Children With Autism Providing a Knowledge Base for Educational and Therapeutic Product Design

Abstract

Besides everyday objects and environments, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) engage with a wide range of educational and therapeutic tools, equipment, and environments that aim to improve their social interaction, communication, and motor skills, sensory systems, and enhance cognitive abilities, self-maintenance, and independence. Such products and environments play a significant role in ASD-specific schools and special education centers. In Turkey, public schools apply the curriculum that is approved by the Ministry of National Education, whereas private special education centers apply more specific ASD intervention and educational methods accepted worldwide. These schools and special education centers are equipped with products that vary depending on whether the school or center is a public or a private one, since they apply different curricula. However, these products used in integration with various methods do not always fully suit the needs of these children. In that sense, participatory product design has much to offer to children with ASD in terms of increasing their overall wellbeing and quality of life. Participatory design, as a design method giving participants the right to have a say both in the design process and the final product, enables the involvement of these children and others also affected by the disorder, such as parents and special educators, in shaping their surroundings. In this study, examining a public and a private special education center in Izmir, Turkey, the physical environments provided to children with ASD as well as the possibilities of participation of the children and their caregivers in these centers in the design of educational and therapeutic products, are discussed with examples, in terms of children's attachment to the products in these environments and their contribution to children's quality of life in return, through observations and interviews. The findings showed that the participatory design processes conducted with children with ASD, their parents, and caregivers, were helpful in collecting significant information that is not readily available elsewhere, and that can be a base for new educational and therapeutic product design for children with ASD.