About Cognitopia
Where Self-Determination comes to life
Our Mission
Improve independence, self-determination, and transition success for individuals with autism and other cognitive disabilities while enhancing support from others in their lives who help and guide them.
Our Goal
Our goal is to develop universally-designed, person-centered tools that people can use to tell their stories and self-manage daily living, school, and work. We see a gap between instruction about self-determination and the availability of user- facing tools that enable people with developmental disabilities to exercise the kind of control over their lives that starts early in life and builds true self-advocacy.
Cognitopia Story
The Cognitopia Platform for Self-Determination has been developed through a multi-year effort to build universally-designed applications that give individuals with disabilities the tools they need to live self-determined lives and that enable the agencies that serve them to embrace person-centered thinking and practices toward that goal. We are serious about self-determination and giving people the tools they need to live their best lives.
The development of Cognitopia has been funded in part through federal grant funding from agencies such as the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Institute of Child Health and Mental Development. As a result, it is rooted in evidence-based practices such as video modeling, task analysis, and universal design, and our lean development approach has always incorporated participatory design through the deep involvement of users with developmental disabilities.
The Cognitopia Platform is the work of a team of innovative designers, developers, and trainers who continue to iterate on Founder Tom Keating’s vision for a kind of one-stop solution to the challenges experienced by individuals with cognitive disabilities to communicate their stories, manage daily life, and pursue their goals. That vision emerged through Tom’s role for as caregiver for his brother James, who had autism, and the potential offered by the emergence of personal computing technology in the 1990’s. James sadly passed away in 2012 but our work has continued in his honor.
Cognitopia’s first application was Picture Planner, a visual calendaring tool that allowed users to create calendar events step by step, selecting from image arrays to describe the what they were doing, who they were doing it with, where, what to bring, what to wear, and how to get there. This initial success led to the realization that a broader range of tools was needed, resulting in the Cognitopia Platform for Self Determination as a web-based hub with a range of cognitively accessible life tools.
We’re proud of what we’ve done so far with the MyLife digital portfolio, Routines task prompter, and Goal Guide tool for progress tracking and sharing, but we’re not done yet. We continue to develop new tools and ways to use them, always grounded in the real everyday needs and feedback of people with disabilities and their supporters.