For my final year modules, I found myself becoming increasingly interested in accessibility in graphic design, but also in the way design is shaped by personal experience. Over time, and after years of trying to find my place as a designer, I started to understand more clearly that creative processes are never separate from the experiences that shape them.

A big part of that thinking was personal. I have a twin brother who is also neurodivergent, and he was diagnosed when he was five, while I wasn’t diagnosed until I sought an assessment myself at 20. When I asked my parents whether they had noticed anything when I was younger, they said they had, but that it hadn’t affected my everyday life in the same way, which is why they only sought out an assessment from my brother. Don’t get me wrong, I’m full of love for my parents, but navigating my own diagnosis later in life made me think more deeply about how often neurodivergence and disability are still reduced to a narrow set of symptoms or assumptions.

That idea stayed with me throughout my dissertation research. I began by looking at designers’ understanding of accessibility guidelines such as WCAG, but as I spent more time researching and speaking to designers and students, I started noticing a connection between the way accessibility is discussed and the way neurodivergence is often understood. In both cases, there can be a tendency to rely on rigid rules, fixed categories and surface-level understanding, rather than listening more closely to lived experience. What interested me most was when speaking to individuals, the question of why people so often ask for tools to understand us from a distance, when a better place to start might be by asking us directly.

The more I researched, the more I moved away from seeing accessibility as something fixed, and towards understanding it as something more flexible, nuanced and rooted in real experience. That shift changed the way I approached the project, but it also changed the way I now think about my own practice. I became more aware of the gap between theory and practice, and of how often design claims to be inclusive without fully reflecting the realities of the people it is meant to support.

What I’m taking forward from the project is a stronger sense of intention. It reminded me that good design is not only about how something looks, but about how clearly it communicates, who it includes, and what kind of response it creates. That feels especially important to me as I continue developing my practice, because it reinforces the kind of designer I want to be: thoughtful, research-led and people-centred.