The famous autistic designer Temple Grandin once said that teaching an autistic child to cross the road might involve taking the child to many different roads, and repeating the same instructions over and over. This is because autistics have trouble generalising from experience, applying a lesson learned in one situation to a different situation. A related difficulty is in ‘transposition’, expressing (or understanding) the same meaning in different forms. That’s why the watch diary (pictured below) from Connect Design may appeal to some autistics; because it doesn’t require them to transpose between two different ways of marking the time, on a watch that’s actually running and in a standard diary where times are listed vertically and don’t change. The watch diary has a real watch in the centre, and events are written around the watch face. So an autistic person can immediately see what’s on in ‘real time’, right there on the page. Maybe that’s why, as an autistic, I find it intuitively appealing.