"We are in this together": Supporting Neurodiverse Children in Participatory Design through Design Partnering

We report how designers support active engagement of neurodiverse children (13 -16 y.o.) in participatory design (PD) through “Design Partnering”. Design partnering denotes a process in which neurodiverse children are teamed up with neurotypical peers to help them overcome cognitive, social, and relational barriers and thus make their engagement more active during design. We contribute with studies of design partnering in three different PD activities: Field studies, Ideation, and Prototyping. We map out the opportunities and challenges we faced in our study when applying design partnering in PD research. We discuss our findings to lay out future studies to be conducted in Child-Computer Interaction research to provide more knowledge on the potentiality and challenges of design partnering in PD.