Social play is important for children’s development and overall well-being, and forms a significant part of children’s lives, particularly within mainstream educational settings. However, barriers to meaningful engagement in social play can emerge within neurodiverse groups, where differences in play, interaction, and communication styles may create challenges for participation, connection, and, therefore, friendship. Technology could provide a potential bridge to help children overcome these challenges; however, much work in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) either considers neurodivergent children in isolation or focuses on technologies that reinforce neurotypical norms, overlooking the unique, fluid, and contextual dynamics of neurodiverse social play. In this thesis, I argue that neurodiverse social play should be understood as its own phenomenon, with distinct characteristics, strengths, and challenges. I further argue that, therefore, designing neurodiversity-affirming technologies requires co-design methodologies andnplay analysis frameworks that recognise and support distributed, diverse forms of participation and play. To explore how neurodiverse groups play and design together, I developed and used a range of methodological tools, contributing the following: an application of the double empathy problem as an analytical and design lens, the concept of an ‘accompanying social play thing’ to support unstructured neurodiverse social play, a continuum model of neurodiverse social play to capture the characteristics of play during analysis, and the notion of ‘collective protagonism’ to explore how children can contribute to and shape design problem spaces, processes, and outcomes through diverse and shared forms of participation. Together, these contributions highlight the importance of attending to the contextual, relational, and diverse ways children play and participate in design, and provide implications for developing more neurodiversity-affirming approaches to designing technologies for neurodiverse social play.
Recommended citation: Designing Technologies for Neurodiverse Social Play, Morris, B. (Author). 29 Sept 2026
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