Marginalised Voices:
Neurodiversity and Inclusivity in the Design Process
— A Speculative Design Exploration
2020
Role: Animator, Modeler, Editor, Director, Designer.
For this project, our group’s aim was to use speculative design and co-designing workshop techniques to amplify the voices of autistic children in relation to urban design aesthetics.
In order to better respond to the brief, our actions have followed two intertwined underlying principles, inverting the power dynamics existing between adults as the dominant group and children, plus understanding how neurodiverse individuals (would like to) experience their surroundings.
Research
Our initial research started by watching popular TV shows and reading articles on neurodiversity, which gave us an overview of associated terminology and group classifications, but no clear subject of focus.
During an interview with Qona Rankin, RCA Dyslexia Co-ordinator, our attention was brought upon the problems faced by autistic individuals in general and we also learned about the subsequent social security issues not effectively addressed by the UK governmental policies.
We discovered that autistic people are a marginalised group not only institutionally, but also culturally as there is a constant societal referral bias to ‘normality’ as represented by people identified as ‘low’ on the autism spectrum.
Another aspect that had a deep impact on us was the fact that severe cases of autistic individuals leave school with virtually no institutional support, having to rely solely on help coming from private sources i.e. mainly family and/or charities with the daunting prospect of not having any support as they age.
Qona kindly helped us further by recommending the book Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum by Luke Beardon and Dean Worton, which all of us read independently. The book presented us not only with a wide range of positive experiences recollected by 28 autistic writers, but it also proved to be pivotal later on when we designed and conducted our co-creation workshop at the Paddock School.
Co-creation Workshop
The main research part of our project was the co-design workshop held at Paddock School, where we’ve asked a group of 11 neurodiverse students to design their ideal world.
Before the workshop, we read about various student engagement techniques and received some great advice in the form of a very handy bullet point list from Dr Katie Gaudion, Senior Research Associate at The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design — a list that actually informed our decisions on the day!
We concluded that the workshop had to be constructed as simple and as 'liberal' as possible so that the students engage in their own way without adding too many constraints, potential for stress and anxiety factors.
We prepared 4 types of activities: lego, clay, coloured pens, and magazines for cutouts and collages. We were also prepared to be extremely flexible with both staff and students and be ready to change strategies quickly if needed
Our approach was to place all materials in the centre of the room with sitting mats around so that students pick up their places and materials of choice individually.
It all worked like a charm as it made everyone feel very comfortable and they took it both as leisure time and as a class activity. Students were very engaged, some moved away and set up their workshop in various parts of the room, others stayed in their initial place. We moved around trying to engage with each of them asking what they're making and trying to understand their motivations and aspirations as much as possible.
In terms of materials, it seems it was a good idea to have multiple choices as we managed to cater for everyone. The non-verbal students were quite attracted by the illustrations in the magazines and clay, whilst some of the others moved between multiple mediums without getting bored.
Staff was quite enthusiastic when they saw how well the students responded to our very 'liberal' approach, as everyone was enjoying themselves, they were very engaged, and there was a very calm and relaxed atmosphere all around. The session’s success was probably also due to the workshop’s less formal format compared to regular classes.
Overall, it felt great to be there and we're really grateful for being awarded this enlightening experience.
Urban Design Elements
-
![]()
Amusement Park
Inspired by his favourite superhero Sonic The Hedgehog, one of the students designed a playground. Acknowledging people’s innate need for amusement and our students’ receptiveness to play this concept turned into an amusement park and it was allocated a quarter of the entire city’s surface.
-
![]()
Public Artworks
A student introduced Sheepy to us — his talking best friend and a very captivating personality overall. As Sheepy was central to the student’s narrative, it became a central part of the urban design as well, with its own monument overlooking the town’s main road junction.
-
![Vehicles]()
Vehicles
A student’s clay model of a vehicle which became the standard design throughout the city.
-
![]()
Street Lighting
A student presented a series of drawings representing portraits of her mother, landscapes and the letter “P” which became neon light decorations for the Social/Food Market, plus they inspired the design for the entire street lighting system.
-
![]()
Buildings & Architecture
Several students made architectural models which were subsequently used for both building and masterplanning arrangements throughout the city. They made a strong argument for a new type of thinking about urban design, outside the confinements of efficiency-driven economic models, which most often leads to banal looking parallelepipedic shapes, not responding in any way to the aesthetic tastes of large parts of the population.
-
![]()
Roads
Major roads are based on a ‘street with no litter’ model presented by a student. A useful reminder that roads don’t have to always be unicolour.
-
![]()
Fashion
A student made a series of portraits of his favourite fictional characters from the Super Mario universe, plus a complementing clay model, all of which became the basis for urban fashion and was ultimately adopted by the RCA students for their profile photos. The characters also became citizens of the new city.
Made with Zbrush, Substance Alchemist, Cinema 4D & Arnold render, DaVinci Resolve
Result
We used the ideas generated during the workshop to construct an environment consisting of four different areas: Amusement Park, Main City Capital (for work and study), Residential, and Social/Food Market.
The video tries to replicate the experience of living in this new environment and it was conceived as the starting point for a more immersive and interactive creative expression of our process. Due to the limited computing power at our disposal, the export quality had to be reduced dramatically, hence the ‘grainy’ aesthetic..
Timeframe
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank everyone that helped us throughout this inspiring and deeply rewarding experience.
Paddock School Students and Staff, Wandsworth
Jasmin ‘Jaz’ Wharmby
Teacher and workshop co-ordinator
Christina Barrett
TLR Head of Department
Emily Hayward
Head of School
We want to thank the school’s staff for their generosity and support. We were very touched by their dedication to an essential human cause — caring for each other and protecting the most vulnerable.
Although we had virtually zero experience running these kinds of workshops, Jaz and the team were brilliant in putting some structure in and helping us overcome our own anxieties to deliver what we thought was an overall engaging and entertaining creative session for the students.
Ultimately, we absolutely loved meeting the students and couldn't be more grateful for their contribution. For us, as storytellers, it was amazing to see how much creativity exists in people that are not bound to operate within mainstream modes of thinking and how much potential for a richer human experience lies in bringing everyone into the conversation.
Royal College of Art Support and Teaching Staff
Qona Rankin
RCA Dyslexia Co-ordinator
Dr Katie Gaudion
Senior Research Associate
The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design
Dr Carol MacGillivray
Personal Tutor
Hestia Peppe
Personal Tutor
Indira Knight
Personal Tutor
Richard Neville
Personal Tutor
Dr Eleanor Dare
Head of Programme
Dr Matt Lewis
Programme Tutor
We would like to thank first and foremost to Qona Rankin for opening our eyes to the general issues of autism, for directing our research to the lecture Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum and for suggesting us to contact Paddock School through her daughter Jaz — we consider all of the above the stepping stone of this wonderful experience.
Huge thanks to Dr Katie Gaudion for jumping in at short notice and giving us very helpful tips in conducting field research with children.
Thank you to our personal tutors Dr Carol MacGillivray, Hestia Peppe, Indira Knight and Richard Neville who have ‘been there’ during a turbulent period and found the resources to give us direction, emotional support and the right tools for completing the unit successfully.
Finally, thank you, Dr Eleanor Dare and Dr Matt Lewis, for tirelessly making sure RCA MA Digital Direction offers their students an experience worthy of the syntagm ‘best in the world’.