The Design Trust, Verona Carpenter Architects, WIP Collaborative, and a network of disability advocates have partnered on The Neurodiverse City (NDC) to reimagine New York City public spaces — streets, playgrounds, plazas, and more —  to better support neurodiversity and sensory sensitivity.

Cornell PiTech PhD Impact Fellow Lucy Jiang joined our team to assess how technology can help evaluate public space “accessibility.” Lucy’s Report “Neurodivergence Research, Technology, and Public Space” examines her findings and calls to center neurodiverse perspectives in city planning.

Author's note: This work was conducted while I was a Siegel Family Endowment PiTech PhD Impact Fellow in 2024 and joined the Design Trust as a researcher of the Neurodiverse City project. In this report, I contribute insights on designing a technological tool for assessing public spaces for neuroinclusivity and synthesize perspectives from the neurodivergent community, human-computer interaction and accessibility, and architecture and urban planning. I first describe the background and initial learnings grounding the project. Then, I share findings from interviews with Design Trust partners and neurodivergent advisory committee members and describe the process by which we created the final evaluation strategy. Finally, we close with a discussion of recommendations for researchers and designers aiming to make public spaces more accessible for neurodivergent people.