Between 15 and 20 per cent of people are neurodivergent: autistic, with ADHD, dyslexic or some combination of the three (Doyle 2020, British Medical Bulletin). Autism is the starkest case. Among autistic adults as many as four in five are out of work (UK Office for National Statistics 2021, which puts 22 per cent in any paid employment). That gap has little to do with ability. Most of it comes from rooms designers built for one kind of mind and imposed on everyone else.
In 2022 the British Standards Institution published PAS 6463, “Design for the Mind”, the first standard of its kind. It sets three tests for a space: clarity, control and calm. Clarity means a person can read the room: sightlines, wayfinding and a layout that behaves the way it looks like it will behave. Control is a person’s ability to adjust their own light, sound and temperature, without asking permission or explaining why. Calm is the sensory load a room produces, noise, glare and clutter, staying under the level that tips a nervous system into overload. A contractor cannot install any of the three the way an inspector ticks a box on a list. Each is an outcome: a room either produces it for the person using it, or it does not.
That is what makes neurodiversity the sharpest test I know for design that has to deliver an actual result. A sustainability certificate can be earned by installing the specified count of low-flow fixtures and rated windows, features checked off one by one on a list. PAS 6463 will not sit still for that kind of accounting. Either an autistic employee can filter out the hum of an open-plan floor or the room has failed. A dyslexic reader finds the sign to the fire exit during a drill, or the sign was no use. There is no partial credit for having tried. The person doing the work decides whether the standard was met, and no specification signed off in advance can decide it for them.
Large practices have taken the standard seriously. HOK and Gensler have each published their own neurodiversity design guidance in recent years, and Foster + Partners has co-authored a white paper on it with Buro Happold. HOK’s commitment goes back to 2016 and now includes a research partnership with the University of the West of Scotland on neuroinclusive laboratory design (HOK, 2024). In 2025 HOK published Designing Neuroinclusive Workplaces: Advancing Sensory Processing and Cognitive Well-Being in the Built Environment with Wiley, having presented the work at SXSW the year before. That level of commitment, from three of the largest architecture firms in the world, marks neurodiversity design as mainstream practice.
None of this activity guarantees a good room. Publishing a guideline is cheaper than building to it, and many never leave the shelf. But the direction the guidelines point in matters on its own: design for the mind and the room gets better for people who are not neurodivergent too. Better acoustic separation helps the colleague taking a phone call two desks over. The person who slept badly the night before feels the drop in glare and clutter, and clear signage guides the visitor who has never set foot in the building. The same standard that serves neurodivergent people serves everyone who uses the room.
Most architects I have worked with already want the room to work for the person in it. What they lack is a test that settles the question by asking whether that person can actually do their job where they have been put. PAS 6463 forces exactly that question, since only a person using the room can verify clarity, control and calm. I would build to a standard that answers that question before I would build to one that only counts fixtures. A room meets the standard only if the person using it can do their job there, and only the people who use it can confirm that, after they have moved in.