rather than for us.

None of it was planned as a system. It accumulated, the way a garden does, and then we went back and named what had grown.

It also grows unevenly, and that is worth saying plainly rather than letting the metaphor imply otherwise. Some regions are dense — the glossary and the pattern language have years in them. Others are sparse. A few lie fallow for a season while the work moves elsewhere, and then someone comes back to them. A garden with no fallow ground is a catalogue.

How the Garden Is Tended

This page maps the garden as you can read it: the published site. Behind it sits a working library — the papers and books we cite, years of notes, and the tooling that indexes all of it. Three pages describe that side, and each answers a different question.

• The Stimpunks Knowledge Garden — how the system is built, and why. It opens with the question the whole thing answers: what happens to everything we know when the person holding it is unavailable?
• The Stimpunks Knowledge Garden as Curriculum — what happens when a garden is read as a course of study instead of a filing system.
• Start Your Own Knowledge Garden — how to grow one of your own, with none of our tools required.

The working library itself is not public. It holds our own copies of other people’s work — things we can cite but cannot redistribute — alongside private working notes. What we publish is the writing that grows out of that shelf, not the shelf. Everything this page links to is open to anyone, with no account and no paywall.

How to Explore the Garden

If you are new to Stimpunks:

1. Start with How to Use Stimpunks.
2. Explore Core Patterns of Neurodivergent Life.
3. Try a few Design Recipes.
4. Explore Neurodivergent Environments.

From there, follow the paths that interest you.

The garden is meant to be explored.