Researchers and designers each developed a particular vision on autism-friendly architecture.Because the basis of this vision is not always clear, questions arise about its meaning and value, and about how it can be put to use. People with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum are central to these questions, yet risk to disappear from the picture. Refocusing the discourse about autism-friendly architecture on them is the aim of the explorative study reported here. Six autobiographies written by autistic (young) adults were analysed from two different viewpoints. First, concepts from design guidelines concerning autism-friendly architecture were confronted with fragments from these autobiographies. The second part of the analysis started from the autobiographies themselves. This analysis shows that concepts can be interpreted in multiple ways. They can reinforce but also counteract each other, thus asking for critical judgment. An open space is preferred by some autistic people because it affords having an overview, which increases predictability, and distancing oneself from others without being isolated. Others might like this space to be subdivided into several separate spaces which affords a sense of structure or reduces sensory inputs present in one room.The six autobiographies provide a glimpse of autistic people's world of experience. Analysing these is a first step in revealing what architecture can actually mean from their point of view. For them, the material environment has a prominent meaning that is, however, not always reducible to design guidelines. It offers them something to hold on to, relate to or structure their reality.
An understanding of diversity is a key principle in the development of theories, tools and techniques of design for inclusion. In assembling new perspectives for inclusive design, we want to gain a more accurate insight into the diversity of people's interaction with the designed environment. People with autism spectrum disorders, for example, due to their particular way of thinking, make sense of their surrounding world in a unique way. Starting from this notion, our research questions the relevance to them of the meaning attributed to the built environment in our society, by studying the interaction between the world of experience of people with autism and the design of the built environment.In this paper, we investigate the way people with autism talk about space and the importance they attach to their physical environment, as reflected in stories and autobiographies of people with autism themselves-in short, auti-biographies. By analysing their own descriptions, we try to gain more insight into an autistic way of thinking and acting in relation to the built environment.
Architectural Design and AutismIn our society, designers have a significant impact on daily life. They commit themselves to certain ideas, which take shape in the artefacts they conceive. In architecture also, a design embodies the designers' line of thought. The tangible space which is the materialisation of an architectural design, thus carries a whole ideological background. However, most people are only exposed to the concrete realisation of the architectural design, to the physical space surrounding them. Yet the way a person deals with this surrounding space and brings it into use does not only depend on the design of the physical space, infused with the ideas of the architect; it is to a large extent based on the personal interpretation this person
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