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

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