Beyond Roles: Collective Protagonism in Co-Design with Neurodiverse Groups of Children

Co-design with children traditionally focuses on individual roles, from “user” to “design partner” and, more recently, “protagonist”. However, these framings rarely capture the dynamics of groups, where participation is distributed, fluid, and often collective. We introduce the notion of collective protagonism: a perspective where the protagonist is not each child individually but a shared stance that collectively shapes design context, contributions, process and outcomes. Through a co-design study consisting of four schoolbased workshops with eight neurodiverse children (8-9yrs), we explored how children defined social play, reflected on its challenges, and designed technologies to support it. We characterise ‘collective protagonism’ and identify methodological strategies that operationalise it, such as collective summaries and distributed contributions, supporting diverse and multimodal expression. We argue that embracing ‘collective protagonism’ could broaden how design research empowers groups of children, particularly within neurodiverse contexts, and fosters equitable, meaningful participation.