Space for and by autistic students: Leveraging lived experiences to inform design interventions

While organisations in various domains increasingly seek cognitive talents associated with being autistic, several barriers prevent autistic people from joining the workforce. One such barrier concerns higher education: compared to their peers, autistic students are more likely to encounter difficulties during college years. Besides challenges with concentration, socialising, or independent living, their specific way of interpreting the world can make their environment appear disorientating and frightening. Yet in inclusive education practices, the role of the built environment – the design of the campus, buildings, and spaces – hardly receives attention. Our study therefore aims to understand college life on the autism spectrum, viewed through the built environment lens. We used participatory methods to explore five autistic students’ experiences at our university and how spaces affect these. The goal was to identify where – in which spaces – they feel most (un)comfortable. We invited a student organisation to use the insights gained to make their main event more autism-friendly and asked participants to assess the interventions. Central in participants’ college life are study, sociality, and retreat. While their experiences are diverse, for all five the role of space relates to clarity (e.g. clear circulation), distractions (e.g. background noise), and possibilities to escape in socially acceptable ways. Predictability and having control are crucial to ease stress and increase comfort. Rather than explicitly suggesting improvements for spaces experienced as uncomfortable, participants demonstrate creative use and appropriation of spaces. We conclude that small interventions can already make a difference. For future research, we encourage addressing autistic students’ real-life challenges and putting insights into practice while respecting the diversity on the autism spectrum. Given this diversity, we also propose different ways to involve autistic people in studies about and with them.