Episode 142 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with UX designer and researcher Stéphanie Walter. Stéphanie is a prolific creator with a regular (and high quality!) newsletter and social media presence. Our conversation focused on her most recent endeavor: Neurospicy.
What is Neurospicy? When we recorded, Stéphanie was still exploring answers to that question. And that was part of our conversation too: how to approach a problem space without a clearly defined vision.
One thing that was clear: Neurospicy focuses on raising awareness about neurodiversity in design. This isn’t just about people with ‘disabilities.’ As Stéphanie explained,
When I’m talking about cognitive accessibility, it’s about designing for people with learning disabilities, but also for people who have different perceptions. So, the thing is, you can have cognitive issues because of a disease like long Covid, for instance, or even while you had Covid, as like during the pandemic, the people who designed the website for the Covid situation did not take into account that someone who has Covid has a complete brain fog.
Which is to say, even ‘neurotypical’ people can benefit from experiences designed to accommodate people with diverse neurological needs. Neurospicy, which Stéphanie co-founded with Myriam Jessier, aims to provide tools and resources for designers to understand and better address neurodiversity.
What form could this take? It could be one of many. And that brought us to the second key point in the conversation: it’s possible to make a difference by starting work on an area without a clear vision of how that work could manifest, but in a spirit of shared exploration:
I’m just like, “Okay, is it fun? Am I going to do this with nice people?” And then, if yes, okay, let’s do it. And yeah, at the end of the day, that’s also maybe like my brain wanting to get some little pieces of dopamine. It’s mostly about trying to do fun stuff, and I think not knowing where it goes is also part of the fun because if you decide you’re going to go in that direction, you might have tunnel vision as, “Okay, that’s the goal here.” We have no idea where it’s going. So everything is open.
I like it because of that too; it’s a very creative way of thinking to say, “Okay, it means we don’t know where it goes, but we’re also not restricted about what we can do.” Maybe it’s because I work in enterprise and it’s very strict and all of that. So I want something fun on the side that isn’t that strict.
This way of working embraces a more bottom-up approach to meeting the needs of the world. “Chaos is also a way to fuel new ideas,” was how Stéphanie put it.
As I said during our conversation, I find this inspiring. I often wait too long — until ideas are “ready for prime time” — before releasing things. This approach is more exploratory, playful, and collaborative — perhaps better-suited to a dynamically changing environment such as the one we’re in today.
The Informed Life episode 142: Stéphanie Walter on Neurospicy