Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Conference Papers

Beyond Categories: Towards a Continuum Model to Capture the Characteristics of Neurodiverse Social Play

Published in IDC '25: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, 2025

The IDC community is increasingly interested in technologies that promote inclusive social play, particularly for neurodiverse groups of children. However, much of the research in this area relies on historic categorisations of play that are based on ‘typical’ play behaviours. These classifications can often fail to account for ‘divergent’ play styles that may be exhibited by neurodivergent children. In this paper, we demonstrate how these traditional classifications of play fail to adequately capture the complexity of neurodiverse social play and propose an initial alternative continuum model for the analysis of neurodiverse play behaviours. We illustrate the model’s potential use through observations of children’s neurodiverse social play with a technology and then reflect on its ability to more effectively capture the diversity of play styles within neurodiverse groups.

Recommended citation: Brooke Morris, Alison Oldfield, and Oussama Metatla. 2025. Beyond Categories: Towards a Continuum Model to Capture the Characteristics of Neurodiverse Social Play. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’25), June 23–26, 2025, Reykjavik, Iceland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3713043.3727061
Download Paper

“It Helps Us Express Our Feelings Without Having To Say Anything”: Exploring ‘Accompanying Social Play Things’ Designed With and For Neurodiverse Groups of Children

Published in Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), 2025

Social play is crucial for children’s well-being and development. However, many social play technologies fail to address the specific characteristics and needs of neurodiverse play and often overlook divergent play styles. To address this, we first conducted a co-design study with a neurodiverse group of 7 children (Age 7-8) and, based on insights from these sessions, then developed a prototype, ChromaConnect, that allowed children to express their play style to one another during play. To evaluate ChromaConnect’s ability to support neurodiverse social play in different contexts, we observed children using it in both structured and unstructured play settings. Our findings show that ChromaConnect enabled children to create a common language of play, made divergent play modes more visible, and facilitated explicit expression of social play initiation. We discuss how these findings could be used to design ‘accompanying social play things’ that are more inclusive of neurodiverse play characteristics and divergent play styles.

Recommended citation: Brooke Morris, Hayati Havlucu, Alison Oldfield, and Oussama Metatla. 2025. “It Helps Us Express Our Feelings Without Having To Say Anything”: Exploring ‘Accompanying Social Play Things’ Designed With and For Neurodiverse Groups of Children. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713738
Download Paper

Plushonas: Exploring Neurodiverse Social Play With Children and Their Parents Through Expanded Proxy Design

Published in 37th International BCS Human-Computer Interaction Conference (BCS HCI 24), 2024

Autistic and neurotypical children can often struggle to play together due to differing communication, play and interactional styles, resulting in reduced social interaction quality for both groups. Play technologies can facilitate and support social play among children. However, play technologies often attempt to encourage more neurotypical traits in autistic children in a bid to foster social play. This approach ignores the unique experiences of autistic children. We present a design case study combining the use of “plushonas” in an expanded proxy design activity and a technology probe observation with a group of 5-year-old children and their parents. We re-introduce the notion of Plushonas as an expanded proxy design facilitating the use of personas with children. We report in-depth qualitative analysis highlighting the importance of creating interdependent play spaces to create a cohesive play environment. We reflect upon using both proxy and expanded proxy design when designing with young, neurodiverse groups of children. These findings can benefit future play technology design sessions with neurodiverse groups.

Recommended citation: Zoë Clark, Brooke Morris and Elaine Czech et al. Plushonas: Exploring Neurodiverse Social Play With Children and Their Parents Through Expanded Proxy Design. 2024. DOI: 10.14236/ewic/BCSHCI2024.15
Download Paper

Sense-O-Nary: Exploring Children’s Crossmodal Metaphors Through Playful Crossmodal Interactions

Published in IDC '24: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, 2024

Metaphors enrich language by allowing us to express complex ideas through familiar concepts, enhancing both understanding and creativity in communication. Crossmodal metaphors are metaphors where one sensory modality is understood in terms of another (e.g, a sharp smell). Crossmodality is an integral part of how we make sense of and create meaning about the world. However, there is a lack of research on how children generate crossmodal metaphors and the interpretation of such metaphors. We present Sense-O-Nary, a game we designed to explore how children react when asked to create crossmodal metaphors in a novel environment. Children are presented with one sensory input and then asked to describe it using a different sense, for another team to guess what the original sensory input is. We engaged children (n=65, aged 8-10) to play this crossmodal metaphor generation game. We qualitatively analysed children’s exchange of crossmodal metaphors to define a set of crossmodal association strategies and then use this to categorise the metaphors they created. We discuss how engaging with crossmodal metaphors can enhance children’s linguistic development and how our findings can inform the design of interactions that involve multiple senses.

Recommended citation: Tegan Joy Roberts-Morgan, Brooke Morris, Elaine Czech, Suhan Neema, Abigale Stangl, Kyle Michael Keane, Matthew Horton, Janet Read, and Oussama Metatla. 2024. Sense-O-Nary: Exploring Children's Crossmodal Metaphors Through Playful Crossmodal Interactions. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC 2024). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 259–269. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3655785
Download Paper

“He always wanted to be far”: Exploring Expanded Proxies to Design Social Play Experiences with Autistic and Neurotypical Children

Published in IDC '24: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference, 2024

Social play is vital for healthy child development. Autistic and neurotypical children can often struggle to play together due to differing communication, play and interactional styles, resulting in reduced social interaction quality for both groups. Play technologies can facilitate and support social play among children. However, most play technologies to date attempt to encourage more neurotypical traits in autistic children in a bid to foster social play. This approach ignores the unique experiences of autistic children. We conducted a preliminary study combining an expanded proxy design and a technology probe observation with a group of 5-year-old children and their parents. We report on initial findings highlighting the importance of creating inclusive spaces for a cohesive and supportive play environment and reflect on using expanded proxy design when designing with young, neurodiverse groups of children.

Recommended citation: Zoë Clark, Brooke Morris, Elaine Czech, Hayati Havlucu, and Oussama Metatla. 2024. "He always wanted to be far": Exploring Expanded Proxies to Design Social Play Experiences with Autistic and Neurotypical Children. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 765–769. https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3659391
Download Paper

Understanding Neurodiverse Social Play Between Autistic and Non-Autistic Children

Published in Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), 2024

Social play supports children to develop essential life skills and foster friendships. However, autistic and non-autistic children often do not have equal opportunities to engage in social play. Previous research to improve these opportunities tends to invoke social skill interventions solely for autistic children or is focused on designing for only one group, rather than considering the interactions or needs of all children in neurodiverse groups. In order to understand the different experiences of children during social play, we conducted interviews with 6 professionals who support neurodiverse social play and undertook observation sessions of 36 autistic and non-autistic children during unstructured social play. Our findings move beyond the existing characterizations of autistic social play and build upon the double empathy problem to capture and consider the needs of all children in neurodiverse playgroups. We argue these findings could be used to inform future neurodiverse social play technology design in HCI.

Recommended citation: Brooke Morris, Hayati Havlucu, Alison Oldfield, and Oussama Metatla. 2024. Understanding Neurodiverse Social Play Between Autistic and Non- Autistic Children. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642809
Download Paper

Double Empathy as a Lens to Understand the Design Space for Inclusive Social Play Between Autistic and Neurotypical Children

Published in Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’23), 2023

Social play (SP) is a play activity that involves social interaction between children. Research has shown mixed groups (MG), which include autistic and neurotypical children, benefit more from mutual social interactions. However, inclusive SP in MG reveals challenges in terms of the differences between groups, by which autism is typically characterized. Previous research addressing these issues either only includes one group or only concerns the barriers for autistic children. Addressing this, we aim to understand the design space to support inclusive SP for MG. For this, we utilize the ‘double empathy problem’ that aims to focus on interpersonal issues rather than problems of one group. In this preliminary work, we conducted interviews with 6 professionals who support MG during SP and examined barriers and design insights. We argue our findings could assist in developing the design space and methods that aim to promote mutual understanding in SP research for MG.

Recommended citation: Brooke Morris, Hayati Havlucu, Alison Oldfeld, and Oussama Metatla. 2023. Double Empathy as a Lens to Understand the Design Space for Inclusive Social Play Between Autistic and Neurotypical Children. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585828
Download Paper