EnvisageKIT
A concept for a toolkit for neurodivergent individuals, utilising generative AI and brainwave sensing technology to create visual aids for use in Art Therapy and daily life.
Funding pending for completion. Please get in touch if you are interested in sponsorship/funding.
Concept first presented at Eyemyth Media Arts Festival at The British Council in Delhi 2024.
The Concept
● A way to make sense of thoughts and feelings and transform them into a visual format in order to communicate with others.
● Navigate the neurotypical outside world and get people in my personal and professional life to understand how best to interact with me.
● Create a deck of images and use them in practical situations and everyday conversations as visual aids.
● Use the process of image generation as a type of art therapy and create a website as a for others to do the same, along with a guide and resources based on psychology and neuroscience.
● Invent a product for use in clinical Art Therapy settings that utilises brainwave sensing technology in order to facilitate non-verbal neurodivergent and children to use a version of the tool available on the website.
The essence of prompt engineering is to get a model to create exactly what you have in mind.
It is a form of expression using your model output as your medium - just like regular art it’s a way to make sense of your thoughts and feelings using a visual format in order to communicate with others.
Now and again, a model will spit out something so above and beyond your wildest imagination that if feels like pure magic.
It is like we have harnessed a billion imaginations to collectively dream beyond what a single mind can produce.
The Story
While I am largely at peace with myself and the way my brain works, my biggest insecurity is navigating the neurotypical outside world and getting people to understand how best to interact with me.
What is ‘normal’ for most can be a struggle for me.
Sometimes I have real difficulty in communicating so I thought why not give AI a try and see if it can get the job done.
What if I could create a deck of images and use them in practical situations and everyday conversations as visual aids?
Seeing my thoughts converted into imagery felt immensely therapeutic. It reminded me of therapy sessions where I drew out scenarios and my feelings, analysed the drawings and used the process to figure out solutions to problems.
Those drawings were indecipherable to anyone else, but these new AI images really meant something to the people I shared them with.
Art therapy has long been used in mental health, but for most, it has been limited to a small group lucky enough to access it.
It’s a very personal practise, our suffering and our triumphs invisible to the rest of the world.
If any of you are neurodivergent you might know that feeling of invisibility.
Now we have image generators accessible to all. We can create something worth sharing with the world, that at the same time can help us navigate it.
AI has democratised creating art- can it democratise art therapy also?
The Experiment
I started out with using simple but fairly abstract prompts to describe common scenarios and feelings me and many other neurodivergent's experience.
Some of the results were surprisingly accurate representations and weirdly similar to a series of doodly sketches I did a few years back where I tried to draw my thoughts inside oversized heads.
Here is a very heavily edited selection of images and the prompts I used to generate them.
I generated hundreds of images for the toolkit but these were the ones that made the most sense to me personally.
The toolkit will provide all the images I generated under the various prompts so that the user can select the most appropriate images to them.
As the process is so deeply personal and the image generation process is therapeutic in itself, the final toolkit will have a generator built in, with pre-made prompts and settings to make it super easy for anyone to create their own deck of images and add captions if required.
While I want people to understand when I am struggling and adapt accordingly, being neurodivergent isn’t all negative - in fact I wouldn’t swap it for the world and and am lucky and thankful that it comes with some superpowers also.
I also wanted to create some imagery that focuses on the positive side so the world can learn how much we have to give and that difference is a wonderful thing.
Neurodivergence doesn’t have to be a disability.
Early Stage Designs
Wire frame of prototype web portal for EnvisageKIT – this will be developed under the guidance of a qualified Art therapist. It will be fully accessibility compatible.
Not everyone is on my end of the spectrum where I basically can’t stop talking - there are many with ASD who have limited or no verbal communication and struggle even more with expressing their feelings.
I thought back to my audio work on brainwaves and thought how awesome would it be if I could create a system where I can turn inputs from brainwave sensing headsets into expressive imagery using genAI, giving people with ASD a new way to communicate visually.
