Designing Everyday Activities, Living Environments for Adults with Autism

Background:  

Everyday activities such as doing laundry, cooking a meal
 or operating electrical appliances help us to develop life skills, live independently and keep our homes clean and enjoyable to live in. Research has consistently found that such everyday activities may present challenges for people with autism. Sensory sensitivities in particular may impact a person’s experience and perception of both everyday objects and the physical environment in which the activity is to be performed.

Objectives:

Our objective was to expand our understanding of how people with autism perceive and experience everyday activities at home. We also sought to examine ways in which design might be used to adapt those activities – and 
the domestic objects associated with them- to make them more enjoyable and educational in terms of personal development and encourage meaningful interactions between people with autism and support staff. 

Methods:  

The research took a people-centred design approach. Twenty adults with autism with limited spoken language and additional intellectual disabilities to express how they perceive and experience everyday activities at home participated, with the help of support staff. Participatory observation, interviewing support staff and encouraging them to record their own observations
 were also priorities in the study. Co-design workshops, visual sensory profiling cards and visual mapping tools called ‘Object of Everyday Use’ and ‘Doing Things with Things’ were also developed to tease out personal responses to designed objects and their related activities. The aim of these methods was to gain insights that might encourage support staff, family members and designers to consider ways of extending, tailoring or otherwise modifying the appeal, function and experience of
 everyday objects.

Results:

The initial research revealed that a person’s choice of everyday activity is heavily influenced by their sensory preferences (e.g., watching bubbles) and a person’s special interests (e.g., Thomas the Tank Engine). We therefore designed a prototype for a vacuum cleaner and washing machine to illustrate how people with autism can be motivated to become more actively engaged within their own homes by extending and correlating their sensory preferences and special interests, and embracing the way a person likes to do things. In a multiple-baseline design, we are investigating whether the introduction of these new everyday objects yields (a) an increase in the frequency with which they take part in these activities – with the new object and with reintroduction of the old object; and (b) more meaningful interactions between people with autism and support staff.

Conclusions:  

This holistic design-led approach was successful in eliciting the views, preferences and everyday experience of individuals with autism with limited communication and additional intellectual disabilities. The results will be used to create a design guideline that provides practical ideas on how to re-design or adapt everyday objects and offer advice on identifying such objects with regards to how well they might meet the individual needs and interests of people with autism.