Workshop: Visualizing Your Inner World (second session)

What is it like to be you? Slow down and explore your personal experience of the world and Amber’s Conversation Cabinet.

What is it like to be you?

In a digital age focused on efficiency and sameness, we often lose the space for true human connection. As part of the Rooftop Sessions: The Brain, designer Amber van Gastel invites you to step away from the noise and explore a different way of communicating. This method does not start with finding the right words, but with images, objects and associations.

Located on the rooftop of the TU Library, you are invited to look down upon the world and slow down. In the presence of Amber’s Conversation Cabinet, you will explore your personal experience of the world. Using the Detailed Talks card set, you will discover how meaning emerges through intuition and metaphor rather than digital convenience. This creates room for conversations that feel more open, layered and fully human.

In this interactive session, you will experience how different people can look at the same image and connect to it in completely different ways. By sharing these associations, you learn to listen beyond language and recognize multiple perspectives without the need to resolve them. It is an exercise in refreshing the mind and reclaiming our attention for one another.

Who is it for? Anyone interested in communication, perception and the human brain is welcome. No prior knowledge of neurodiversity is required.

About the facilitator Amber van Gastel is a neurodivergent designer and researcher. After a late autism and ADHD diagnosis, she developed Detailed Talks as a tool to bridge the gap where literal language often falls short. Her work combines lived experience and design to create gentle tools for connection. She believes that understanding begins when we allow multiple ways of thinking and being to exist next to each other.