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When famous and powerful people open up about their autism experiences, it often gets attention. One example is Bill Gates sharing an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. In it, he writes that “if I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. But although this caused some struggles, he also notes: I wouldnt trade the brain I was given for anything. For many in the autistic community, this visibility can feel like a win. Seeing a successful person identifying as autistic can inspire hope and serve as a reminder: An autistic brain is not something to be ashamed of. In fact, there is much to celebrate. But these high-profile disclosures also bring mixed feelings. Along with the celebration comes a concern about autism and success narratives, who benefits from them, and who is harmed by them. The ‘Autistic Genius’ Stereotype and the Superpower Narrative Popular narratives often frame autistic people in extreme ways. We are either geniuses (albeit often misunderstood) destined to revolutionize industries, or tragic figures, defined solely by our struggles. When someone influential comes out as autistic, the story often focuses on their “unstoppable neurodivergent brilliance”their extraordinary talents, creative thinking, superhuman persistence, or unique approach to problem-solving. It feeds into the neurodivergent superpowers narrative. This might seem like a major improvement over the broken and deficient stereotypes, yet it can also be a trap. Innovative talents and the humans who exhibit them are worth celebrating. Yet a powerful mental image of a genius risks obscuring the broader, more nuanced picture of autistic experiences, and creating stereotypes that might be positiveyet still have negative effects on other autistic people. Research indicates that once we categorize something, cognitive schemas and stereotypes guide our memory and perceptions. This means we are stuck in the oversimplification. Challenging and broadening narrativesin this case, understanding the wide range of autistic experiencesbecomes difficult. One of the more obvious consequences of the tech genius stereotype is pushing people toward tech careers that may or may not align with their calling, while restricting opportunities in fields that dont align with that stereotype. Another problem with the fascination with autistic genius is the risk of perpetuating the perception that autistic peoples value is conditional on having extraordinary abilities. It reinforces a hierarchy of worth, where only the most “useful” or “exceptional” are deemed valuable. For many autistic people, this narrative creates an implicit expectation to keep proving our valuea burden that can exacerbate feelings of inadequacy and exclusion or result in a burnout. The risk of burnout also stems from the expectation that autistic people deliver above and beyond in environments where we lack support. Moreover, wealthy genius narratives can obscure the disproportionate economic challenges faced by the majority of autistic people. Policies and programs focused solely on tapping into autistic potential” may miss the mark when it comes to meeting foundational needs like housing, transportation, or healthcare, and protection from blatant workplace discrimination. Everyday Realities of Working While Autistic In his writing, Gates acknowledges both his luck and his privilege. And I am happy to celebrate his story. But there are so many other stories. Untold, and unheard. Most autistic people face complex and painful challenges in their careers and in their lives. In addition to extremely high unemployment, even those who work are held back by poverty, inaccessible environments, and the lack of understanding from their employers. Their stories are far less glamorous, but theyre just as important. They reflect the lives of the majority of autistic peoplethe ones who dont make headlines. Here are a few stories from my book, The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work, to provide a broader perspective on the autistic experience at work. In that experience, ability and high performance are often not enough. Working as a HR systems analyst in the U.K., Charlie Hart often received positive feedback about her productivity (eats workload for breakfast) and the quality of her work (meticulous attention to detail), yet she never got anything above achieved in her performance reviews. She was striving for the exceed expectations rating though, and asked the HR director what she needed to do to get it. Well, she needed to be a different person. Charlie was assigned to an interpersonal skills coaching, which was de facto a neurodivergent masking and passing for a neurotypical coachingexacerbating years of trauma and pushing her into depression for months. Burnett Grant, a highly experienced Black, autistic lab technician from the U.S., was advised by their supervisor to get on disability benefits and clean houses for extra money under the table. Burnett was a high performer and didn’t ask for advice, which leaves little explanation for this unsolicited guidance other than stereotyping. Dr. Jacqui Wilmshurst from Beverley, U.K., is a health and environmental psychologist. After she was diagnosed as an adult, she disclosed her neurodivergence to her new manager. She was immediately sent on a mandatory occupational health referral to reassess her ability to do the job. That was the job for which she had been through 11 interviewsafter being recruited by the employer in the first place, for her unusual thinking and innovative approach. After disclosure, Jacquis manager said they needed a playbook to manage Jacqui, and only a doctor could provide that. Jacqui ended up resigning. Justin Donne worked in the U.K. and France for governmental organizations, private companies, and many boards. He was also seen as too much and told to slow down. In one of his roles, Justin broke organizational records for KPIs, facilitated fundraising windfalls, and developed award-winning programs. Then, he was placed under a micromanager who wanted to control everything Justin did and how he did it. That was the end of Justins career with that organization. These stories may not be glamorous, but theyre important. They reflect the experiences of the majority of autistic talentthe ones who are too often left out of workplace conversations or considerations. Canaries in the coal mines whose struggles are signals of broken human resources and management systems. A Broader Vision of Autistic Talent Fairness means building unbiased, outcomes-focused work environments. It means supporting all autistic people in developing their talents, extraordinary or not. It means removing the barriers that hold so many back. It means recognizing autistic peoples value as inherent, not commodified. To move from celebrating the exceptional to creating work environments of ordinary excellence where all autistic people can thrive, where all people can thrive, we need to: 1. Broaden the Narrative: Highlight a range of autistic stories, including those of people who are overlooked, struggling, or simply living ordinary lives. Push back against reductive portrayals of autism as either a “superpower” or a “tragedy.” Autism is a complex human experience, not a marketing slogan. 2. Celebrate Human Value: Celebrate autistic and allistic people for who they are, not for superpowers. Everyone deserves dignity, belonging, and the chance to contribute. 3. Remove Barriers: Design fair and flexible workplaces that offer employment and success opportunities for all people, autistic or allistic, regardless of their economic or social standing. Such workplaces benefit all. They help create more stories to celebrate. When a high-profile person brings a spotlight to autism, its an opportunity to celebrate and educate. But its also a moment to reflect. Whose stories are centered? Whose stories are ignored? And how can we expand the conversation to ensure fairness and opportunities for all? The full story of autistic talent is about peopleall of usdeserving dignity, respect, and the right support to thrive. Helping everyone develop their talents enriches the workplace and the world far beyond the contributions of any one person, however exceptional.
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E-Commerce
This year, 2,500 girls will be able to attend secondary school in Afghanistan. While this shouldn’t be a remarkable feat, it is: The Taliban government forbids girls from receiving an education beyond 6th grade. Ideas Beyond Borders, a nonprofit organization, is helping to support The Underground School Initiative that educates girls in 38 secret locations throughout Afghanistan. In an unexpected turn, this project will be partially funded by The Citizenry, a U.S.-based home goods brand, which raised money during its Black Friday sale last year to pay for teachers, educational supplies, and facilities for these students. [Photo: The Citizenry] Desperate for an Education In 2021, when the United States left Afghanistan and the Taliban took back power, one of the new government’s mandates was that girls would not receive more than a primary education. Schools shuttered overnight. This came as a rude shock to the 850,000 girls who were pulled out of school, when they had previously assumed that an education was a fundamental right. Teenagers were turned away from their old classrooms, some in tears. Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, who founded Ideas Beyond Borders eight years ago, had been paying close attention to this unfolding catastrophe. The goal of his organization is to create a free and prosperous Middle East by spreading knowledge and education. For instance, the organization has added upwards of 40,000 articles onto Wikipedia in local languages, including Arabic, Farsi, and Pashtun. [Photo: Ideas Beyond Borders] After the U.S. left Afghanistan, Al Mutar, who splits time between the U.S. and the UAE, began receiving messages from journalists in Afghanistan saying that there were families and teachers who wanted to defy the ban on education and start creating a network of underground schools. There are now many brave communities across the country that are putting thousands of girls through school. They were taking incredible risks, Al Mutar says. Parents were donating their houses so that girls could continue their education. Ideas Beyond Borders wanted to support this work, so it sent a team to vet these schools. It then served as a link between these schools and the outside world, helping to find individuals and companies who would be willing to fund these underground schools. [Photo: The Citizenry] There appears to be some disagreement among the Taliban’s leadership about whether girls should be allowed to go to school. There have been several points over the past four years when some leaders were open to reversing the decision. But a minority of senior hardliners are committed to this stance, and girls continue to be banned from school. While it is a risk for these girls to attend the underground school, communities have found ways to skirt the rules. Teachers describe their classrooms as madrasas, or Islamic religious schools. And according to CBS News, the Taliban’s involvement and regulation of these madrasas vary by location and local officials involved. In Taliban strongholds in the south and east of the country, authorities tend to enforce the ban, while in other areas, leaders are willing to turn a blind eye. Al Mutar isn’t particularly optimistic that things are going to get better in Afghanistan. He says that regime appears to be set on imposing more restrictions on women. The Taliban is making it harder to work, and there’s a new law that bans women from singing. It’s been more and more challenging, says Al Mutar. Freedoms are declining. [Photo: The Citizenry] Black Friday For Good Rachel Bentley and Carly Nance launched The Citizenry in 2014 as a brand that sold home decor ethically sourced from 4,000 artisans in 23 countries around the world. (Last year, it was acquired by Havenly, which owns mny home furnishing brands.) They partnered with Fair Trade to ensure that all workers were receiving a living wage. We learned that handmade doesn’t always mean fairly paid, Nance says. We want to invest in these communities for many reasons, including that it allows them to deliver the best craftsmanship. Nance says that over the course of working with skilled craftspeople from around the world, they found communities in Afghanistan than made traditional hand-knotted rugs. The company was keen to source rugs made by female artisans. But when the Taliban took over, women were no longer allowed to work outside the home. The Citizenry worked with local organizations committed to helping women continue to work safely, if they chose to do so. This meant rerouting rugs through neighboring countries before sending them to the U.S., rather than shipping them directly from Afghanistan, since this would make it less likely that local authorities would audit the rug-making facilities,” says Nance. “We’ve worked to build a supply chain and shipping rout where we can get the rugs in and out, while protecting the women who are working on them.” [Photo: Ideas Beyond Borders] When Nance discovered the network of underground schools, she was eager to support this work through The Citizenry. She believes giving girls an education is one step toward helping them work across many industries, ultimately creating more possibilities for their lives. She reached out to Ideas Beyond Borders to see how her team could help. The Citizenry turned its Black Friday Sale into an opportunity to raise funds for these schools by donating profits to Ideas Beyond Borders. It raised $30,000 that will fund the education of 2,500 girls in 38 secret locations across the country. Black Friday is our single-biggest day of sales in the year, and we thought it would be a beautiful kickoff to the holiday season, she says. Al Mutar hopes that the education the girls receive will allow them to find work in areas they are interested in. Some are eager to learn English and French so they can find work as translators. Others are eager to become graphic designers. A proportion of these girls are even able to go to university in women’s colleges in Bangladesh. They can then go through a more formal education system and find even more job opportunities, he says.
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E-Commerce
The Chinese AI company DeepSeek is making major waves across the tech industry after rising to prominence seemingly overnight. The artificial intelligence tool emerged in the top spot in Apple’s App Store yesterday, above competitors like OpenAIs ChatGPT and Google’s Geminiand on a comparatively tiny timeline and budget. But theres another way that DeepSeek is quietly outdoing its American competitors: through its branding. Late last week, DeepSeek released an updated version of its open-source chatbot called DeepSeek-V3, a product that has some tech analysts describing the companys efforts as “a shot across the bow at the U.S. tech world.” DeepSeek-V3 performs similarly to chatbots like ChatGPT-4o and Meta’s Llamadespite being created in just a few months, being trained on inferior hardware, and requiring a reported budget of just $6 million. (ChatGPT spent $100 million on its latest iteration alone.) The news caused the Nasdaq to tumble by $1 trillion yesterday as markets reacted to the success of the lower-cost LLM challenger. But the visual representation of this industry disruptor is not a swirling black-void logo la OpenAI, or even a robot. Instead, its a friendly blue whale. This diverges from branding trends currently dominating the AI industry, which lean into abstract design and increasingly rigid, tech-inspired aesthetics. By bucking those trends, DeepSeek is offering consumers a new point of view on how an AI company might conduct and represent itself. [Image: Deepseek] DeepSeeks logo makes a splash DeepSeeks logo is a plump, bright blue whale that almost appears to be jumping across the screen. Its accompanied by the brands wordmark in a rounded, fractured sans-serif font. The overall visual identity creates an air of approachability and friendliness that makes the brand stand out. That’s because there’s been a lack of personality and joy in tech-industry branding over the past several years, according to designer Martin Grasser, who created Twitters iconic blue bird logo back in 2012. We’ve seen this homogenization of design when you look across tech companies, Grasser says, adding that he doesn’t see identity design as “a big differentiator” in the current tech environment. He notes that the tech sector has undergone a stark branding evolution from the playful and humanist approach of the aughts to more grandiose visual storytelling. Now we have Uber, Meta, Tesla, Xwe’ve really taken this turn toward technology as the answer, he says. Grasser says he was charmed by DeepSeeks logo, as well as the concept behind it. [Image: Deepseek] The brand is a WIP, but evokes imagination While DeepSeek hasnt openly explained its design choices, when we asked the companys chatbot about the logo, it replied that the mark likely symbolizes depth, intelligence, and explorationqualities that align with the companys focus on AI and deep learning. The choice of a whale works on several symbolic levels, according to Teemu Suviala, chief creative officer at Landor. There are many cultures that associate whales with wisdom, power, and prosperity, he says. Seeing a whale [is] an omen of good things to come in many cultures. Suviala adds that the concept of a whale navigating the ocean is a strong metaphor for DeepSeeks users. The concept of navigating is probably connected to the open-source nature of DeepSeek that is somewhat different from the competition, he says. Suviala and Grasser agree that theres still plenty of work to be done on DeepSeeks branding, both noting that the whales eye becomes lost at a small scale. Grasser believes the brands typography doesnt quite fit with its friendly, optimistic logo, as the fracturing creates a nervous feeling. Suviala called out the inconsistent kerning. Such inconsistencies could be due to the nature of startup branding. Ross Clugston, chief creative officer at Design Bridge and Partners, says that in the U.S., most startups tend to hold off on investing in branding until “they have matured and need to signal to investors they are serious about making profit.” Clugston points to Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok, noting that all of their early branding efforts fell drastically short of the actual product they were building. Logos with animals are usually reserved for more playful tech pastimes like Twitter, Mailchimp, Tripadvisor, Evernote, he says. I think this is a conscious effort [by DeepSeek] to be nonthreatening.” Still, DeepSeek’s unexpected branding is a first building block toward establishing an AI company that opts to distinguish itself from the competition rather than blending in. It evokes imagination and the unknown, and thats cool, Grasser says. It’s nice to hear from somebody who’s curious, as opposed to omnipresent or hovering above you. Logos from OpenAI, DeepMind, Synthesia, DeepMotion, Laika, Oneirocom, Mentum, Regie.ai, Eyeware, Stability AI, HyperWrite, Cortexica, and oPRO.ai [Image: courtesy James I. Bowie] Will this design disruptor have staying power? Over the past several years, dominant AI companies have embraced a few key graphic icons that have come to define the space at large. There are the minimalist, robot-inspired logos, as those from Replika, Jasper AI, and Enzyme. Theres the abstract, swirling hexagon thats come to define giants like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Stability AI. The secondary sparkle icon has been used by companies as far-ranging as OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and Grammarly to suggest the presto magic of their AI tools. As AI has become more powerful, it seems Big Tech companies have focused more on signaling that theyre part of the industry-shaking, boundary-breaking AI club than actually distinguishing their own brand identities. And the more ingrained these tropes become in consumers minds, the more incentive there is for new AI companies to go with the flow and bank on established visual associations. Taken alongside the sector’s existing logos, DeepSeeks mascot-adjacent approach is a pretty big risk. Whether the play actually succeeds, Suviala notes, will come down to how the company conducts itself in the coming monthsincluding whether the product experience itself and the company’s communication style aligns with its friendly exterior. “I would venture as far as to say that DeepSeek is and was always going to terrify Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and government regulators,” Clugston says. “So its strategically sound to make the logo a cute little whale.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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