Caves, campfires, watering holes — the three kinds of place a person needs, and the vocabulary for building them. One sheet, both sides, free to print and share.
Side A is the three places, which is the part that gets pointed at in a room. Side B is who the conditions land on — dandelions, tulips, orchids — and how you build: collaborative niche construction, lily pads, clear paths and predictable rhythms.
Unlike the other sheets, this one does not refuse something. It hands over vocabulary to someone about to shape a space. Compressed from the Cavendish Space Why Sheet, which carries the full detail and every source.
Side A of B
Cavendish Space
A psychologically and sensory safe environment where people can focus, rest, and collaborate on their own terms — and shape their surroundings together. It is our name for lived context: bodies and nervous systems, sensory conditions, social rules and power, tools and layouts, history and memory, all shaping each other at once.
Survival depends on
conditions, not willpower.
space shapes people · people shape space
Quiet, low-stimulation places for withdrawal and recovery. Safety and regulation. Somewhere to be unobserved and stop performing — not a reward for finishing, and not a place you have to earn.
Small-group places for storytelling, learning and reflection. Meaning gets made here, between a few people, at a pace a nervous system can follow.
Open places for gathering, exchange, resource sharing and mutual aid. Where you find out what is going on and who has what.
“Healthy systems need all three — not just productivity zones. And Cavendish Space is never neutral. It is always co-created.”
Stimpunks Foundation · Cavendish Spacestimpunks.org/why/cavendish-space
free to print, copy, change and share · CC0 1.0
reverse
Side B of B
People differ in how strongly a place shapes them, and the difference is the whole reason to design carefully.
- Dandelions tend to be resilient across many conditions.
- Tulips do best in supportive contexts and can cope in moderate ones.
- Orchids are deeply shaped by conditions — they thrive in the right environment and struggle in a harmful one.
Design for all three by shaping the context, not by forcing everyone toward a single norm. An environment that only works for dandelions is not a neutral environment. It is a filter.
- Niche construction, done together. Reshape the place to suit real bodies and minds. Do not treat context as fixed, and do not leave adaptation to the person it costs most.
- Lily pads. Small deliberate supports placed inside the space: pause points and landing zones that reduce transitional harm and hold pacing, memory and attention. They turn change into a series of survivable steps.
- Clear paths between the three places, and predictable rhythms of activity and rest. Safety comes from pattern, not from constant novelty.
- it does treat access as environmental work
- it does make care structural rather than optional
- it does centre lived experience over theory
- it does not frame difference as deficit
- it does not expect people to push through harm
- it does not pretend space is neutral or fair
If we ignore lived context, we blame individuals for structural harm. If we name it, we can build conditions where people actually survive.
Individual coping → shared infrastructure · forced adaptation → mutual designfree to print, copy, change and share — no permission needed
CC0 1.0 · no rights reserved
Foundation
One sheet · print double-sided · bring it to the design meeting · share freely