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

Brooke Morris, Hayati Havlucu, Alison Oldfield & Oussama Metatla. 2025.

ACM CHI Conference on Human Computer Interaction

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.