Insights
→ Interactive technologies can have
empowering roles in the lives of
people with autism.

→ To design for these roles, we need to shift our attention from mitigating deficits to scaffolding positive experiences.

→ Consequently, we require a more participatory and designerly approach.

Rethinking Autism
and Technology

design critique sessions with autistic children. We provided them with a simple digital annotation tool to show us what they liked or disliked in the virtual environment and what could be added. After a pilot was run, the power of the annotation tool quickly became apparent, but not quite in the way we expected: Much more than fulfilling its intended purpose as an annotation tool, it supported children with autism in communicating with us. It acted as a catalyst that scaffolded the human interaction off the screen by taking away many of the perceived social pressures that autistic children feel anxious about.

The children happily responded to our questions and interacted with us while drawing and putting smiley faces on the screen. Take the technology away and the conversation became a lot harder [ 3].

As we saw in the study, interactive technologies can have other roles than the ones on which we had been focusing thus far. They can scaffold interactions; they can mediate and empower. Children with autism seemed to readily appropriate our technology for their communication styles and make it part of the conversation. The learning of social skills became implicit and meaningfully situated rather than instructional. Has our focus on delivering interventions obstructed our view on what could be the real power of interactive technology in the lives of autistic people?

RETHINKING OUR APPROACH

If we want to create technology that
affords these kinds of roles, we need
to critically reflect on our drivers and
consequently rethink our approach to
(ASDs) are impaired social and
communication skills and tendencies
toward repetitive behaviors and
narrow interests. However, the ways
in which these features play out in
individuals are unpredictable and make
for an extremely heterogeneous group of
people. What most people with autism
[ 1] appreciate, though, is structure in
their environment, their daily routines,
and their social interactions. Which
explains why many have an affinity with
technology, as its behavior is predictable,
governed by rules that might be complex,
yet stable. Furthermore, technology
offers a tolerance for repetition that few
human peers can match.

Consequently, digital technologies are seen as a promising route for engaging autistic people and delivering therapeutic intervention or supporting them pragmatically with everyday issues.

Many such interactive systems have been developed, ranging from visual scheduling aids to social-skills training.

A consensus is emerging that technology
really can effectively support people
with autism in various ways. However,
many challenges remain largely
unsolved, for example, how to measure
learning gains as a result of a technology
intervention or how to facilitate the
effective transfer of learned skills from
the therapy room to the playground.

ECHOES

As I started as a post-doctoral researcher
on the ECHOES project, we aimed
to make our contribution against this
backdrop. Building on a well-known
intervention program, we developed
a system that allowed children with
autism to interact with a virtual
character on a big touchscreen to
learn specific social skills. A complex
evaluation study was devised to
investigate the learning effects, and
indeed, promising interventional
successes started to emerge. For me,
however, looking at the countless hours
of video we captured from children
interacting with the system, the most
interesting things were happening
off the screen. There was something
about the way in which many children
interacted with other people in the room
while interacting with the system—
through small gestures, often in between
tasks or in reaction to the system doing
what it evidently shouldn’t do [ 2]
In parallel to the formal evaluation
study, the design team organized

Christopher Frauenberger, Vienna University of Technology In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products.

— Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor FORUM UNIVERSAL INTERACTIONS