0:00  OK, let's dive right into this explainer by completely rethinking everything we assume about human capability and how we navigate our daily lives.

0:02  You know, we've all been taught that getting things done, whether that's crushing a project at work, keeping the house clean, or literally just getting out the door in the morning, is entirely about personal effort. We tend to think of productivity and independence as these things that live exclusively inside our own individual bodies and brains. But what if that entire premise is fundamentally flawed. What if the very way we design for human participation is actually setting us up to fail? Today we are exploring a deeply fascinating systems level design philosophy called Distributed Capability Architecture, or DCA for short. It is a completely different, frankly game-changing way to look at how humans actually function in the real world.

0:41  I really want you to consider this question for a second, because the failing individual model of productivity tells us that when we hit a wall, we just need to rely purely on willpower and masking. Most systems of accessibility and productivity treat the human body as a closed system, and under that assumption, if you struggle with a task, well, it's viewed as your individual deficit, and what's the standard solution we're given?

0:41  We're told to push harder, we try to compensate, or we use tools to try and force ourselves back to some imaginary normal baseline. But let's be totally realistic here. Human capacity is not static. Our energy fluctuates wildly, we experience pain, fatigue, sensory overload, or just extreme stress, and in that individual model, when your personal capacity drops, the entire system collapses, simply because there's nowhere else for the load to go, and that right there instantly exposes the broken baseline of judging capability by what the unassisted body can do.

0:53  The traditional performative independence model treats you, your brain, and your body as the sole unit of capability. Its response to any friction is just sheer will power. Its whole design focuses on abstract optimization, assuming you must always bear the brunt of the work. But contrast that with the DCA ecosystem model.

1:52  Here, the unit of capability is the entire system around you. Its response to friction isn't masking or gritting your teeth, it's deliberately shifting the load to your environment or your tools, it focuses on how you actually function at your absolute lowest capacity state. This is adaptive systems designed for real life, built for genuine real world resilience. So, the absolutely crucial point here, a radical reframe we really need to anchor in our minds, is this capability is an emergent property of your ecosystem, not an inherent trait of your physical body. 

2:24  The ability to complete a task, move through a space, manage an emotion, or even participate in a community does not reside in your body alone. It's produced by the relationships between you, your tools, your environment, and your time. If you remove those supporting elements, a task might become impossible, but not because your inherent capability just vanished, but because the system producing it collapsed. 

2:46  Once we accept this, we stop trying to fix the person, and we finally start engineering the system, and this brilliantly illustrates the solution. Distributed capability architecture treats participation as a dynamic property distributed across five interconnected nodes that form a continuous loop: Body, Tools, Environment, Community and Time. Think of this as a highly sophisticated routing infrastructure. 

3:10  DCA makes capability distribution deliberate, so instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping the right conditions happen to be in place for you to get through your day, DCA asks, Okay, which of these nodes is currently overloaded? Which node actually has spare capacity? And how do we route the task through the node that can actually carry the weight? Right now, let's break down this routing infrastructure a bit. When your physiological state, your body node, fluctuates because of pain or fatigue, the system doesn't have to fail. Instead, that capability is dynamically routed through the other four nodes, it relies on tools, and we're not just talking about hammers here, we mean cognitive extenders like AI systems or sensory regulators, like a curated music playlist. It leans on your environment, where the actual spatial and architectural design of a room can carry memory for you if it's set up right.

3:56  It draws from community, your distributed support network, sharing mutual aid, and it utilises time staging tasks and migrating efforts, so you're doing work when you actually have the capacity, ensuring it's already done when your capacity drops. Let's see how this builds in practice. Tools act as capability extenders; they don't replace you; they carry the physical and cognitive load your body currently cannot. Think of an air fryer carrying the physical load of cooking, or an AI acting like an executive exosuit for your planning load. 

4:24  Meanwhile, time acts as a temporal bridge. This allows for capability migration, which is honestly one of the most powerful concepts in DCA. It's the act of doing work on a high capacity day, effectively storing it and sending it across that bridge to your future self, who might be having a low capacity moment. Making a batch of freezer meal meals on a Sunday, you are literally packing capability into a box and shipping it to a Wednesday night, where you have zero energy. 

4:47  It is high-performance systems engineering applied to daily survival. Now, it is absolutely crucial to understand where this comes from. This isn't just a fleeting set of internet life hacks. This highly refined architecture was forged in a 50 year crucible of institutional pressure and lived experience by neurodivergent systems thinker Marie Maroney. It was reverse engineered from decades of managing complex physical and neurodivergent conditions, and more importantly, it was built under immense pressure. We're talking navigating hostile bureaucratic environments, fragmented healthcare systems, and compounding administrative friction. A system built under those intense conditions isn't just designed to work when everything is perfect. It is fundamentally designed to survive and function when multiple things go wrong simultaneously. 

5:29  At its core, this is a survival architecture. Because this was stress tested under such extreme conditions, the architecture is universally transferable to absolutely anyone whose participation in life is constrained by fluctuating capacity or systemic friction. The disability and neurodiversion context was the crucible that revealed the framework for sure, but it doesn't limit it. 

5:51  The blueprint travels a carer managing immense cognitive overload can use DCA sequenced regulation to build mandatory recovery phases right into their day, a parent carrying a toddler can use threshold architecture, like placing a designated transition table by the door for keys and mail, to automatically reduce friction. Even a refugee navigating a complex immigration bureaucracy can use DCA's concept of cross-layer documentation to manage hostile institutional interfaces. 

6:18  I want you to think of your capability to be kind of like a constellation, you are right there in the centre, but your potential blooms outward, supported by your tools, your environment, your community, and time. When one of those nodes dims, the others glow brighter to compensate. This totally redefines independence. It's not about doing everything completely alone, it's about having the system designed in place to keep participating in your own life, even when your personal capacity drops. DCA teaches us that independence is not a measure of how much you can suffer through without assistance. True independence is having sovereign control over the design of your distributed ecosystem. 

6:58  We spend so much of our lives feeling incredibly guilty for not being able to force our bodies and minds to operate like flawless machines in environments that were never ever designed for us, but distributed capability architecture offers us a profound permission slip. It tells us that the capability is out there, just waiting to be organised. You don't need to fix yourself, you just need to find your nodes, map out where your daily friction lies and start deliberately shifting the load.

7:24  So to leave you with a final thought to take away from this explainer. What would happen if you stopped trying to fit your body to the world and instead began mapping your friction to build your own architecture? What part of your ecosystem can carry the weight for you tomorrow?

DCA is adaptive systems design for real life.

It is a way of asking:

What is the participation goal?
Where is the friction?
Which part of the system is currently overloaded?
Can the task be shifted into the environment, a tool, a routine, another person, or a different moment in time?

The basic routing pattern is:

Participation goal → friction point → overloaded node → migration route → new support system

DCA is not about forcing the body to perform better.

It is about redesigning the ecosystem so participation does not depend on one fragile point of failure.

DCA is not a productivity system.
It is not a self-help method.
It is not a set of life hacks.
It is not a way to become more normal.
It is not pretending disability, pain, exhaustion, trauma, or institutional failure do not exist.

DCA starts from actual functioning.

Not imaginary functioning.
Not “best day” functioning.
Not what someone could do once, under pressure, at high cost.
Actual functioning.

Then it designs from there.

The Body node includes pain, mobility, fatigue, sensory processing, digestion, interoception, attention, executive function, and nervous system state.

The body is allowed to fluctuate.

The system should expect that.

DCA does not start by asking how to fix the body. It asks how to design around the body’s real operating conditions.

Tools are capability extenders.

They include mobility aids, kitchen equipment, AI systems, storage containers, playlists, bags, chairs, knee pads, timers, labels, air fryers, pressure cookers, adapted handles, templates, and anything else that changes the interface between a person and a task.

A good tool does not just help.
It changes what becomes possible.

The environment is infrastructure.

Rooms, thresholds, lighting, surfaces, storage, furniture, pathways, gardens, kitchens, workspaces, and object placement all affect capability.

A room can increase friction or reduce it.
A doorway can break a task or hold the transition.
A shelf can hide the next step or make it visible.

In DCA, the environment is not background scenery. It is an active part of the system.

Community includes friends, neighbours, carers, peer networks, professionals, shared knowledge, practical help, public witnessing, and mutual aid.

Support is not failure.

Support is load distribution.

DCA treats community as part of the architecture, not as an emergency patch added after collapse.

Time includes batching, staging, recovery, reminders, future-self systems, open-loop parking, freezer meals, pacing, and doing work when capacity exists so it is not required when capacity has dropped.

Time is not just a clock.

Time is where capability migrates.

A task done earlier can become support for a lower-capacity future self. A recovery phase can protect tomorrow’s participation. A staged object can preserve the thread of a task between sessions.

Real life does not divide neatly into categories.

Food is physical, cognitive, sensory, temporal, financial, and emotional.
Music is autonomic, cognitive, social, and temporal.
A transition table is furniture, memory, logistics, task parking, anxiety reduction, and journey preparation all at once.

That overlap is not mess.

It is the architecture.

The strongest DCA systems are usually not single-purpose adaptations. They are high-overlap nodes that reduce friction across several layers at the same time.

🧺A basket on the stairs can reduce pain, decisions, journeys, and forgotten objects.

🧊A freezer meal can carry nutrition, time, executive function, money, and future capacity.

🗃️A visible project box can preserve task state, reduce search effort, and make restarting easier.

🔑A transition table can hold keys, food, paperwork, mobility tools, blocked tasks, and the memory of what happens next.

DCA uses practical design principles such as:

Cross-layer multi-functionality
Threshold architecture
Capability packaging
Suspended state management
Environmental memory
Visibility as activation
Dynamic mobility switching
Designing for the lowest-capacity state
Recovery as infrastructure
Documentation as infrastructure
Organisational interface architecture

These principles are not abstract theory floating in a glass jar. They are tools for reducing friction in daily life.

They help answer questions like:

Where does this task break?
What is carrying too much load?
Can the environment hold the reminder?
Can a tool carry the physical demand?
Can a person carry the social or administrative load?
Can the task move to a better time?
Can recovery be designed in before the system crashes?

🍽️A transition table near a doorway can work as a memory system, travel station, task parking zone, food visibility point, and anxiety reducer.

📸A staged project box can preserve task state so restarting does not require rebuilding the entire mental map. (Ie camera bag, charger, batteries, memory cards, back drops and tripod stored in one box.)

🎵A playlist can support nervous system regulation when words, planning, or emotional labelling are offline.

🍜A freezer can store future capacity by holding meals prepared during a higher-capacity window.

🩼A mobility toolkit can shift between crutches, hiking sticks, wheelchair, powered attachment, office chair, knee pads, or other supports depending on terrain, pain, distance, and task demand.

📱An AI assistant can act as a cognitive exosuit by helping with translation, planning, sequencing, paperwork, and communication.

📄Documentation can become infrastructure when organisations are inaccessible, inconsistent, or hostile.

Use this page as the entrance map.

The DCA section breaks the architecture into working layers:

💪Body
📱Tools
🏘️Environment
🫂Community
🕤Time
💚Autonomic regulation
📄Case studies
🆘Build-your-own prompts

The pages overlap because real life overlaps.

Start with the node that is currently causing the most friction, then trace where the load could move.

You do not need a perfect system.

You need a system that can keep working when conditions change. 💚