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.

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.

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.