Co-design with children traditionally focuses on individual roles, from “user” to “design partner” and, more recently, “protagonist”. However, these framings rarely capture the dynamics of groups, where participation is distributed, fluid, and often collective. We introduce the notion of collective protagonism: a perspective where the protagonist is not each child individually but a shared stance that collectively shapes design context, contributions, process and outcomes. Through a co-design study consisting of four school-based workshops with eight neurodiverse children (8-9yrs), we explored how children defined social play, reflected on its challenges, and designed technologies to support it. We characterise ‘collective protagonism’ and identify methodological strategies that operationalise it, such as collective summaries and distributed contributions, supporting diverse and multimodal expression. We argue that embracing ‘collective protagonism’ could broaden how design research empowers groups of children, particularly within neurodiverse contexts, and fosters equitable, meaningful participation.

The IDC community is increasingly interested in technologies that promote inclusive social play, particularly for neurodiverse groups of children. However, much of the research in this area relies on historic categorisations of play that are based on 'typical' play behaviours. These classifications can often fail to account for 'divergent' play styles that may be exhibited by neurodivergent children. In this paper, we demonstrate how these traditional classifications of play fail to adequately capture the complexity of neurodiverse social play and propose an initial alternative continuum model for the analysis of neurodiverse play behaviours. We illustrate the model's potential use through observations of children's neurodiverse social play with a technology and then reflect on its ability to more effectively capture the diversity of play styles within neurodiverse groups.

Social play is crucial for children’s well-being and development. However, many social play technologies fail to address the specific characteristics and needs of neurodiverse1 play and often overlook divergent play styles. To address this, we first conducted a co-design study with a neurodiverse group of 7 children (Age 7-8) and, based on insights from these sessions, then developed a prototype, ChromaConnect, that allowed children to express their play style to one another during play. To evaluate ChromaConnect’s ability to support neurodiverse social play in different contexts, we observed children using it in both structured and unstructured play settings. Our findings show that ChromaConnect enabled children to create a common language of play, made divergent play modes more visible, and facilitated explicit expression of social play initiation. We discuss how these findings could be used to design ‘accompanying social play things’ that are more inclusive of neurodiverse play characteristics and divergent play styles.

Social play supports children to develop essential life skills and foster friendships. However, autistic and non-autistic children often do not have equal opportunities to engage in social play. Previous research to improve these opportunities tends to invoke social skill interventions solely for autistic children or is focused on designing for only one group, rather than considering the interactions or needs of all children in neurodiverse groups1. In order to understand the different experiences of children during social play, we conducted interviews with 6 professionals who support neurodiverse social play and undertook observation sessions of 36 autistic and non-autistic children during unstructured social play. Our findings move beyond the existing characterizations of autistic social play and build upon the double empathy problem to capture and consider the needs of all children in neurodiverse playgroups. We argue these findings could be used to inform future neurodiverse social play technology design in HCI.

Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are increasingly popular, particularly in homes. However, little research has investigated their potential in other settings, such as schools. We investigated how VUIs could support inclusive education, particularly for pupils with visual impairments (VIs). We organised focused discussions with educators at a school, with support staff from local authorities and, through bodystorming, with a class of 27 pupils. We then ran a series of co-design workshops with participants with mixed-visual abilities to design an educational VUI application. This provided insights into challenges faced by pupils with VIs in mainstream schools, and opened a space for educators, sighted and visually impaired pupils to reflect on and design for their shared learning experiences through VUIs. We present scenarios, a design space and an example application that show novel ways of using VUIs for inclusive education. We also reflect on co-designing with mixed-visual-ability groups in this space.