Abstract

Assistive technologies (ATs) are increasingly proposed to support young autistic individuals (YAAs) in daily life. Yet, the uptake of these technologies remains limited. Most ATs are designed for and by non-autistic people, which makes them less usable for YAAs. Moreover, ATs specifically designed for YAAs are often part of formal therapy or training and typically aim to mitigate and rectify ‘problematic’ autistic behavior. In the research project Design Your Life, we are working with YAAs to develop a co-design toolkit that will help them create a personalized environment to support their independence. By now, we have completed ten design case studies, each deploying a different version of the toolkit. In this paper, we report on the insights that we gained from these case studies, for which we used a grounded theory approach. In total, we identified ten categories of knowledge that will inform the development of a single, final toolkit.

Keywords

design your life, grounded theory, research-through-design, codesign

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Conference Track

Research Paper

Share

COinS
 
Jun 25th, 9:00 AM

Towards a toolkit to empower young autistic adults: Using grounded theory to analyze ten design case studies

Assistive technologies (ATs) are increasingly proposed to support young autistic individuals (YAAs) in daily life. Yet, the uptake of these technologies remains limited. Most ATs are designed for and by non-autistic people, which makes them less usable for YAAs. Moreover, ATs specifically designed for YAAs are often part of formal therapy or training and typically aim to mitigate and rectify ‘problematic’ autistic behavior. In the research project Design Your Life, we are working with YAAs to develop a co-design toolkit that will help them create a personalized environment to support their independence. By now, we have completed ten design case studies, each deploying a different version of the toolkit. In this paper, we report on the insights that we gained from these case studies, for which we used a grounded theory approach. In total, we identified ten categories of knowledge that will inform the development of a single, final toolkit.

 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.