Magda Mostafa on ASPECTSS, learning and the sensory landscape

This keynote by Magda Mostafa explores architecture as a means to support neurodivergent learners across various learning environments.

While focusing on the school setting as the traditional centre of formal learning, it also presents learning as an act that extends beyond the boundaries of a school, encompassing both the surrounding cities and across the learner's lifespan.

Everyone must have the right to learn safely, comfortably, and happily. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and as designers of learning spaces, we bear responsibility for much of this shortcoming. Neurodivergent individuals—with their diverse spectrum of often invisible preferences and needs—are often overlooked and excluded by designers. This is despite research showing that designing for the neurodivergent learner can, in many cases, benefit everyone.

This talk traces the trajectory of ASPECTSS from its motivation in 2002, to its inception in 2014, and its ongoing application in curatorial, scholarly, and design practices up to 2025. Told through a series of encounters with the autistic experience, the talk will present autism and neurodivergence as forms of expertise, authorship, and curation of design experiences as translated into architectures of learning, living, community, and care.

It introduces the construct of the Sensory Landscape with its affordances of Prospect and Refuge—a proposition of senso-socio-spatial gradients developed from over two decades of work with the Autism ASPECTSS Design Index. Published in 2014 and expanded in 2021, ASPECTSS is recognised as the world’s first research-based design framework for autism.

This keynote address was presented as part of the 2025 Designing Learning Spaces for Neurodiversity and Disability Symposium, hosted by the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.