Co-Designing the Co-Design Process: Formulating Participatory Studies and Co-Creating Robotic Interventions with Autistic Children and Their Families

Abstract

When serving as participants, autistic children and their families are all too often brought in at the end of the study to evaluate robotic interventions with the premise of support. Even when co-design approaches are employed, its involvement takes place after the problem formulation. Within this thesis we take a different approach: co-designing the co-design process. This study involves the key stakeholders of autistic children, their families, and clinical psychologists, in not only the creation of the robotic intervention, but also in the foundational design of the study itself. This two-tiered engagement underscores a comprehensive participatory approach, ensuring that both the research framework and the resulting solutions are deeply informed by stakeholder experience and insight. Through iterative brainstorming sessions, study material design, and pilot co-design sessions, we formulate a robotic intervention in the form of a game, created to practice frustration management, and support cognitive flexibility. The contributions of this thesis are mainly empirical, we provide study materials that have been co-designed with our stakeholders. However, there are methodological underpinnings in this work as well, which highlight the novelty of this two-tiered approach to co-design in this space.