Neuroinclusion - Busting the Myths and a New CEU
Updated: Sep 14
For many neurodivergent people, leaving home requires careful assessment of risks, energy, and effort. The process often involves scanning details such as the route, parking, and the likelihood of sensory overwhelm upon arrival. The environment itself can determine whether a task is completed or a panic response is triggered.
In some cases, I leave a store within minutes due to bright lights, noise, and crowds that become unmanageable.
Our new CEU course, Trauma-informed Design and Neuro-Inclusion, is designed to help practitioners navigate these sensory challenges and environmental factors to create more supportive spaces.
This course supports practitioners in meeting the needs of neurodivergent communities. While environments do not need to be perfect, reducing sources of sensory overwhelm such as harsh lighting can make a measurable difference for those who have already expended significant effort to access a space.
The truth is, many architecture and design programs rarely consider the nervous system. This course changes that.
TiD Is a Framework, Not a Style
Trauma-informed Design is sometimes mistaken for an aesthetic defined by soft colors, natural light, and plants. In practice, it is an all-encompassing approach. The TiD Society uses an 11-domain framework that directs practitioners through the full requirements of trauma-informed design, including sensory interaction, spatial organization, and operational choices. This course is structured around that framework and delivers a systematic approach rather than a collection of visual preferences.
Neuro-Inclusion Addresses the Needs of a Broad Population
Neuro-inclusive design is often categorized as an accommodation for a small subset of users, but this approach overlooks the prevalence and variability of neurodivergence.
Approximately one in five people are neurodivergent. Additionally, spatial experience is not static for any individual; it changes with nervous system state, stress, fatigue, and other factors. Designing with the nervous system in mind supports a wider range of users, not only those who identify as neurodivergent.
Why This Matters
For generations, architecture has privileged a narrow idea of the "default" body—usually white, male, able-bodied, and neurotypical—frequently to the detriment of everyone else.
Feminist and Scholars of Color have long pointed out that the built environment reflects and supports social stratifications, shaping whose safety, comfort, and belonging are emphasized, and whose are marginalized or outright dismissed.
This is why true equity work in design must center the views and experiences of those most excluded by dominant norms—especially women, people of color, people with disabilities, and those with trauma histories.
Feminist disability scholars like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Black feminist thinkers such as bell hooks remind us that accessibility, disability justice, and trauma-informed care are not add-ons, but practices rooted in listening deeply to those most impacted by exclusion and harm. Designing for justice means unlearning the myth of a universal user and accepting the complexity of real bodies and lives.
“When we create beloved community, environments that are anti-racist and inclusive, it need not matter whether those spaces are diverse. What matters is that should difference enter the world of beloved community it can find a place of welcome, a place to belong.” - bell hooks
To bridge the gap, we are pleased to present this new CEU!
What the Course Covers
This is a Sphere 3 course, focused on designing for the broad spectrum of the human experience. Through it, you’ll discover the eight senses (not just five) and learn the way lighting and acoustics directly influence our nervous system and sense of safety in a space.
Explore how spatial planning, wayfinding, and biophilic design become valuable instruments for nervous system regulation—not just decorative features. Understand how color and material choices impact well-being when viewed through a trauma-informed lens.
Investigate three practical case studies from education, healthcare, and workplace design to see principles in action.
Get practical project checklists that you can put to use immediately, helping you apply trauma-informed and neuro-inclusive design right away.
Who Should Take It
This course is designed for architects, interior designers, and other TiD practitioners who already possess foundational design vocabulary and seek to deepen their understanding. Familiarity with floor plans and lighting specifications is assumed.
The content addresses a layer often overlooked in design education: how a nervous system interprets a space.
TiD practitioners include professionals from outside traditional design roles, such as therapists, healthcare workers, educators, and others whose work occurs within designed environments. This range underscores the material's relevance. The content moves beyond conceptual theory and is applicable to anyone attentive to how bodies respond to their surroundings.
A Few Examples of What That Looks Like in Practice
An interior designer working on a pediatric clinic waiting room can use the eight-senses framework to rethink lighting and acoustics, not as finishing touches, but as the first thing a scared kid's body reacts to before anyone says a word.
A therapist running a private practice can apply the wayfinding and spatial planning concepts to their own office, thinking through how a client moves from waiting room to session room in a way that doesn't spike anxiety before the work even starts.
A workplace designer can use the case study on office environments to build spaces that support people handling chronic stress or trauma histories, not as an accommodation bolted on later, but as part of the baseline design.
This diversity of backgrounds is central to the course's purpose. Trauma manifests across environments—schools, clinics, offices, and courtrooms. Those with the deepest understanding are not always architects by training.
The course provides design professionals and allied practitioners with a shared language to address these realities.
Course Details
Instructor:
Kathryn Parkhurst, AIA, NCARB, TiD-B, a licensed architect, educator, and design researcher, teaches the CEU and studies how the built environment shapes how people think, feel, connect, and belong. She holds degrees in both Interior Design and Architecture, and teaches architecture and design at the graduate level alongside her practice. Her work sits at the intersection of trauma-informed design, neuro-inclusive design, and environmental psychology, translating research into design strategies that put people, not just buildings, at the center.
Format:Online, on-demand 1.5 hours At your own pace | Available CEUs:1.5 TID CEUs 1.5 IDCEC CEUs (HSW) 1.5 AIA LUs (HSW) |
Approaching design with attention to nervous system needs has the potential to transform practice. For those committed to environments that foster inclusion, safety, and genuine belonging, this course offers concrete steps toward that vision.
We invite design professionals to expand their practice, providing tools that can reshape how spaces are understood and created.
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