Reworlding - Making PD more inclusive and neuroaffirmative
Increasingly, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), specifically Participatory Design (PD), has focused on work alongside autistic populations, with the development of technologies targeted at these same communities (Spiel & Frauenberger, 2019; Maye & Brodersen, 2025). However, non-speaking groups, or those whose main form of communication isn’t speech, are still largely excluded from participation, even though they make up 30% of the autistic population (Wilson et al., 2019). This is particularly problematic, as current knowledge production within the field of HCI is seemingly not accounting for a relevant subset of the autistic community.
This project explores the current methods, techniques and tools used to support varied forms of participation of non-speaking autistic individuals, through a multidisciplinary and neuro-affirming lens (Carvalho and Storni, 2026). The goal is to better understand how these practices may inform PD towards the empowerment and self-advocacy of non-speaking autistic communities, as well as the development of more appropriate methodologies and technologies.
Katta Spiel, Christopher Frauenberger, Os Keyes, and Geraldine Fitzpatrick. 2019. Agency of Autistic Children in Technology Research—A Critical Literature Review. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 26, 6, Article 38 (December 2019), 40 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3344919
Laura Maye and Nicolai Brodersen Hansen. 2025. Involvement of Autistic Adults in the Participatory Design of Technology: A Scoping Review. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 776, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713961
Cara Wilson, Margot Brereton, Bernd Ploderer, and Laurianne Sitbon. 2019. Co-Design Beyond Words: 'Moments of Interaction' with Minimally-Verbal Children on the Autism Spectrum. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 21, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300251
Carvalho, Ana, and Cristiano Storni. 2026 Waiting to Learn, Learning to Wait: How ‘waiting’as a neurodiversity-affirming approach can inform inclusive participation. In Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026, Vol. 2: Exploratory Papers and Doctoral Colloquium, pp. 177-182. .
