These Architectural Playscapes Provide Therapy for Children with Autism

This article was originally published on Autodesk's Redshift publication as "Architecture for Autism Could Be a Breakthrough for Kids With ASD."

Good architects have always designed with tactile sensations in mind, from the rich wood grain on a bannister, to the thick, shaggy carpet at a daycare center. It’s an effective way to engage all the senses, connecting the eye, hand, and mind in ways that create richer environments.

But one architecture professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is working on a tactile architecture-for-autism environment that does much more than offer visitors a pleasing and diverse haptic experience: It’s a form of therapy for kids like 7-year-old daughter Ara, who has autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Social Sensory Architectures, an ongoing research project led by Sean Ahlquist, creates therapeutic structures for children with ASD. One prototype, the sensoryPLAYSCAPE, is a tent-like pavilion made of tensile fabric stretched over rods to create an immersive environment. Responding to touch, sounds are triggered, and 2D imagery is projected onto the fabric’s surface, as if on a screen. This visually demonstrates the connection between motor skills and auditory and visual feedback, helping children with autism adjust the amounts of force appropriate to apply at a given movement—a common issue among those on the autism spectrum.

As a PhD researcher at The Institute for Computational Design (a hub at the University of Stuttgart for research in lightweight architectural materials, where Frei Otto founded the Institute for Lightweight Structures), Ahlquist focused on pre-stressed tensile structures. When he came to Michigan in 2012, he continued his research using a CNC knitting machine, which gave him the ability to create his own textiles. The more he researched different kinds of light, tactile materials, the more he noticed something odd about how people interact with them once they’re fitted together into a structure.

A piece of fabric is a thing to be touched; a fabric structure is to be experienced from a distance. “The structures we were developing had a really intimate quality to them, but in terms of the architecture, the second you build it into a quote-unquote ‘architectural system,’ the materiality quickly becomes a passive backdrop,” he says. “It becomes a thing that goes around you, as opposed to the thing that you actually engage.”