By Kathryn Yap - 29th August, 2026

Designing for People Under Stress: Neuro-Inclusive Emergency Planning

Emergency plans are built around a sequence of expected actions: hear the alarm, understand the instruction, find the exit, move to safety. Yet people do not necessarily hear, process, or respond to information in the same way, especially under stress.

That gap between procedure and lived experience was the focus of People and Buildings Under Stress: Neuro-Inclusive Design and Emergency Planning, hosted by the AIANY Social Science and Architecture Committee at the Center of Architecture on June 29. The evening brought together Capria Berry, Director of Disability Inclusive Culture at NYU; Jennifer Carpenter, Principal at Verona Carpenter Architects; Melissa Marsh, Founder and Executive Director of PLASTARC; and Alex Norman, Founder and CEO of Access Built. Presentations on neuro inclusive design, disability culture, and emergency planning led into a hands-on workshop that used the Center for Architecture itself as a live test case.

For PLASTARC, the discussion raised a familiar human-centered design question: how well do systems work when they are tested against the way people actually experience them?

Beyond the compliance baseline

Jennifer Carpenter opened with the social model of disability, which shifts attention from an individual condition to the environments and systems that can limit participation. She connected that framework to neurodiversity through sensory processing: the same sound, light, or spatial cue can be manageable for one person and overwhelming for another.

For architects, emergency planning is often approached through egress widths, travel distances, alarms, and other code provisions. Carpenter described compliance as a “really low bar” and asked how those systems might work better for neurodivergent occupants.

Fire alarms made the issue concrete. Carpenter shared the experience of her son, Booker, who is autistic and has epilepsy, and who described the sound as feeling like he was “pushed in the stomach.” Looking more closely at requirements, she found that “the code seemed to have more room than I thought it did.” NFPA 72 already requires synchronized strobes to reduce seizure risk, and its 2025 edition introduces a lower pressure “Rainbow” audible mode for sensory-sensitive settings.

When compliance becomes culture

Capria Berry reframed the challenge in the institutional terms. Higher education, they argued, is a place where “compliance means culture,” with the opportunity to move from a deficit mindset toward practices that center people’s lived experience. At NYU, that also means recognizing students as experts on their own needs rather than relying only on medical documentation to define disability.

Berry pointed to the value of giving people useful information before they encounter a barrier. NYU’s Connections program, for example, allows autistic students to preview routes between buildings with autistic peers, including sensory conditions such as noise and temperature. Event information can do similar work by identifying accessible entrances, construction changes, restrooms, and other conditions in advance.

As Berry put it, “being proactive is key.” That same principle carries into emergency planning, where clear information and multiple ways of receiving it can reduce confusion before stress compounds it.

Planning for people under stress

Alex Norman shifted the discussion to what happens when emergency plans are tested against real behavior. His work at Access Built looks at cognitive, sensory, and behavioral responses under stress, including sensory overload, processing delays, and difficulty making quick decisions. Norman put the issue plainly: “Emergency plans often tell people what to do.” The question, he continued, is whether those plans account for how people actually respond under stress.

Norman organized those pressures into four areas: notification, evacuation, sheltering, and operations or first response. Each raises a different question about how people receive information, move through a building, remain safe in place, or are interpreted by staff and responders. Evacuation, he noted, is also about decision-making; sheltering has to account for sensory and cognitive safety as well as physical protection.

The framework set up the workshop that followed, where participants would look for points of friction in the Center for Architecture’s own emergency procedures and test how those systems might perform under stress.

Stress-testing the building

The second half of the evening moved from discussion to a live exercise. Working in small groups, participants used the Center for Architecture’s floor plans and emergency manual to test scenarios including fire and smoke, flooding, crowd surge, and an active threat. Each group looked for friction across notification, evacuation, sheltering, and first response, then proposed an intervention that could address more than one problem.

Melissa Marsh helped facilitate the workshop as participants tested ideas against the Center’s floor plans and emergency manual. Jennifer encouraged participants to resist ruling out ideas too quickly. The scenarios were serious, she acknowledged, but the exercise could still allow for “blue sky thinking.” Rather than beginning with whether an idea was immediately practical or permitted by code, she urged the participants to think more freely.

That thinking produced ideas at several scales. Groups proposed clearer, multimodal alerts; low-level and tactile wayfinding for conditions such as smoke; sensory-supportive spaces that could double as shelter; and better advance communication for visitors unfamiliar with the building. Staff training also surfaced repeatedly, particularly around helping occupants interpret information and navigate under stress.

Beyond the emergency

Carpenter closed on the idea of “co-benefits,” pointing to the workshop’s sensory pods as an example of a space that could support sheltering during an emergency and serve as a quiet break space in everyday use. Berry saw similar potential in proposals that offered people more ways to receive information, including vibrating, light up bracelets that could signal an alert without adding more noise.

Norman brought the discussion back to lived experience. Data can help identify where systems may fail under stress, he notes, while the ideas generated in the room came from people drawing on their own experiences. Taken together, the closing reflections pointed to a practical design direction: emergency planning can also produce spaces and systems that are clearer, more flexible, and more supportive in everyday use.