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Research documents the sensitivity and pattern recognition abilities of neurodivergent people.

The canary metaphor reflects the experience of many neurodivergent people at school and work.

Design from the margin can use the sensitivity of neurodivergent people to improve systems for everyone.

"I tried to explain that the enterprise software we were getting was going to be a problem, but they told me to shut up. Years of reworking things and who knows how much lost money later, they are now looking for someone to blame."

"Back when I was at school, I tried to persuade them to change how they organized extracurriculars. Nobody paid attention. Now they are in the news for all the wrong reasons, over things they could have corrected. I was a canary in the coal mine."

It seems like most neurodivergent people have stories like these. We feel danger before others. We see problematic patterns. And too often, we are ignored.

“Canary in the coal mine” is not just an expression referring to an early and often lone warning of danger. The true story of canaries in coal mines offers many lessons for designing environments fit for humans.

On sentinels and sensitivity

Sentinel species are animals or other organisms sensitive to environmental threats and able to react before humans. At different points in history, birds, guinea pigs, mice, rabbits, horses, and other animals had served as sentinels of toxins and other dangers. Canaries were the original carbon monoxide detectors in mines. In the presence of toxic air, birds would show distress before miners were significantly affected. This gave the miners time to evacuate safely and to revive the canary using oxygen from a bird-sized oxygen tank. In the UK, canary birds went underground with the miners until 1986, when........

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