My previous research into Valencia et al. (2019) raised a question that I wanted to investigate further.
Their systematic review of 94 studies states that previous research has identified a positive disposition towards technology and computer-based learning among many autistic people. Importantly, they suggest that this may relate to the environment technology creates: interactions can be predictable and structured, helping users maintain routines without affecting their comfort.
Rather than simply accepting the statement that autistic people have an “affinity” with technology, I wanted to understand what characteristics of technology might contribute to this relationship.
This led me further into the research.
One of the areas repeatedly appearing within this earlier research is virtual environments.
Research by Parsons, Mitchell and Leonard explored whether virtual environments could provide autistic people with a space in which situations could be experienced and learned without all of the variables present in real-world environments.
This interested me because virtual environments can potentially provide something physical environments cannot: control over the experience.
Later literature discussing this work identifies several potential advantages of virtual environments for autistic users, including predictable repetition, adaptability to the individual and control over sensory/input stimuli.
This feels important in relation to the idea raised by Valencia et al. Technology is not necessarily useful simply because it is digital. Instead, digital environments can change the conditions under which somebody experiences information or learns about an environment.
A situation can potentially be: repeated, paused, experienced safely, made predictable, adapted to the individual and experienced before encountering the real situation.
There is also evidence that autistic participants can understand and learn within these environments. Parsons, Mitchell and Leonard's later research found improvements in some participants' judgements about social situations following virtual-environment experience, although this does not mean that learning automatically transfers to every real-world context.
This made control particularly interesting to me. If part of technology's usefulness comes from creating controlled and predictable experiences, I wanted to know whether control and routine appear elsewhere in research concerning autistic people's everyday environments, rather than only in educational VR experiments.
This paper moves closer to the territory I am interested in because it looks beyond learning applications and towards autistic people's everyday movement through physical environments.
The researchers interviewed 12 autistic people about their spatial needs and experiences of urban environments, eventually using the findings to develop considerations for designing technology that could support everyday movement.
What immediately interested me was the shift in perspective.
Rather than starting with ‘How can technology correct an autistic difficulty?’, the research begins to consider what characteristics of an environment create difficulty, and how could technology give the individual greater ability to navigate it? This feels much closer to the direction of my own project. It also introduces routines and control as significant ideas when considering autistic people's relationships with space.