Students in Focus
The power of design: Bianca Handel's mission to help neurodiverse kids communicate
First-year student Bianca “Bee” Handel is an inventor: through industrial design, she hopes to improve the lives of neurodiverse children.
As a neurodivergent student herself, Bee found school challenging. She often struggled to concentrate in class and had difficulties fitting in with other kids. She felt isolated until she entered high school at Canberra Grammar School, where she discovered an innate talent for design, and a place where she finally belonged.
“I'm autistic and have ADHD, which made it very difficult to focus and to hold down stable friendships throughout primary school,” Bee says.
“Finding design in high school was kind of my saving grace. I met my best friends through the class. It was a space where it never mattered if my thoughts were scattered, or if I just wanted to stand up and make things. I could actually just be myself, and that was enough.”
Bee took Design and Technology each year throughout high school. For the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in her senior years, she designed an innovative product to help neurodivergent children express their needs and emotions: the Assistive Communication Abacus, or ACA. She was recognised for her invention on the HSC honour roll for Design and Technology.
The product design process started with an intensive phase of research. She conducted surveys with other students at the school and immersed herself in journals and papers on different learning disabilities.
“I discovered something called Alexithymia, which is an inability to understand your own emotions. It really clicked with me. The ACA is something I didn't have growing up, that might have made parts of my education a lot easier,” Bee says.
While modern forms of assistive communication rely heavily on digital technology such as tablets, Bee’s product addressed a major feature that these lack – tactility.
“Tactile input is so important for individuals with disabilities and neurodivergence. The ACA is a tool they can tangibly feel,” she says.
Children who may not be able to communicate verbally, or are feeling really overwhelmed, can slide the beads along to communicate.
The ACA’s tiles are completely interchangeable and can be personalised, with different emotions, body parts and feelings to add to the board.
Bee hand-crafted hundreds of beads – each set are a different texture. Users can choose from smooth polymer clay or fuzzy wool; soft, feathery pipe cleaners; or rough blocks.
Over a series of models, Bee refined the ACA’s design, focusing on purpose and functionality – ensuring a curved look and feel to avoid sharp edges, experimenting with different layouts for the internal containers, different colours and textures for the beads, and locks to hold the rods in place.
The final ACA prototype is lovingly nicknamed “Megan” (it was kept in a storage box that happened to have Megan written on the bottom).
Feedback on the product has been resoundingly positive. In a world dominated by plastic, mass produced products, and an app for every whim, what sets the ACA apart is the delicate attention paid to every fine detail.
“I've had lots of teachers encourage me to start producing them. The entire Design and Technology staff at Canberra Grammar School have been so supportive, they went out of their way to help me access the resources I needed,” Bee says.
In 2023, she was named as a major prize winner for the UC Creative Competition, winning a year’s study grant for any course within the UC Faculty of Arts and Design. Of course, the Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design) was the obvious choice for Bee.
“Industrial design is this happy medium between engineering and art,” she says.
Now in her second semester, Bee is feeling at home within the UC community, well-supported by her tutors and the wider design workshop staff, and couldn’t be happier with the direction her studies are taking.
“It's perfect. It's what I always wanted to do,” Bee says.
I love the little design community here. Everybody helps each other out with the ideas that we're working on – I think you’d really miss that in a bigger university.
“It's quite fast paced, we're always making products and these tangible things, so you actually feel like you're getting somewhere.”
As for the future of the ACA, Bee is far from finished with this project.
“My plan at the moment is to keep working away at it, making improvements while I study and hopefully beginning small batch production at the end of my degree,” Bee says.
“On the horizon, I hope to continue spring-boarding off this project, creating inclusive education products to make life easier for children of all abilities.”
Story by Kelly White, photos by Tyler Cherry