Research in HCI applied to clinical interventions relies on normative assumptions about which bodies and minds are healthy, valuable, and desirable. To disrupt this normalizing drive in HCI, we define a “counterventional approach” to intervention technology design informed by critical scholarship and community perspectives. This approach is meant to unsettle normative assumptions of intervention as urgent, necessary, and curative. We begin with a historical overview of intervention in HCI and its critics. Then, through reparative readings of past HCI projects in autism intervention, we illustrate the emergent principles of a counterventional approach and how it may manifest research outcomes that are fundamentally divergent from dominant approaches. We then explicate characteristics of “counterventions” – projects that aim to contest dominant sociotechnical paradigms through privileging community and participants in research inquiry, interaction design, and analysis of outcomes. These divergent research imaginaries have transformative implications for how interventionist HCI might be conducted in future.

We describe a virtual reality environment, Bob’s Fish Shop, which provides a system where users diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can practice social interactions in a safe and controlled environment. A case study is presented which suggests such an environment can provide the opportunity for users to build the skills necessary to carry out a conversation without the fear of negative social consequences present in the physical world. Through the repetition and analysis of these virtual interactions, users can improve social and conversational understanding.

Social stigma is a complex phenomenon that plagues humanity. Disability is a key target of stigma, with physical, cognitive, emotional conditions being highly scrutinized by society. Many technologies aimed to support disabled people attempt to do so by directly changing their individual interactions with the world. When attention is drawn to affirm disability identities, it risks being perceived as inspiration porn. However, there is another way to level the playing field, to be inclusive rather than objectifying; that aim to empower stigmatized individuals rather than provide a single example of inspiration for the nondisabled observer that does little to reduce the negative stereotype. This paper introduces the concept of Celebratory Technologies for Neurodiversity. Drawing on a framework of social change specific to the stigma of autism; the tenets of the Neurodiversity movement; and the results of a current design probe with an adult with autism, initial suggestions for creating Celebratory Technologies for Neurodiversity support are provided.

Autism has been characterized by a tendency to attend to the local visual details over surveying an image to understand the gist–a phenomenon called local interference. This sensory processing trait has been found to negatively impact social communication. Although much work has been conducted to understand these traits, little to no work has been conducted to intervene to provide support for local interference. Additionally, recent understanding of autism now introduces the core role of sensory processing and its impact on social communication. However, no interventions to the end of our knowledge have been explored to leverage this relationship. This work builds on the connection between visual attention and semantic representation in autistic children. In this work, we ask the following research questions: RQ1: Does manipulating image characteristics of luminance and spatial frequency increase likelihood of fixations in hot spots (Areas of Interest) for autistic children? RQ2: Does manipulating low-level image characteristics of luminance and spatial frequency increase the likelihood of global verbal responses for autistic children? We sought to manipulate visual attention as measured by eye gaze fixations and semantic representation of verbal response to the question “What is this picture about?”. We explore digital strategies to offload low-level, sensory processing of global features via digital filtering. In this work, we designed a global filter to reduce image characteristics found to be distracting for autistic people and compared baseline images to featured images in 11 autistic children. Participants saw counterbalanced images way over 2 sessions. Eye gaze in areas of interest and verbal responses were collected and analyzed. We found that luminance in non-salient areas impacted both eye gaze and verbal responding–however in opposite ways (however versus high levels of luminance). Additionally, the interaction of luminance and spatial frequency in areas of interest is also significant. This is the first empirical study in designing an assistive technology aimed to augment global processing that occurs at a sensory-processing and social-communication level. Contributions of this work include empirical findings regarding the quantification of local interference in images of natural scenes for autistic children in real-world settings; digital methods to offload global visual processing to make this information more accessible via insight on the role of luminance and spatial frequency in visual perception of and semantic representation in images of natural scenes.

Research indicates that the social stigma of an autism label is the biggest unaddressed problem with autism. To address this gap, a novel celebratory paradigm will seed the first wave of Celebratory Technology for Neurodiversity. By creating Celebratory Technology SIG, we plan to foster an HCI community of neurodiverse scholars over the coming years. A goal of the SIG is to enrich HCI researchers’ understanding of neurodiversity because of increased awareness of neurodiverse communities, approach design from a celebratory perspective that aims to intervene at a societal level, and clarity around community-oriented challenges that warrant further exploration. This SIG will produce knowledge via a conceptual framework and empirically derived interaction designs for social change. Design sprint results and discussion will be encouraged to be expanded upon and disseminated via publications in venues such as ACM CHI, ASSETS, and TACCESS. Ultimately, these new interaction designs may drive programs implemented by social media platforms and policy to reduce autism stigma.

Children with autism often have sensory processing differences that can lead to a myriad of challenges, including difficulty with awareness of how their bodies occupy physical space. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) can help augment therapies to support these children. We developed DanceCraft, a whole-body interface to augment dance therapy for children with autism. In a pilot study, we deployed DanceCraft to nine homes for one week for children with autism to use. We received feedback on both the system's central activity (dance), as well as elements of its design and set up, offering lessons to guide future field deployments of such systems.