Investing in Prevention: Failed Systems and Fire Extinguishers
The case for moving sensory design from reactive accommodation to preventative standard practice.
The ‘sensory friendly’ inclusion industry is obsessed with fire extinguishers.
I want to talk about the architecture of the space.
All too often, sensory inclusion efforts start too late.
For years, the focus has been on helping people cope with overwhelming environments through accommodations, coping strategies, and self-regulation.
Through tools and resources such as noise cancelling headphones, quiet rooms, sensory breaks, or therapeutic supports.
These things matter and they help, but they all share one hidden assumption:
The environment stays the same - the person has to adapt.
And that raises an important question:
What if we’ve been solving the right problem at the wrong point in the system?
The difference between coping and design
Most current sensory inclusion strategies operate downstream, they come into play only after someone is already struggling or hit their breaking point.
We help people cope.
We help people regulate.
We help people recover.
If we zoom out and look at the whole system, we can see a different picture.
Overwhelm doesn’t start with the person because it actually originates in the environment.
A typical progression looks something like this:
Environment exists
Stimuli increases
Contrast drops
Mental effort increases
Fatigue builds
Withdrawal happens
Recovery becomes necessary
That is the Sensory Contrast Collapse Cycle.
Most supports enter the scenario near the end of this chain.
The SOLACE Model is intentionally designed to come in sooner because the earlier you intervene in a system, the less cost accumulates downstream.
This is basic systems thinking, and ultimately feeds into human design principles.
Prevention is always cheaper than recovery.
The fire extinguisher problem
Here’s a simple way to think about it:
What would you rather have?
A fire extinguisher
or
A building made from materials that don’t easily burn?
Fire extinguishers came first because they were the fastest and easiest solution. But they were never meant to be the only solution. They were for a time, until better solutions were developed.
Fire extinguishers are important. We absolutely need them. There will always be some buildings that have fire risk. Nobody would argue they are the primary fire safety strategy, but over time we learned to build better and smarter. With more foresight.
We developed fire-retardant materials, safer stoves, and educated the public about fire safety. Now we invest heavily in prevention:
• Fire codes
• Materials standards
• Electrical regulations
• Sprinkler systems
We try to prevent fires because we know recovery is expensive.
Yet in sensory accessibility, we often still operate like our only option is the extinguisher.
Quiet rooms are important, but they are the fire extinguisher. They help after the system has already failed someone.
What if we designed spaces that were less likely to create overload in the first place?
The hidden cost of unmanaged sensory load
When environments are poorly balanced from a sensory perspective, people pay the difference with their own nervous systems.
They work harder to hear conversations, strain to focus, and expend more cognitive bandwidth to filter distractions. They are faster to tune out and disengage socially.
This effort is mostly invisible, and many people don’t even consciously realize it’s happening because it’s not like suddenly putting your hand on a hot stove, it’s more like slowly turning on the heat to boil water.
From the outside it may just look like:
Someone getting quiet
Someone leaving early
Someone disengaging
Someone “not participating”
But often what we’re actually seeing is sensory fatigue which compounds on top of other factors like pre-existing fatigue, hunger, illness, hormones, and more.
When environments demand too much filtering, people eventually run out of filtering capacity. They might have the motivation to want to be there and to participate, but the energy economics fail them.
That is the often silent disappointment that people experience when they go to an event they’re excited about, and they have to leave early because the event is just too much.
Like with any system, when costs rise too high, participation drops.
The burden shift we rarely talk about
When sensory environments are unmanaged, the burden shifts from design to the individual.
Instead of asking ‘How can this space function better?’, the question that has actually been asked was ‘How can this person tolerate more?’
That is a subtle but important difference.
Most accessibility systems today focus on increasing human tolerance (because our current systems value perceived endurance over sustainable performance).
What SOLACE focuses on is reducing unnecessary environmental demand.
Not instead of existing supports, but rather before them.
When environments are calibrated properly (for human comfort), people don’t just survive spaces. They are able to enjoy them. They can actually thrive.
They’ll stay longer, participate more, and form positive memories. Perhaps most important of all - they will come back. Willingly, happily, even eagerly.
That is just good design, and good design produces accessibility naturally.
The next evolution of sensory inclusion
If we look at the history of sensory awareness, we can see a clear progression.
First came clinical recognition.
Then came coping strategies.
Then came accommodations.
Then came sensory rooms.
Each step moved us ‘forward’.
But we are now at the point where the next logical step is environmental prevention.
This requires more intention, more effort, and more resources in some cases, but in the long run it will pay for itself and then some.
We take the original compensation factor and make the accommodation permanent such that it just becomes integrated. Similar to how it is now standard for newer buildings to have an elevator for wheelchair users, or braille on signs and buttons for Blind users.
Sensory comfort-calibrated environments need to become standard. And that is ultimately the core mission of the movement that Beyond Quiet Rooms is building.
What prevention actually looks like
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying here.
Preventative sensory design isn’t about silence.
It isn’t about sterile, stripped-back spaces that feel clinical or unwelcoming.
It’s about balance, which means managing competing stimuli, protecting sensory contrast, reducing the unnecessary cognitive load that accumulates when environments are left uncalibrated.
The goal isn’t to eliminate quiet rooms entirely, the goal is to make them needed much less often. To make spaces that people don’t need to recover from.
This way we are supporting human nervous systems instead of challenging them constantly. This benefits far more than just neurodivergent people.
It helps:
• Employees concentrate longer
• Students learn more effectively
• Patients heal with less stress
• Event attendees stay engaged
• Customers stay longer
When we design for sensory sustainability, everyone benefits.
A future beyond quiet rooms
Accessibility shouldn’t begin after overwhelm happens, that’s too late. That’s like throwing buckets of water at a five alarm blaze.
Fix the ‘signal at source’, and build it right from the start.
The future of inclusion is moving from patching system failures and building better.
This is the shift I’m working toward through the SOLACE Model:
Moving from reactive disability support toward preventative environmental design.
Because the best accessibility intervention is the one that never has to be used.
And the real goal of inclusion is creating environments where more people can simply exist comfortably.
That is the future I’m interested in building.
A future beyond quiet rooms.
Lacey Artemis (she/they) aka The Sensory Nerd is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and researcher focused on systems-level sensory inclusion and design. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting, where her applied research and advisory work supports more comfortable, sensory-accessible public spaces.
Lacey is Autistic and has sensory processing issues that affect her in a variety of ways.
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