Figure 1: Illustration of a Deaf swimmer and a kayaker.The kayaker uses the DeafSwim app on a smartphone to send a vibration alert to the swimmer's smartwatch to gain their attention.

Intimacy is a complex, multifaceted subject of importance within disability rights movements.Disabled individuals are entitled to the same universal human rights (e.g., marriage, sexual and reproductive self-determination) as everyone else.Assistive measures that support equity in their personal lives remain central to these movements.However, the research community's relatively narrow focus of what "intimacy" is (i.e., primarily concerned with sex) combined with factors, such as context, cultural sensitivities, power dynamics and complex ethics, has resulted in its limited exploration in HCI Accessibility Research.Among the relatively small body of HCI literature, most works approach disabled intimacies through a primarily deficit-oriented and heteronormative lens.Notably, ASSETS has featured only two papers on this subject in the past 23 years [53].Moreover, few studies in HCI explore the methodological and ethical considerations of researching disabled intimacies, and even fewer are disability-led and include queer perspectives [53].In this half-day virtual workshop, we invite engineers, technology design and development researchers, industry practitioners, accessibility * These authors contributed equally to this research and share first authorship of this publication.

The investigation of technologies facilitating sexual interactions and sexuality-related explorations is becoming more established in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), albeit with little systematic attention to the sexual lives of disabled people. In this space, we undertook a literature review utilising feminist content analysis to take stock and critically analyse the domains of sexuality, technology and disability when they intersect. Our approach aligns with the broader goals of promoting inclusivity, diversity, and equity in technology design and application. We present a descriptive and analytical outline of existing research on sexuality, technology and disability through which we identified unmarked norms governing research. These include a focus on individualised technologies oriented on heteronormative assumptions on sexual desires. In addition, we focus on common methods employed and describe the involvement, or lack thereof, of disabled people in research practice. This highlights gaps in our collective knowledge from which we can derive areas for future work.

Online communities are important spaces for members of marginalized groups to organize and support one another. To better understand the experiences of fat people - a group whose marginalization often goes unrecognized - in online communities, we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with fat people. Our participants leveraged online communities to engage in consciousness raising around fat identity, learning to locate ''the problem of being fat'' not within themselves or their own bodies but rather in the oppressive design of the society around them. Participants were then able to use these communities to mitigate everyday experiences of anti-fatness, such as navigating hostile healthcare systems. However, to access these benefits, our participants had to navigate myriad sociotechnical harms, ranging from harassment to discriminatory algorithms. In light of these findings, we suggest that researchers and designers of online communities support selective fat visibility, consider fat people in the design of content moderation systems, and investigate algorithmic discrimination toward fat people. More broadly, we call on researchers and designers to contend with the social and material realities of fat experience, as opposed to the prevailing paradigm of treating fat people as problems to be solved in-and-of-themselves. This requires recognizing fat people as a marginalized social group and actively confronting anti-fatness as it is embedded in the design of technology.

In the era of ubiquitous information technologies shaping our everyday lives, the advancements of technologies ‘for the deaf’ have provided significant access for deaf users not only for participation in hearing-dominated environments but also within deaf communities. However, since these technologies have predominantly been developed through implicit hearing-centered design that puts deaf experiences second, they often require deaf users to adapt to them. This poster provokes the question: what would technologies look like if they centered on the experiences and desires of deaf people instead? By employing a case study from broader ongoing research on Deaf Tech, we investigate and discusse insights garnered from the concept of DeafWatch developed in one of the workshops. Through our analysis, we aim to tentatively move forward in providing different socio-technical narratives from a deaf-centered perspective.

Representation of disability in games is important to facilitate inclusive experiences. In our work, we address this issue through an exploration of the representation of ADHD in games. First, we engage in interviews with 15 young people with ADHD to understand their lived experience of ADHD and their perspective on its integration in games. Second, we formulate considerations for the design of games that include ADHD in a way that aligns with their experience. Finally, we apply the guidelines to develop three game concepts and evaluate them with the initial group of young people to critically appraise our design considerations. The results show that nuanced representation of ADHD requires careful deliberation, that lived experience should be leveraged with care, and that game design must be mindful of the challenges associated with identifying the fine line between disability simulation and adequate representation.

In this study, we explore the experiences of LGBTQIA+ individuals with disabilities in community centers in the United States, with a focus on the role of assistive technology (AT). Our research addresses three key questions: (1) How do LGBTQIA+ individuals with disabilities navigate intersecting identities in community centers? (2) How do social connections impact AT use in these environments? (3) How do community center norms and structures influence AT use? Through 11 semi-structured interviews, we examine the challenges and barriers faced by people with disabilities, their motivations for visiting centers, the impact of social dynamics, structures, and norms on AT use, and the importance of social connections. To address these challenges and foster lasting change, we offer recommendations for designing more inclusive and affordable AT, nurturing interdependence, and promoting collaboration between LGBTQIA+ community centers and disability organizations.

In this position paper, we argue for designing autistic social media for thriving neurodiverse online communities. We discuss emerging work in the field of Human-Computer Interaction around autism and social media design, and explore how a Banal Autistic Design approach can lead to a less deficit-focused design paradigm by conducting a Found Footage Autoethnography, a method we introduce as an autoethnography variant suited to autistic embodied ways of knowing. Finally, we juxtapose our design insights with existing design guidelines for autistic social media, and argue for design for customisation, anti-normativity, non-prescripitiveness, granular publics, and interest-centricity.

Accessibility research strives to develop technology that is useful for disabled people, but the research processes that we engage in do not always center disabled people in a way that allows us to shape artifacts so that they benefit disabled communities. In this workshop, we want to address core questions that are relevant in this context: How can research questions be defined in a way that shares power between research teams and technology users? How should research processes be designed to be broadly accessible for disabled people? And what are equitable ways of summarizing and sharing research findings in a way that allows disabled communities to critically appraise findings with us? Through discussion among all attendees, we want to develop a practical guide in disability-centered research that will be made available and further developed as a community resource when engaging in accessibility research.

Assistive technologies (AT) are a necessity for a person with a severe disability to be able to lead a self-determined life within modern societies. Thus, these technologies fulfil an important societal role and have a significant impact on the lives of those affected. This experience report provides insights on the lived experiences surrounding the necessary use of AT from the point of view of a disabled person. Using an autoethnographic approach, we determine the function and relevance of AT in everyday life and illustrate the intended and unintended effects of AT as well as the subsequently arising socio-technical dependencies through representative examples. The results show how the resulting dependencies on AT pose a risk for users, especially in the event of a technological failure. Furthermore, a deployment of AT without the necessary reflection and preparation of backup strategies in case of failure may lead to unexpected and inadvertent, potentially harmful, side-effects. Based on these observations, we elaborate on the implications for different stakeholder groups involved with the design, development, deployment and daily use of AT. We deem the key factors for success to lie in a deeper understanding of the application context, the integration of affected people in the development process as well as a fundamentally reflective approach by everyone involved with AT.

In our experience as researchers engaging with non-academic audiences, we observed that it remains a challenge to receive direct and critical feedback from participants. This is particularly amplified in the context of disabilities even if the researchers identify themselves as disabled given that the interaction is governed by social status and material power dimensions to say the least. To work productively with these power dynamics, we explored embodied approaches to articulating critique acknowledging the different ways of knowing stemming from different bodyminds. Here, we line out two exploratory cases illustrating how physical bodies can be directly attended to to express critiques in more direct ways than participants might be used to on a language based level (spoken or signed). We show how communication and critique can take on many forms encouraging us to broaden our methodological toolset to incorporate practices common in disability cultures. Our experiences show that we need to embrace crip approaches to knowledge production to receive more actionable and useful feedback in developing technologies with disabled communities.

Technology research for neurodivergent conditions is largely shaped by research aims which privilege neuro-normative outcomes. As such, there is an epistemic imbalance in meaning making about these technologies. We conducted a critical literature review of technologies designed for people with ADHD, focusing on how ADHD is framed, the research aims and approaches, the role of people with ADHD within the research process, and the types of systems being developed within Computing and HCI. Our analysis and review is conducted explicitly from an insider perspective, bringing our perspectives as neurodivergent researchers to the topic of technologies in the context of ADHD. We found that 1) technologies are largely used to ‘mitigate’ the experiences of ADHD which are perceived as disruptive to neurotypical standards of behaviour; 2) little HCI research in the area invites this population to co-construct the technologies or to leverage neurodivergent experiences in the construction of research aims; and 3) participant resistance to deficit frames can be read within the researchers’ own accounts of participant actions. We discuss the implications of this status quo for disabled people and technology researchers alike, and close with a set of recommendations for future work in this area.

We present TactJam, an end-to-end suite for creating and sharing low fidelity prototypes of on-body vibrotactile feedback. With TactJam, designers can create, record and share vibrotactile patterns online. This opens up new ways of collaboratively designing vibrotactile patterns both in collocated as well as in remote settings. We evaluate TactJam in a two-part distributed online workshop, exploring the design of on-body tactons. Participants were able to successfully use TactJam to learn about tacton design. We present an overview of mappings between tactons and their associated concepts before comparing the results of tactons created using solely a GUI and tactons created through experimenting with placements directly on the body. Conducting both parts of the workshop separately highlighted the importance of designing directly with bodies: less implicit assumptions were made, and designs were guided by personal experience. We reflect on these results and close on deliberations for the future development of TactJam.

Gender is encoded in multiple technological infrastructures, most prominently in digital forms across educational, commercial, medical and governmental contexts. To illustrate the pervasiveness of (binary) gender ideologies and the impact this can have on non-binary individuals – like me – encountering them, I conducted an autoethnography. For more than a year, starting with me receiving a legal non-binary status, I documented systems that did not allow me to register my gender correctly. The findings indicate how technological infrastructures predominantly encode gender as a fixed, immutable and static binary variable with limited options for non-binary people to adequately register self-determined choices for gender and/or (gendered) titles. I further analyse the range of reactions that I received when pro-actively asking for workarounds, fixes and updates, indicating how pointing towards those issues can trouble the status quo, identities and power hierarchies in unintended ways. I close on suggestions for the refactoring of existing and design of new technological infrastructures around gender and reflect on the value of lived experience in knowledge production – as well as the cost it comes with for those doing this research.

Virtual Reality (VR) holds the promise of immersing people in virtual worlds. However, initial work on the relationship between VR and disability suggests that VR is a body-centric technology that poses barriers for disabled users. We supplement this work with a theoretical analysis of immersive VR through the lens of Surrogate Body theory, a concept from media theory for the structured examination of interactive media in use. Leveraging Critical Disability Studies, particularly the theory of the Minority Body, we explore the assumptions about bodies inherent in VR, and we reflect on implications of these assumptions when disabled people engage with the technology. Our findings show that VR is an inherently ableist technology that assumes a ‘corporeal standard’ (i.e., an ‘ideal’, non-disabled human body), and fails to adequately accommodate disabled people. We conclude with implications for HCI research on VR, and discuss design approaches that foster inclusive technology development.

Gender input forms act as gates to accessing information, websites, and services online. Non-binary people regularly have to interact with them, though many do not offer non-binary gender options. This results in non-binary individuals having to either choose an incorrect gender category or refrain from using a site or service—which is occasionally infeasible (e.g., when accessing health services). We tested five different forms through a survey with binary and non-binary participants (n = 350) in three contexts—a digital health form, a social media website, and a dating app. Our results indicate that the majority of participants found binary “male or female” forms exclusive and uncomfortable to fill out across all contexts. We conclude with design considerations for improving gender input forms and consequently their underlying gender model in databases. Our work aims to sensitize designers of (online) gender web forms to the needs and desires of non-binary people.

Breastfeeding brings benefits for newborns and parents, but can be a challenging process. In this paper, we leverage a mixed-methods approach that builds on the Integrated Behavioural Model (IBM) to explore parents’ perspectives toward breastfeeding along with their lived experiences, and examine the role of technology in this setting. Results of twelve semi-structured interviews and 175 online survey responses suggest generally positive attitudes toward breastfeeding and good theoretical knowledge. This is combined with a complex lived experience of breastfeeding where main challenges are situated in practical, emotional, and environmental/societal aspects, which are currently not sufficiently recognised by technology that seeks to support breastfeeding. Building upon our findings, we present points for reflection for the design of technology to support breastfeeding, focusing on the importance of drawing from the lived experience of parents, and ensuring that technology not only casts breastfeeding as an individual but also as a collective effort.

In the few decades since the first mainframe computers, computing technologies have grown smaller, and more pervasive, moving onto and even inside human bodies. Even as those bodies have received increased attention by scholars, designers, and technologists, the bodily expectations and understandings articulated by these technological artefacts have not been a focus of inquiry in the field. I conducted a feminist content analysis on select papers in the proceeding of the ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) since its inception in 2007. My analysis illustrates how artefacts are implicitly oriented on unmarked bodily norms, while technologies designed for non-normative bodies treat those as deviant and in need of correction. Subsequently, I derive a range of provocations focused on material bodies in embodied interaction which offer a point of reflection and identify potentials for future work in the field.

Play presents a popular pastime for all humans, though not all humans play alike. Subsequently, Human–Computer Interaction Games research is increasingly concerned with the development of games that serve neurodivergent 1 players. In a critical review of 66 publications informed by Disability Studies and Self-Determination Theory, we analyse which populations , research methods, kinds of play and overall purpose goals existing games address. We find that games are largely developed for children, in a top-down approach. They tend to focus on educational and medical settings and are driven by factors extrinsic to neurodivergent interests. Existing work predominantly follows a medical model of disability, which fails to support self-determination of neurodivergent players and marginalises their opportunities for immersion. Our contribution comprises a large-scale investigation into a budding area of research gaining traction with the intent to capture a status quo and identify opportunities for future work attending to differences without articulating them as deficit.

Game map interfaces provide an alternative perspective on the worlds players inhabit.compared to navigation applications popular in day-to-day life, game maps have different affordances to match players' situated goals. To contextualize and understand these differences and how they developed, we present a historical chronicle of game map interfaces. Starting from how games came to involve maps, we trace how maps are first separate from the game, becoming more and more integrated into play until converging in smartphone-style interfaces. We synthesize several game history texts with critical engagement with 123 key games to develop this map-focused chronicle, from which we highlight trends and opportunities for future map designs. Our work contributes a record of trends in game map interfaces that can serve as a source of reference and inspiration to game designers, digital physical-world map designers, and game scholars.

Virtual Reality (VR) holds the promise of providing engaging embodied experiences, but little is known about how people with disabilities engage with it. We explore challenges and opportunities of VR gaming for wheelchair users. First, we present findings from a survey that received 25 responses and gives insights into wheelchair users' motives to (non-) engage with VR and their experiences. Drawing from this survey, we derive design implications which we tested through implementation and qualitative evaluation of three full-body VR game prototypes with 18 participants. Our results show that VR gaming engages wheelchair users, though nuanced consideration is required for the design of embodied immersive experiences for minority bodies, and we illustrate how designers can create meaningful, positive experiences.

Physical activity (PA) positively impacts the quality of life of older adults, with technology as a promising factor in maintaining motivation. Within Computer Science and Engineering, research investigates how to track PA of older adults for various purposes. We present a systematic review of 204 papers and discuss wearable tracking systems according to their purpose, technological context, and target audience, as well as design and evaluation processes with particular attention to the meaningful involvement of older adults. Our results show that most systems focus on supervising older adults in the context of disease and frailty management. Only few systems focus on supporting older adults by promoting rehabilitation and respecting agency of older adults via self-monitoring PA, or encouraging PA to maintain healthy levels of activity. Moreover, systems are often narrowly limited to walking, although older adults may enjoy a broader range of activities. Likewise, the involvement of older adults in design processes is scarce, and their experience with a given technology is rarely considered relevant for evaluation. In sum, we contribute an overview of wearable technology for tracking older adults’ PA, contextualize our findings within recommendations provided by Sports and Rehabilitation Science, and illustrate opportunities for future work.

Games User Research (GUR) focuses on measuring, analysing and understanding player experiences to optimise game designs. Hence, GUR experts aim to understand how specific game design choices are experienced by players, and how these lead to specific emotional responses. An instrument, providing such actionable insight into player experience, specifically designed by and for GUR was thus far lacking. To address this gap, the Player Experience Inventory (PXI) was developed, drawing on Means-End theory and measuring player experience both at the level of Functional Consequences, (i.e., the immediate experiences as a direct result of game design choices, such as audiovisual appeal or ease-of-control) and at the level of Psychosocial Consequences, (i.e., the second-order emotional experiences, such as immersion or mastery). Initial construct and item development was conducted in two iterations with 64 GUR experts. Next, the scale was validated and evaluated over five studies and populations, totalling 529 participants. Results support the theorized structure of the scale and provide evidence for both discriminant and convergent validity. Results also show that the scale performs well over different sample sizes and studies, supporting configural invariance. Hence, the PXI provides a reliable and theoretically sound tool for researchers to measure player experience and investigate how game design choices are linked to emotional responses.

An ever-increasing body of work within HCI investigates questions of around “Women’s Health” with the aim to disrupt the status quo of defaulting to an implicit norm of cis-male bodies. This laudable and feminist project has the potential to drastically improve the inclusivity and availability of health care. To explore how this research attends to gender, embodiment and identity, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of 17 publications explicitly positioning themselves as works concerned with “Women’s Health”. We find essentialised articulations of embodiment and gender, though little discussion on the intersections of race, class, sexuality and cultural contexts. Through two speculative designs, we illustrate potential responses to our analysis: The Shadow Zine, a reflection of self and the Compass, a token for community care. 1 Our work provides an opportunity to develop a broader frame of gender and health, one that centers (gendered) marginalised health by attending to the power structures of existing medical practices and norms.

Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes.

Participatory design (PD) with heterogeneous groups poses particular challenges, requiring spaces in which different agendas or visions can be negotiated. In this paper we report on our PD work with two groups of neurodiverse children to design technologies that support co-located, social play. The heterogeneity in the groups in terms of abilities, conceptions of play, motivations to be involved and individual preferences has challenged us to think of the design process and its outcomes as spaces for continuous negotiation. Drawing on the notion of agonistic PD, we sought not to necessarily reconcile all views, but foster constructive disagreement as a resource for and possible outcome of design. Using our project work as a case study, we report on controversies, big and small, and how they manifested themselves in the processes and outcomes. Reflecting on our experiences, we discuss possible implications on the notion of democratising technology innovation.

This article offers a synopsis of and a critical reflection on the research project OutsideTheBox Rethinking Assistive Technology with Autistic Children. The aim of the 3-year project was to develop digital technology that would holistically respond to the complex life-worlds of autistic children, affording positive experiences that they could share with others. Through a series of long-term participatory design processes, smart objects were developed individually with nine children employing a wide range of different methods (e.g., Co-operative Inquiry, Future Workshops, Fictional Inquiry, Magic Workshops, Drama and Making & Digital Fabrication). In this article are presented the cases of all children worked with and tie them together by a critical reflection across them. The discussion offers insights along three main themes: we a) substantiate the argument for a theoretical shift in conceptualizing roles for technology in the lives of disabled people, b) discuss our methodological contributions in participatory design processes and c) propose alternative, participatory approaches to evaluate outcomes.

Autistic children are increasingly a focus of technology research within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. We provide a critical review of the purposes of these technologies and how they discursively conceptualise the agency of autistic children. Through our analysis, we establish six categories of these purposes: behaviour analysis, assistive technologies, education, social skills, therapy and well-being. Further, our discussion of these purposes shows how the technologies embody normative expectations of a neurotypical society, which predominantly views autism as a medical deficit in need of ‘correction’. Autistic children—purportedly the beneficiaries of these technologies—thus become a secondary audience to the largely externally defined purposes. We identify a lack of design for technologies that are geared towards the interests, needs and desires of autistic children. To move HCI’s research into autism beyond this, we provide guidance on how to consider agency in use and explicitly allow for appropriation beyond externally driven goals.

While studies point to the positive potential of games for health to increase patient engagement and to a need to consider longer-term perspectives, there is a lack of more tangible knowledge on how to design for long-term engagement in games for health. This paper makes a contribution in this space by drawing a reflective arc across three games for health projects from areas such as rehabilitation, prevention and chronic disease. We discuss the projects using a research through design lens and reflect on user research data and design artifacts from the perspective of the involved game designers. The results are design considerations towards long-term engagement in games for health. These considerations present a body of intermediate-level knowledge [19] oriented towards maximising the potential of the design space in early stages of games for health projects. The considerations are structured into those relevant to gameplay, research design and application context.

Over the past two years, we have engaged autistic children in a participatory design (PD) process to create their own, individual smart object. In this paper, we reflect on our methodological choices and how these came about. Describing the design process with one of our participants as a case, we show how we developed participatory activities by combining, blending, re-interpreting and adapting techniques and tools from a pool of methods on the basis of the characteristics of the child, our own skills as designers and the history and context of our collaboration. Reflecting on this practice retrospectively, we seek to make two contributions: firstly, we distill a repertoire of methodological building blocks which draw on our experience of co-designing with autistic children. Secondly, we present a visual tool that captures the process by which we combined, blended and interpreted these building blocks into coherent design activities with a view to provide systematic guidance for future work. While the work presented here is set within the context of designing with autistic children, we argue that the underlying approach can be applicable and useful in a wider co-design context.

With this workshop we aim to bring together researchers who explore interactive technologies in the context of autistic children. At a point at which considerable effort has been invested in this area and results are promising, but hardly conclusively convincing, we argue that it is time to critically reflect on our work. We do this by posing three provocative questions: 1) Are we trying to do the right thing? 2) Is it working? and 3) Does it matter? With all three questions we aim to kick-start a debate about the goals and intentions with which research is done in this area, how we define that technology is successful and how we can ensure that our research has real-world impact beyond the people involved directly.

Difficulty in TETRIS is adjusted by adapting the speed with which blocks fall. In this contribution, we describe results of an exploratory study in which we investigated relationships between players' performance and their subjective assessment of difficulty and fun. We tested five different algorithms that, instead of adjusting game speed, adjust difficulty by choosing blocks based on the current game state. With our results, we establish pile height and bumpiness as parameters that indicate the performance of a player during a live game, discuss the inherent difficulty of different block choosing algorithms and show how the relationship between fun and perceived difficulty varies for distinct player groups. With regard to adapting difficulty, we argue that one can still teach an old dog such a TETRIS a lot of new tricks.

Capturing and describing the multi-faceted experiences autistic children have with technologies provides a unique research challenge. Approaches based on pragmatist notions of experience, which mostly rely on empathy, are particularly limited if used alone. To address this we have developed an approach that combines Actor-Network Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on this approach, we discuss the experiences autistic children had with technologies resulting from the collaborative design process in the OutsideTheBox project. We construct a holistic picture of the experience by drawing on diverse data sources ranging from interviews to log-data, and most importantly, the first-hand perspective of autistic children. In four case studies, we demonstrate how this approach allowed us to develop unique individual and structural insights into the experiences of autistic children with technology.

Participatory Design (PD) has become a standard methodology in HCI, however, the evaluation of the outcomes of participatory processes is often exclusively driven by researcher defined measures of success. Through our work with autistic children, who have radically different life worlds from our own, it became evident that their criteria for the success of a project are most likely also very different. In order to address the limitations of researcher defined and led evaluations in this context, we developed an approach for participatory evaluation called PEACE (Participatory Evaluation with Autistic ChildrEn). Using this approach, we were able to include autistic children in dedicated evaluation phases through the co-definition of goals and methods, joint processes of data gathering and the co-interpretation of results. We discuss three case studies in which we successfully applied our approach and conclude with a reflection on the novel insights created through participatory evaluation and researchers' roles in such a process.

Way-finding pillars for tourists aid them in navigating an unknown area. The pillars show nearby points of interest, offer information about public transport and provide a scale for the neighbourhood. Through a series of studies with tourists and locals, we establish their different needs. In this space, we developed Mappy, a mobile application which augments and enhances way-finding pillars with an added digital layer. Mappy opens up opportunities for reappropriation of, and engagement with, the pillars. Seeing the pillars beyond their initial use case by involving a diverse range of people let us develop the digital layer and subsequently overall meaning of way-finding pillars further: as "community fountains" they engage locals and tourists alike and can provoke encounters between them.

This paper describes the design work being conducted as part of the OutsideTheBox project. Within the time-frame of eight months, we engaged four children with autism in a participatory design process to develop their own smart object. We re-interpreted Future Workshops and Co-operative Inquiry to demonstrate that a) autistic children can lead processes with a deliberately open design brief and b) this leads us to explore design spaces that are un-imaginable for neuro-typical, adult designers. To capture these four design cases, we have developed Design Exposes, a concept that is inspired by annotated portfolios and Actor-Network Theory. We apply this concept to our cases and present four exposes that subsequently allow us to draw out intermediate-level design knowledge about co-creating technology with autistic children. We close by critically reflecting on the design processes as well as our concept of capturing them.

With few exceptions, technology for autistic children tends to be focused on the regulation of perceived deficits. With OutsideTheBox we focus on the strengths of the children as design partners and created in our first year four technological objects together with them. They all have common that they are embedded in the children's lives and share some degree of embodied interaction. We present a case study along with four objects, two of them with wearable components, two of them focused at sharing experiences in an embodied mode. This opens up the argument not only for more design actually led by autistic children, but also for companion technologies that embody situatedness. Such technologies are then not driven by an outsider's perspective of what an autistic child needs, but rather are intrinsically valuable to them as a user.