Colloquia

Summary

Young adults with autism (YAWA for short) can use tools to help face challenges that people without autism may never face. However, there is value to be found in facilitating YAWA to design their own tools. Autism is heterogeneous in nature, so every YAWA will have different wants and needs. As the foremost expert in their own experience, YAWA can bring valuable input to a design that is meant to cater to them specifically. The Design Your Life project (DYL) has created a toolkit that facilitates this very concept.

The DYL toolkit is built upon a strong foundation of research, and as such contains a variety of well-researched and tested methods to guide the user through the design process. However, the physical form and presentation of the toolkit still has ample room for improvement. While steps have been made to shape the toolkit in a way that works on a base level, there is still much untapped potential. The goal is to redesign the toolkit to bring its physical representation up to the level of its content. A strong root in both building for autism as well as embodied sensemaking can help sprout a redesign for the physical form of the toolkit that could truly resonate with its userbase. In doing so, the toolkit itself can communicate the theoretical content of the DYL design process to the user on a deeper level, and spur creative and conceptual thinking.

The toolkit is used as a case to center the theorical research questions, in which I ask how physical form-giving can contribute to creative sensemaking.Using Research Through Design as the main methodology, I created three chronological iterations of toolkit redesigns. These iterations are grounded in an extensive analysis of the current DYL toolkit, research on how to design for autism, and a design framework based on embodied sensemaking. This framework proposes three roles that a toolkit can fulfil to move past an ordinary artefact that merely represents the thinking process, to become something that stimulates deeper and creative thinking.

Each iteration was evaluated with a different group of evaluators, and given feedback was fed into the next iteration. In the end, a hi-fi redesign of the DYL toolkit was made, aiming to resolve existing problems with the current toolkit, cater towards an audience of YAWA, and incorporating the embodied sensemaking framework. The last redesign was evaluated with two YAWA that are unfamiliar with the DYL project, where they shared their thoughts and opinions on what aspects meet its goals, as well as denoting potential room for improvement.