Collaborative Design for Job-Seekers with Autism: A Conceptual Framework for Future Research

The success of employment is highly related to a job seeker's capability of communicating and collaborating with others. While leveraging one's network during the job-seeking process is intuitive to the neurotypical, this can be challenging for people with autism. Recent empirical findings have started to show how facilitating collaboration between people with autism and their social surroundings through new design can improve their chances of employment. This work aims to provide actionable guidelines and conceptual frameworks that future researchers and practitioners can apply to improve collaborative design for job-seekers with autism. Built upon the literature on past technological interventions built for supporting job-seekers with autism, we define three major research challenges of (1) communication support, (2) employment stage-wise support, and (3) group work support. For each challenge, we review the current state-of-the-art practices and possible future solutions. We then suggest future designs that can provide breakthroughs from the interdisciplinary lens of human-AI collaboration, health services, group work, accessibility computing, and natural language processing.