around this campus we see handicapped
parking spaces ramps and handrails
structures and features designed to
promote functional accessibility for
people with physical disabilities and
not for a second when any of us question
whether we need these things of course
we do as a school of mines graduate now
turned mines professor with a lot of
adventures in between save for another
TED talk I was once in your shoes and
I’ve often asked myself the question
what would be the equivalent of a
handicapped ramp for emotional needs in
other words how can we bring about more
emotional accessibility to our campus so
we have a lot of students in the
audience today and again I was once in
your shoes I really really was down in
the trenches engineering stuff I still
remember how stressed I felt and how I
imagine stressed you feel with
high-stakes tests long late nights of
homework enjoyable but demanding
extracurricular activities trying to
keep up a social life maybe working a
part-time job to afford tuition and as
professors believe it or not we to feel
the stress of hundreds of students and
assignments endless emails committee
work long office hours time away from
our own families to be here for extra
events and it’s not to say that we don’t
all pride and have value and love what
we do but the fact is that these
challenges give rise to a lot of stress
and feelings of being overwhelmed
I have two amazing freshmen and one of
my classes Sarah and Tanner and they
were actually gonna stand beside me and
give this talk today but they got a
little stressed out with all the other
demands of school but they encouraged me
to do this talk alone and a lot of what
they have shared with me is
being delivered to you today so they
approached me a few weeks ago after
class one day about this problem of
campus stress but they didn’t just come
to me to gripe to complain they wanted
my feedback on a potential solution
they’ve been developing to alleviate
campus stress but they weren’t just
talking to me they were talking to their
friends their peers maybe to some of you
other professors they were talking to
representatives from student life
academic life trying to get their
feedback as well as good human centered
designers they are committed to
integrating the human perspective in all
portions of the problem-solving process
which starts with problem definition
figuring out what’s the problem and this
didn’t just emerge from their heads good
problems don’t we can’t come up with
good problems from the confines of our
dorm rooms or from our computers or from
our desks good problems come from
talking to people what struck me so
profoundly is that I with another group
of students and faculty was working on
tackling the same problem for a subset
of the CSM population who may perhaps
experience the problem of campus stress
even more profoundly I imagine that as
I’ve been speaking you all have been
able to focus your attention on the
sound of my voice my gestures and my
body language I imagine you were a lot
less focused on the feeling of your
socks or your stockings rubbing against
your feet the pressure of your back
against your chair the whooshing sound
of the HVAC system your neighbour
clearing her throat the hum of the
overhead stage lights the temperature in
the room for most of us our brains have
the capacity to filter out this
background noise and let only the
important pieces come through so I’m a
new mom probably saw me with my baby
earlier she’s six months old and along
with the many many many joys of
parenthood there’s a lot of sleep
deprivation going
my house and I guarantee you that if any
portion of this TED talk required me to
get horizontal I would be out but what’s
interesting is when I do sleep I am out
cold and I will not wake up for the
garbage man for a motorcycle passing our
house a dog barking all those things are
background noise but if my little baby
so much as sniffles I’m awake so fast
you would think someone had just
splashed cold water on my face and that
is an amazing capacity of our brain less
the important information come through
filters out the rest but not all of our
brains are installed with the same
operating system one in sixty eight
individuals in the United States is
diagnosed with an autism spectrum
disorder characterized by communication
challenges inability to read social cues
and a lot of sensory processing problems
it basically comes down to the fact that
there is so much being processed at one
time that is difficult to focus it’s
difficult to know that this means a
smile and this means standoffish these
are skills that people with autism have
to learn so oftentimes for people with
autism temperatures and textures can be
felt with such intensity that they are
often painful sounds and lights can be
blaring and blinding I was once told by
my friend Brian on the autism spectrum
that auto flushing toilets are the
single worst technological innovation
ever right I mean they’re kind of scary
for all of us when you’re not all
finished and they flush once or twice
it’s loud
it’s jarring on the flip side having a
brain without the ability to filter out
the background noise can inspire
enormous and exceptional creativity in
autistic individuals people on the
spectrum often have rich inner worlds
and they are imbued with vivid
imaginations whereas a lot of us think
in words people with autism
sometimes think in pictures thinkin
pictures how cool is that and some of
our greatest minds Einstein Mozart
Michelangelo to name just a few
were thought to lie somewhere on the
autism spectrum and even today you might
not know it but companies like Google
and Microsoft are actively hiring people
on the spectrum because of their high
intelligence because of their ability if
given the right environment to be able
to focus on one concept at a time their
ability to see problems define problems
that the rest of us don’t normally see
and to generate off-the-wall solutions
we need these creative thinkers to be at
the forefront of solving our most
pressing present and future challenges
we need these great minds here at CSM
and you are here sometimes I think I
recognize you when you come to my office
hours and you say something brilliant
and witty and creative but you maybe
won’t look me in the eye and I sit there
and I want to connect with you so badly
but sometimes I just don’t know how so
back to our statistic one and it 268
people on the spectrum can we estimate
that that translates to about 100 staff
students and faculty on this campus with
autism maybe maybe not
because well research has shown that
people on the autism spectrum do grab it
eight toward science technology
engineering and math research has also
shown that of all other disability
groups so visual impaired hearing
impaired different sight different types
of learning disabilities orthopedic
impairments people on the autism
spectrum one of the least likely groups
to even get to a four-year institution
perhaps because navigating the dynamic
college environment dealing with the
underlying level of stress that we all
face learning to communicate with peers
to have meaningful conversations with
professors presents a challenge as
formidable as climbing the stone
steps of Guggenheim in a wheelchair so
what can be done I’m in the early stages
of trying to tackle this problem and for
me using the human centered design
approach first means talking to a lot of
people and in my case this is people on
the autism spectrum and one of the
solutions that’s come about is
generating spaces around campus where we
can relax and recreate so what would
this look like I’m not entirely sure yet
but I’m going to take you there I’m
gonna take you there so I want you to
close your eyes and lean back in your
but imagine you’ve just finished a
brewing calculus exam given by our own
Gus greevil who is going to be to be
speaking later
you have an hour before your next chem
lab which is gonna last for three hours
your body’s stressed you’re feeling just
wired and tired where could you go so
there is a space on campus a relaxing
recreate zone and you step through the
door and the first thing you notice our
paper lanterns hanging from the ceilings
they’re all different colors the walls
are a soft blue the room is gently lit
with natural light maybe you take off
your shoes and you step on to a
comfortable soft rug you’ve definitely
turned off your cell phone your
textbooks and computer you’ve left out
the room in front of you you see two
students they’re painting on a big wall
easel they turn and smile at you you
walk over to the right side of the room
where a bunch of art supplies are held
there’s paints colored pencils clay you
take out some colored pencils in your
sketchbook and you you sit down at one
of the art desks and you just let your
mind relax as you open one of your pages
and start
filling in a sketch you were working on
last time the feeling of the colored
pencil sliding across the paper is
soothing and soon you start to feel
sleepy you close your book head to one
of the nearby beanbag chairs pull out
some noise cancelling headphones put on
an eye pillow and take a short nap you
can open your eyes
you may not probably felt good even in
that visualization so these spaces
wouldn’t just be for students faculty
and staff on the autism spectrum and in
fact they shouldn’t be because this
solution is exactly what Tanner and
Sarah came up with after talking to all
of you something that we need on campus
so what’s so valuable about the human
centered design approach is that by
talking to people and solving a problem
for one user group we often end up
solving the same problem for another
group perhaps one that we didn’t even
know existed and that helps us
understand really how alike we all are
we realized that our needs preferences
desires and once are the same as those
of people we think are so much different
than us when we a students staff faculty
people on the spectrum people off the
spectrum people on a different spectrum
entirely perhaps introvert extrovert
when we realize that we all need more
emotional accessibility and we all need
more stress relief around campus it
reveals to us the common core of who we
all are so we can see each other better
so I invite you to ask yourself the
question what is the equivalent to you
of a handicap ramp for emotional needs
and when you have an idea please please share it thank you