Digital Prosthetics – Neurodiversity and the Connected Mind

First Place - 2024 Monash University Visualise Your Thesis Competition

In which Alisdair Gurling explores how innovative design, learning, and technology can empower neurodivergent learners, foster open mindsets and create personalized tools to enhance cognition and unleash a joy for learning.

Transcript:

We live in a world that often views neurodiversity through the lens of disability. Neurodivergent learners, like those with ADHD, autism and dyslexia, struggle everyday with hostile educational environments, societal narratives that aren’t designed for them. This often leads to limiting mindsets.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s an enormous array of assistive tools and strategies that can help, like software for dictation, task management and summarisation. 

My research blends learning and co-design methods to create experiences that forge a strengths-based view of neurodiversity, encourage the uptake of assisted tools, enhance learning, and expand cognition. 

These new ways of accessing assistive tools are responsive to the individual, flexible enough to adapt around an ever-changing technological landscape, and are powerful enough to allow learners to flourish around their constraints.

This approach could help learners not only reach comparity with their neurotypical counterparts, but extend their cognition beyond normative standards, transforming how neurodivergent learners navigate the world, changing the stories we tell ourselves.