Microarchitecture, Autism

Casa Never Never Land

- Patrizia Lake
- Marysia Barczentewicz
- María Verdú

With our model, we would like to conduct normal people into the life of an autistic person. On the one hand, we want to show how difficult it can be to live with this disorder, but on the other hand, we also want to express what advantages you get when you have this different kind of feeling. That is why our experiment deals with the special senses autistic persons have.

First of all we thought about how to make these impressions as realistic as possible, and so we come up with the idea of creating a helmet and glovs.

The helemt will have a geometric form and could be made out of papier mache or cardboard. The part in front of the eyes is beaked and you look throgh a loupe. This has the effect that you can not see everything around you and the things you can see are diffuse, but get really clear, when you come close to them. The same happens to the austistic people, who have often problems with their eyes, but they are focussed on details, that a lot of other people would not see.

Another sense that is affected by the illness is hearing. Loud noises have a huge effect on autistic persons, because they hear these sounds louder than normally. So we thought about an appliance for the ears of the person that is wearing the helmet. This can be put on the ears and is connected with a lot of needles. In the inside of the helmet is a material like paper fixed, so that the needles always touch the paper, when the person moves. And because the needles are so close to the ear, the noises are even starched and it feels like it is directly in it .

The other aspect we focussed on is that autistic people often can not recognize things by touching them. That is why we wanted to make the person loose his hands as a medium for get to know new things.

Therefor, the person get something like gloves to put on his hands. It should be delicate cable on each finger, that has bubbles on it, which make the person feel like they never really touch anything. It also seems like there is something between you and all the things, so that you never know what you are touching at the moment.

Our experiment target to force the person to concentrate all the time on every sense they have. It shoud show how important our senses are and that they are not self-evident. It should confuse the person that they do not see, hear and feel the things they expected and make them understand in which good way Autism can affect your life and make you see things in a different way.