Katie Gaudion

Autistic adults with limited speech and additional learning disabilities are people whose perceptions and interactions with their environment are unique, but whose experiences are under-explored in design research. This PhD by Practice investigates how people with autism experience their home environment through a collaboration with the autism charity Kingwood Trust, which gave the designer extensive access to a community of autistic adults that it supports.

The PhD reflects upon a neurodivergent designer's approach to working with autistic adults to investigate their relationship with the environment. It identifies and develops collaborative design tools for autistic adults, their support staff and family members to be involved. The PhD presents three design studies that explore a person’s interaction with three environmental contexts of the home: garden, everyday objects and interiors. A strengths-based, rather than a deficit-based, approach is adopted, which draws upon an autistic person’s sensory preferences, special interests and action capabilities, to unravel what discomfort and delight might mean for an autistic person; this approach is translated into three design solutions to enhance their experience at home.

By working beyond the boundaries of a neurotypical culture, the PhD bridges the autistic and neurotypical worlds of experience, and draws upon what the mainstream design field can learn from designing with autistic people with additional learning disabilities. It also provides insights into the subjective experiences of people who have very different ways of seeing, doing and being in the environment. 

Supervisors: Professor Ashley Hall and Professor Jeremy Myerson

Thesis available at researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/1692

Occupational Textiles (in homage to Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori and the field of occupational therapy.)

An innovative range of non-age or gender-specific textile props to stimulate the primary senses of touch, sound, smell and sight, and encourage movement and play for adults and children who experience sensory sensitivities.

Each prop capitalises on the somatic nature of textiles, which transforms toys of the past in terms of scale, pattern, shape, texture, sound, weight, temperature and colour, to accentuate and heighten the sensorial, kinetic, haptic and bodily experience it perpetuates for each individual.

Thesis available at  researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/4743