Designing technology for spatial needs: Routines, control and social competences of people with autism

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We interviewed 12 autistic individuals.

  • We explored their spatial needs and how they live the urban environments.

  • We identified three kinds of spaces that characterize their everyday life.

  • We outlined a series of design considerations to support their daily movements.

  • We developed our conceptualization through a design session.

Abstract

Over the years, the relationship between technology and people with autism has been framed mainly in a medical model, where technology is primarily aimed at mitigating deficits and providing helps to overcome limitations. This has yielded a variety of Human-Computer Interaction designs addressed to improve the autistic individuals’ daily tasks and behavior. In this article, we want to explore a different approach, by proposing a phenomenological take on the autistic lived experience, which could integrate the results achieved by the medical model, and offer a “first person perspective” on autism. More precisely, by adopting a cognitive approach to urbanism we want to explore how autistic individuals conceptualize and experience the spaces they inhabit. To this aim, we interviewed 12 adults with a diagnosis of autism asking them to recount their everyday movements and city living activities. Building on the study findings, we identified three kinds of spaces that characterize their life and outlined a series of design considerations to support technology interventions for satisfying their spatial needs. Then, during a design session, we developed our conceptualization as well as our design suggestions, yielding a more nuanced picture of how space is subjectively constructed by autistic people.

Introduction

Autism is characterized by peculiarities in domains as diverse as social interaction, communication, attention, and practical skills (Hobson, 1993), as well as emotional features like a propensity to become anxious. All of these may occur in different forms, ranging from severe intellectual and language impairments to high-functioning autistic/Asperger syndrome, sometimes with an IQ above the average. The latter may often remain invisible to society (Hobson, 1993, Luciano et al., 2014, Keller et al., 2016). Since autism is marked by a tendency to withdrawal from social relationships as well as oftentimes a preference for the mechanical and formal over the biological and psychological, technology-based interventions appear to be successful when used by affected individuals: interactive technologies typically are more predictable than humans, do not require direct social interaction, and can provide routines as explicit, present, and clear expectations, as well as feedback consistent rewards or consequences for responses (Kientz et al., 2013).

Designing technology for people with autism, however, implies the willingness to understand their “neurodiversity”,1 if we want to go beyond the idea that a unique mode of existence and experience is legitimate in our society. For a long time, neurodiverse conditions have been framed within a medical model, “defining being disabled by people's physical or cognitive differences and the resulting functional limitations” (Frauenberger, 2015, 58). Likewise, the relationship between technology and people with disabilities has been framed within the medical model, because it has proven to be pragmatically useful in providing requirements for design (Frauenberger, 2015). This surely has to be applauded, as Mankoff et al. (2010) noted: however, they also pointed out that a different take, coming, for instance, from disability studies, could integrate the medical approach helping us produce a nuanced understanding of these people's needs. In the 1980s, the disability rights movement proposed a reconceptualization of disability (the so-called social model), being seen as a social construct resulting in impaired people being disadvantaged (Barnes, 2012). Recently, Frauenberger et al. (2016) claimed that we need to capture the complexities of the disabled experience, suggesting that we should explore novel theoretical approaches. If we want to be able to respond to needs and desires that go beyond mitigating deficit, this requires us to understand what is meaningful in the autistic people's lives and develop solutions that are situated in their lifeworlds (Frauenberger, 2015).

Building on top of these insights, in this article we aim at exploring how people with autism experience the spaces they live, since their spatial needs, i.e., what they seek when they inhabit a place, or move across different environments, seem to be still underexplored in both the autism and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature. We further propose to adopt a phenomenological perspective, in order to account for the lived experience of this neurodiverse population. This could integrate the medical perspective, by offering an alternate take on the autistic lived experience.

The philosophical and psychological paradigm of phenomenology has its roots in the works of Husserl, 1962, Husserl, 1976), Merleau-Ponty (1962), and Heidegger (1982). This theoretical approach sees reality as the product of a “view from within” (in contrast with the “view from nowhere” criticized by Nagel, 1986) and conceives the mind as subjectivity, which actively “constructs” the world by ascribing subjective meanings to it (Clancey, 1997, Brizio and Tirassa, 2016). Within HCI, phenomenology has been used to promote a tool-based approach to design (Ehn, 1988), ground a theory of embodied interaction (Svanæs, 2013), and inform the design of Personal Informatics systems (Rapp & Tirassa, 2017). Phenomenology offers a rich and diverse range of orientations providing a useful framework for understanding how people make sense of existence in and toward the world (Frauenberger et al., 2010). Therefore, it may be useful to understand the autistic people's experience, looking at their world from a first person point of view.

To explore autistic spatiality, we moved from studies on cognitive urbanism (Lynch, 1960), which investigates how the features of human cognition and the characteristics of urban environments interact to produce a subjective spatial representation of city places, paths, and landmarks. This approach focuses on how people experience and subjectively construct urban environments, thus encompassing the phenomenological perspective we want to follow.

In sum, our work aims to explore how adults with autism live their cities, what kind of spatial needs they have, and how they can be supported in their daily routines by technology. We look for an answer to the following questions: How do individuals with autism perceive and represent the urban spaces in which they live? What do they mean for them? What kinds of barriers do they encounter when moving across urban environments? How might HCI technologies support people with autism living their city and during their transfers?

We interviewed 12 adults with autism asking them to recount their everyday movements and city living activities. Our contribution to HCI is twofold: (i) we investigate autistic persons focusing on their lived spatial experience, and (ii) we provide implications for the design of interactive systems capable of supporting their situated needs in urban environments.

The article is structured as follows. Section 2 outlines the relevant related literature and our theoretical background. Section 3 describes the method used in this research. Section 4 exposes its results. Section 5 discusses the main features of the “autistic space” and presents a few considerations for design. Section 6 reports the outcome of a design session with high-functioning/Asperger individuals, developing our conceptualization of the autistic space, along with the proposed design suggestions. Section 7 describes the limitations of our study and Section 8 concludes the article.

Section snippets

Background

In this section, we will first introduce relevant literature with reference to autism and technology. In doing so, we will try to highlight current literature trends. Then, we will briefly outline the theoretical background that informed our study.

Method

To explore the representation that autistic adults have of the urban environment and their ways of using it and moving within it, we interviewed 12 persons with a diagnosis of autism. Then, in a subsequent design session, we recalled five participants to further develop the outcome of the interviews (Section 6).

Results

As we have seen, the analysis resulted in three main themes, which all relate to the overarching theme of uncertainty. Spatial routines, i.e., the tendency to stick to rigid paths during daily transfers, may be interpreted as a compensatory strategy that participants enact to cope with uncertainty, which otherwise may yield anxiety and consequently disorientation. Controlled environments, which point to all those places that are considered “secure” by our participants, can be seen as another

Discussion and considerations for design

High-functioning/Asperger participants encounter more or less the same barriers faced by mid-functioning ones, albeit to a lesser extent. This is likely due to their greater intellectual abilities, which makes them substantially self-sufficient in daily living. However, their need of moving around the city is far more pressing than that of the mid-functioning individuals, since their everyday routines and work require frequent transfers: as a consequence, they face “uncertainty barriers” more

Design session

In order to have a feedback on our conceptualization, as well as on the defined design considerations, we recalled the interviewees to collectively discuss them. At this stage, we decided to focus on the high-functioning/Asperger individuals, since the frequency, variety, and magnitude of their everyday movements (most of them travel for work and/or are involved in mundane activities requiring regular transfers) pointed to a more pressing desire to use technology for spatial support. Moreover,

Limitations

One limitation of our work is that we did not involve a group of neurotypical individuals to compare the experience of autistic participants with those of others to highlight the unique aspects of autism. This somehow undermines the possibility of claiming that what we outlined in this work represents unique and idiosyncratic needs of the autistic population. However, this can be mitigated by the fact that the need we found underlying all the themes we described, namely that of coping with

Conclusion

In this article we explored the representations that autistic individuals have of home and of the urban spaces, and the ways and needs they have to live and move within them. The interviews and the design session helped us understand how these persons conceptualize the spaces in which they live as well as the barriers they encounter in the urban environments. This allowed us to identify three kinds of spaces that characterize their life.

The safe space practically identifies with home, a place

Declarations of interest

none.

Acknowledgment

This work has received funding by the ICxT (ICT and Innovation for the Society and the Territory) Center.

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