Desiging Social Play Things.

Social play is a key factor in children’s positive development. Children with different interactional styles, such as neurodivergent children, face challenges to create opportunities for playing with peers to practice and acquire complex social skills, putting their social and emotional wellbeing at risk. We report on the design of social play technologies that aim to scaffold and support, in non-normative ways, co-located play of heterogeneous, neurodiverse groups of children aged 6 to 8. In three case studies we describe the participatory design processes that led to the development of three prototypical social play things. We report on the methodological challenges to design with these highly diverse groups and critically reflect on negotiating design decisions across abilities, agendas and conceptions of play within the process. Drawing on our successes and failures in these three cases, we synthesise design guidance for creating social play technologies for diverse groups of children.