Designing for Strengths: Opportunities to Support Neurodiversity in the Workplace

Supported employment programs have demonstrated the ability to enhance employment outcomes for neurodivergent individuals by offering personalized job coaching that aligns with the strengths of each individual. While various technological interventions have been designed to support these programs, technologies that hyperfocus on users’ assumed challenges through deficit-based design have been criticized due to their potential to undermine the agency of neurodivergent individuals. Therefore, we use strengths-based co-design to explore the opportunities for a technology that supports neurodivergent employees using their strengths. The co-design activities uncovered our participants’ current strategies to address workplace challenges, the strengths they employ, and the technology designs that our participants developed to operationalize those strengths in a supportive technology. We find that incorporating strengths-based strategies for emotional regulation, interpersonal problem solving, and learning job-related skills can provide a supportive technology experience that bolsters neurodiverse employees’ agency and independence in the workplace. In response, we suggest design implications for using neurodiverse strengths as design requirements and how to design for independence in workplace.