Maps, legends, threads, and tapestries
using art to humanize the lived experience of women with autism
This work explores how expectations of gender and femininity shape the experience of autism in women—and how underdiagnosis and masking affect our mental health and sense of self. It examines the internal reality of living with autism and the external pressures of what society expects women with autism to be.
More photos of the dress will be added here as the project evolves and future evolutions include:
- STORIES: More stories and codesigning with people in workshops to describe their lived experiences
- AR: Exploring Augmented Reality to bring the stories to life
- DESIGN: What if the dresses could become less about a painting on top of a dress, and more creating a diorama within the dress?
- AI: how would a tool like this leverage AI to create a support tools if and when someone experiences a symptom? I had started to build a Notebook LLM to hold multiple stories to help me identify what to visualize, and this can be expanded to explore Agentic AI as a support tool.