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Exploration and discovery are core components of play. For children with autism, whose needs are complex and diverse, the potential that technology affords for developmentally appropriate play is under researched. Many software programmes focus on operational routines and fail to maximise on the capricious, idiosyncratic and emergent fun that can evolve when children are relaxed and able to freely discover their interests. There are very few studies that reveal how children with autism benefit, in terms of their confidence and self esteem, when technology is utilised simply as a trigger for play and how this particularly influences emotional regulation, social communication and learning. The aim of this PhD is two-fold: to contribute to knowledge on the challenges of designing for play for children with autism and to make a contribution to research in the autism field by demonstrating the expressive communication abilities revealed by children through playful interaction with a software interface. The PhD overview critiques eight published works, which analyse and discuss the design methods, the nature of discovery-led interaction and the impact on children's play and communication. The early publications are cohered around participatory design, and how the relationships with end user populations influenced early prototypes and shaped initial evaluation. These studies paved the way for deeper investigations into the multi sensory capacities of technology in relation to the characteristics of autism. These studies furthered the contextualisation of the work by locating design in and with affordable everyday environments. The emphasis on situated-ness is understood from a philosophical perspective in the most recent and concluding studies, which draw on phenomenology for the meta-analysis of action and reaction. The final paper provides a confident argument for play as a means of exploiting the physical directness of tactile and auditory input. The studies reveal how even the most hard to engage child demonstrated creative and communicative ability beyond the expectation of his carers. The papers contribute towards an understanding of playfulness as an emergent, unpredictable and ultimately rewarding experience for children severely affected by autism. In the design field, the work represents a contribution to new knowledge in participatory and collaborative methods for developing responsive sensory interfaces for marginalised groups.

This paper examines the educational efficacy of a learning environment in which children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Conditions\ud (ASC) engage in social interactions with an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual agent and where a human practitioner acts in support of\ud the interactions. A multi-site intervention study in schools across the UK was conducted with 29 children with ASC and learning\ud difficulties, aged 4-14 years old. For reasons related to data completeness and amount of exposure to the AI environment, data for\ud 15 children was included in the analysis. The analysis revealed a significant increase in the proportion of social responses made by\ud ASC children to human practitioners. The number of initiations made to human practitioners and to the virtual agent by the ASC\ud children also increased numerically over the course of the sessions. However, due to large individual differences within the ASC\ud group, this did not reach significance. Although no evidence of transfer to the real-world post-test was shown, anecdotal evidence of\ud classroom transfer was reported. The work presented in this paper offers an important contribution to the growing body of research\ud in the context of AI technology design and use for autism intervention in real school contexts. Specifically, the work highlights key\ud methodological challenges and opportunities in this area by leveraging interdisciplinary insights in a way that (i) bridges between\ud educational interventions and intelligent technology design practices, (ii) considers the design of technology as well as the design of\ud its use (context and procedures) on par with one another, and (iii) includes design contributions from different stakeholders, including\ud children with and without ASC diagnosis, educational practitioners and researchers.

Experimental intervention studies constitute the current dominant research designs in the autism education field. Such designs are based on a ‘knowledge transfer’ model of evidence-based practice in which research is conducted by researchers, and is then ‘transferred’ to practitioners to enable them to implement evidence-based interventions. While these research designs contribute important knowledge, they lead to a gap between what the research evidence may prescribe and what happens in practice, with a concomitant disparity between the priorities of researchers and practitioners. This paper discusses findings from the ESRC funded ‘SHAPE’ project, which adopted a different model of evidence-based practice, focusing on knowledge co-construction. Pupils (N=8), teachers (N=10), a Speech and Language Therapist and a parent in three different school communities investigated creative ways in which children’s social communication skills could be enhanced through technology use. Through a participatory methodology, digital stories were used as a method to enable engagement with the practical realities of the classroom and empower practitioners to construct and share their own authentic narratives. Participants articulated precise knowledge about the learning opportunities afforded to them and their pupils through quality interactions that were mediated by the technologies, as evidenced through digital stories. The Shape project shows that it is feasible to develop methodologies that enable genuine knowledge co-construction with school practitioners, parents and pupils. Such co-construction could offer realistic opportunities for pedagogical emancipation and innovation in evidence-based practice as an alternative to the currently dominant and narrow model of knowledge transfer.

Commercial sensor-based technologies offer efficient mechanisms for capturing detailedmovement data today. These pre-determined calibrations and representations are used to design solutions that indicate how people should move in order to achieve certain goals. This presents an ethical power imposition that resides in the computational prowess within processing to activate prompts and smooth out errors by ignoring or discarding movement outside of what is deemed useful. Our discussions on movement come out of two research projects Somantics and Sync in which we developed digital tools to observe changes in user agency when movement becomes the focus of a chain of responsive actions and reactions - affect and effect - made possible through digitization. The projects were undertaken with people with atypical movement experience, from expert dancers to children on the autistic spectrum. We discuss the need for reframing an ethical and critical discourse on digital movement to understand the sensate and social means with which we all use our bodies to regulate and rehearse, communicate and connect.