This dissertation highlights social media as digitally-mediated support for neurodivergent individuals, countering alarmist narratives of these platforms. Social networks have been criticized for their assumed role in addiction to technology, the spread of misinformation, and its impact on mental health. However, by adopting a critical disability theory lens, I critique the techno-solutionism around mental health care and focus on the lived experiences shared within neurodivergent social media communities. Existing social media platforms can provide community support situated within daily use for neurodivergent individuals to step away from the individualistic approaches currently promoted by much digital mental health technology. These social media-based communities are providing an important service of care and collective knowledge for individuals going through similar experiences to find validation and a sense of agency regarding diagnostic and support options. Social media platforms have democratized the dissemination of information about ADHD, allowing individuals with lived experience to contribute to the conversation and push back against stereotypical misconceptions about the community. The friendly and accessible format in which social media content is presented helps empower individuals in their personal journeys and provides important education. This research further explores the relationships neurodivergent individuals have had with diagnostic and care systems, as well as ongoing tensions with healthcare providers in both physical and digital spaces. By adopting the Neurodiversity Paradigm in HCI and healthcare, we will be better able to support neurodivergent communities.

The playground is a space where play is encouraged and happens most freely. Online communities can be imagined as playgrounds. In addition to face-to-face playgrounds, these “online playgrounds” mediate the embodied experience, but in a different way. In the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), to better understand play, I shift the focus from using technology to assist children with disabilities engage in normative play, to using technology that supports children’s play—whether normative or not. Work in other fields upholds normative, face-to-face interactions as the goal in any social interaction. Current research often holds offline and online as two distinct experiences with many caregivers, teachers, parents, and researchers privileging the experiences that happen in the physical, face-to-face realm—the physical-world playground. In HCI, studying technology for play is often acknowledged only to accomplish specific goals (such as education, skill mastery, or improving health). When stakeholders use technology for play simply for the sake of play, normative interactions are the focal point, such as with able-bodied children. In technology research, children with disabilities are not ignored altogether, but rather when technology for play is studied for disabled children the technology becomes an aid—a support to allow the children more normative interactions. Being disabled inherently means not fitting into and not adhering to the normative embodied interactions. When we assume a normative way of engaging as the best or only way to interact, there will be people who are excluded. In a digital ethnography conducted in Autcraft, an online community centered around a Minecraft world for children with autism, we can see how online communities can become “online playgrounds” and used as an alternative place to play. This dissertation aims to re-center technology design to support topos-mediated ludic sociality—the various ways sociality as an embodied experience is mediated by playful place—rather than focusing on how technology can be used to normalize social interactions.

Despite good intentions for disabled communities, research and design products and processes often lead to unintended harm and negative effects. Like sexism and racism, ableism is woven throughout our technological, cultural, and social ecosystems by default [7–10]. Engineers and designers working in the space of accessibility and assistive technology want to do good and improve the lives of others. However, without addressing systemic ableism and its intersection with race, gender, economic status, etc. we risk harm surfacing through our designed worlds and processes. Traditional technology development and human-computer interaction practices do not provide the tools to consider systemic issues. To understand what practices of resistance and liberation look like in the context of technology and disability, this dissertation looks at how social justice orientations change the day-to-day work of researchers and designers.To explore this area, this dissertation includes a systematic literature review of social justice in HCI, semi-structured interviews with those interested in disability justice and technology, and the development of a novel method that carries values found in the literature review and interviews. Through the results of these studies, this dissertation provides actionable practices for future technologists seeking to bring just and equitable practices into their work.