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(disabled) by their environment. This
shift had far-reaching consequences
in policymaking, science, and the
public discourse, since it called on the
environment to change. In recent years,
the social model too was criticized
for being one-sided and ignoring the
experiential perspective. Both the
medical and the social model had
little to say about what experiences
individuals had with being disabled or
living with an impairment. While there
are fundamental differences, feminist
and queer studies address some similar
questions, and the field is in the process
of incorporating postmodern and
critical realist thinking in order to make
progress in analyzing our understanding
of the relationship between disability,
impairment, culture, and society [ 4].
The relationship between technology
and people with disabilities is still widely
dominated by the medical model, because
it has proven to be pragmatically useful
in providing requirements for design.
Technology is designed to assist people in
overcoming their functional limitations,
and as Mankoff, Hayes, and Kasnitz have
written in a recent paper [ 5], these efforts
are to be applauded. But they also rightly
say that disability studies can help us
develop a more nuanced understanding
of these efforts and guide us to critically
reflect on our attempts at “doing good.”
OU TSIDE THEBOX
With OutsideTheBox, my first
project as principal investigator,
we take up this line of argument
and implement a research agenda
that aims to explore how we can
find new, meaningful roles for
technologies in the lives of children
with autism. We adopted a designerly
and participatory approach and
chose ubiquitous computing as a
technological opportunity space. The
only requirements we defined in the
design brief are that the technology
affords positive experiences within
the life-worlds of children with
autism, and that it supports the
children in sharing those experiences
within their social environment.
In a series of case studies,
Outside TheBox reinterprets a range
of PD methods in which we work with
autistic children to co-design their very
own smart objects. The design processes
are evaluated to assess how well they
enable children with autism in leading
the exploration and expressing their
ideas. Mapping out various methods,
we aim to provide designers with a
concept space offering methodological
guidance that is firmly grounded in the
case studies.
The project is less than a year old,
but we are starting to see how powerful
our approach is in unlocking design
spaces. We are also confronted by
many challenges—in practical and
theoretical terms—but we believe our
work demonstrates how we could start
redefining the relationship between
people with autism and technology.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Outside TheBox - Rethinking Assistive Technologies with Children with Autism is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (F WF): [P26281-N23]. The ECHOES project was funded by the ESRC/ EPSRC, TRLP TEL programme (UK), grant number: RES-139-25-0395.

 

Endnotes

1. There are different views on the use of “people-first” language in reference to people with autism/autistic people. Good arguments have been made on both sides and many say it is a matter of personal preference. This article uses both terms interchangeably as a way to acknowledge this.

2. Alyssa Alcorn, another former member of ECHOES, further investigated the effects of these unintentional slips and argues to use them as an opportunity for design in her Ph.D. work. See: Alcorn, A. M., Pain, H., and Good, J. Motivating children’s initiations with novelty and surprise: Initial design recommendations for autism. Proc. of the 2014 Conference on Interaction Design and Children. ACM, 2014, 225– 228. DOI: 10.1145/2593968.2610458

3. Frauenberger, C., Good, J., Alcorn, A., and Pain, H. Conversing through and about technologies: Design critique as an opportunity to engage children with autism and broaden research(er) perspectives. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 1, 2 (2013), 38–49. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijcci.2013.02.001

4. Shakespeare, T. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited, Second Edition. Routledge, Oxon, U. K., 2014.

5. Mankoff, J., Hayes, G.R., and Kasnitz, D. Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology. Proc. of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. ACM, New York, 2010, 3–10. DOI: 10.1145/1878803.1878807

Christopher Frauenberger is a senior researcher at the Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, Vienna University of Technology, where he is the principal investigator of the Outside TheBox project. His research focuses on exploring ways in which we can involve people with disabilities in designing novel interactive technologies. → [e-mail] DOI: 10.1145/2728604 COPYRIGHT HELD BY AUTHOR. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00 Autistic children co-design smart objects in Outside TheBox that are meaningful and empower them to share their experiences with their social environment.