SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award: Evaluating Experiences of Autistic Children with Technologies in Co-Design

Many technologies available to autistic children functionally focus on the medical characteristics of a diagnosis of autism. All too often, these technologies are not oriented towards their specific modes of sense-making, but rather towards an outcome behaviour defined by a neurotypically dominant society [7]. These technologies are then also evaluated according to the extrinsic motivations driving their design. Recently, though, more and more Participatory Design (PD) projects create technologies together with autistic children, albeit still mostly remaining in a medicalised view of autism. Hence, there is a lack of research into participatory design with autistic children aiming to develop technologies that reflect their intrinsic interests, holistic wellbeing and considers the embodied experiences they have with these technologies. Constructive notions of experience in the research field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) rely on empathy as a core component of experience-driven evaluations [2]. However, autistic individuals perceive the world differently and, hence, make sense of it differently than non-autistic researchers [1]. This divide becomes especially pronounced when working with children, whose life worlds vastly differ from those of adult researchers. While empathy is a core requirement for the evaluation of the experience of autistic children, my work shows that researchers cannot rely solely on their empathy. Hence, evaluating these experiences requires a structured process capturing multiple views [6].