Autistic Technocultures

Research in technologies “for” autism is currently experiencing a crisis of epistemological commitments. Prior work has noted how HCI for neurocognitive disability has been dominated by motivations of “fixing”, paternalistic ideas about what disabled people should want and need, and inaccurate assumptions that disabled people are not already themselves engaged in technology design. Guided by a frame of autistic technology adoption as a practice of creating “Cyborg Assemblages”, we explored how autistic adults form intentional, agential, self-mediated EF management strategies to inform future designs that support autistic self-efficacy and self-determination. By supporting a sense of user-directed flexibility and control, and by enabling user-directed formation of collective care networks, future assistive technologies for EF can more effectively address the needs of autistic children and adults. These findings may support design strategies for other populations affected by EF difficulties, including traumatic-brain injury and stroke survivors, as well as non-disabled users.

Team Members

Rua, Chorong

Associated Funding

• Partially funded by SSRC Just Tech Fellowship (2022-2024)

Calls for Participation

inactive

Associated Publications

• Rua Mae Williams and Chorong Park. 2023. Cyborg Assemblages: How autistic adults construct sociotechnical networks to support cognitive function. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 62, 1–15. Https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581556
  • Autism has become a popular context for accessible technology researchers, yet a majority of HCI projects for autism and ADHD do not engage in participatory methods or otherwise involve disabled stakeholders in the project and research design. Prior inquiry has identified executive function as a common difficulty for which technologies may provide novel benefits. In this study, we explore how autistic adults currently use technologies, broadly defined, to augment executive function and support themselves in day-to-day tasks. We collect qualitative data from narratives elicited during informal asynchronous interviews to conduct a digital ethnomethodology. Following from principles of Design Justice, crip technoscience, and cyborg assemblage theory, we investigate how autistic adults articulate their own sociotechnical environments into technologically mediated assemblages of executive function and interpersonal webs of care. These patterns of sociotechnical formation inform future work in research and design for tools that can mediate executive function for all users.