Design Your Life: User-Initiated Design of Technology to Support Independent Living of Young Autistic Adults
This addresses the problem of technology design for independent living in young autistic adults, but it is incremental as it builds on existing co-design literature and is exploratory without validation.
The paper tackles the challenge of designing technology to support independent living for young autistic adults by introducing the 'Design Your Life' method, which involves co-design case studies to generate initial design insights, though no concrete results or numbers are reported.
This paper describes the development of and first experiences with 'Design Your Life': a novel method aimed at user-initiated design of technologies supporting young autistic adults in independent living. A conceptual, phenomenological background resulting in four core principles is described. Taking a practice-oriented Research-through-Design approach, three co-design case studies were conducted, in which promising methods from the co-design literature with the lived experiences and practical contexts of autistic young adults and their caregivers is contrasted. This explorative inquiry provided some first insights into several design directions of the Design Your Life-process. In a series of new case studies that shall follow, the Design Your Life-method will be iteratively developed, refined and ultimately validated in practice.