Choosing a User Group: Why Autism?
When we began this project, our team wanted to focus on a population often overlooked by the design world, and thoughtfully chose individuals with special needs with plans to narrow our scope after conducting some interviews. We also established a set of goals for our team, which helped us devise a plan of action and direct our interviews. Having spent the past five years volunteering with kids with special needs, I immediately sought out these families and inquired about their children's specific disabilities and their daily successes, fallbacks and needs.
Through these interviews and goal-setting exercises we quickly came to a few realizations:
(1) Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is extremely prevalent and came up during most of our interviews. In the US, 1 out of 68 children is diagnosed with ASD. As studies and research on autism have increased, so have the resources and programs that educate people and support families. Unfortunately, these advancements are fairly recent so very few products exist that address even the most basic needs of many individuals on the spectrum.
(2) ASD encompasses an extremely wide range of behaviors and anything we built would need to take this into account and allow for some degree of customizability. One person may love listening to a sound that completely overwhelms another individual on the spectrum. I repeatedly heard the popular saying coined by Dr. Stephen Shore, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism."
(3) Though voids exist at all stages of life for those with autism and special needs in general, we noticed that there was an extreme lack of tools available to young adults as they transition from the structure of the schooling system into the real world. Parents with older children (16+) repeatedly expressed a desire for their sons/daughters to become more independent, and many of these teens and young adults conveyed a similar feeling. Yet a lack of relevant tools can make this goal especially challenging. In the words of Sue (picture below), on her 20-year-old daughter with ASD, "I know she's capable and I know she can do it. So we just have to get over that bridge so that she remembers to do it on her own. I'm not always going to be around to remind her."
