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.

Metaphors improve communication between children and adults, which can be challenging due to differences in experiences. Cross-sensory metaphors convey qualities associated with one sense using terms from another, e.g. a “sharp smell'' and could thus improve generational communication by bridging differences in sensory cognition. We observed children (8-11yrs, n=65), young adults (18-24yrs, n=51) and older adults (60-85yrs, n=38) playing Sense-O-Nary, a variation of Pictionary where players construct and interpret cross-sensory metaphors, and analysed differences in metaphor type, degree of elaboration, and association strategies. We found that children relied on ``familiar experiences'' for metaphor construction, while adults used more diverse association strategies. Degree of elaboration was consistent across ages for tactile and visual stimuli but differed for olfactory stimuli. All groups used ``active'' metaphors most commonly, but children showed more use of ``implicit'', ``similes'', and ``personification''. We present designs that demonstrate how these characterisations could be leveraged to improve intergenerational communication.

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 is vital for healthy child development. Autistic and neurotypical children can often struggle to play together due to differing communication, play and interactional styles, resulting in reduced social interaction quality for both groups. Play technologies can facilitate and support social play among children. However, most play technologies to date attempt to encourage more neurotypical traits in autistic children in a bid to foster social play. This approach ignores the unique experiences of autistic children. We conducted a preliminary study combining an expanded proxy design and a technology probe observation with a group of 5-year-old children and their parents. We report on initial findings highlighting the importance of creating inclusive spaces for a cohesive and supportive play environment and reflect on using expanded proxy design when designing with young, neurodiverse groups of children.

Metaphors enrich language by allowing us to express complex ideas through familiar concepts, enhancing both understanding and creativity in communication. Crossmodal metaphors are metaphors where one sensory modality is understood in terms of another (e.g, a sharp smell). Crossmodality is an integral part of how we make sense of and create meaning about the world. However, there is a lack of research on how children generate crossmodal metaphors and the interpretation of such metaphors. We present Sense-O-Nary, a game we designed to explore how children react when asked to create crossmodal metaphors in a novel environment. Children are presented with one sensory input and then asked to describe it using a different sense, for another team to guess what the original sensory input is. We engaged children (n=65, aged 8-10) to play this crossmodal metaphor generation game. We qualitatively analysed children’s exchange of crossmodal metaphors to define a set of crossmodal association strategies and then use this to categorise the metaphors they created. We discuss how engaging with crossmodal metaphors can enhance children’s linguistic development and how our findings can inform the design of interactions that involve multiple senses.

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.