Ila Krishna Kumar, Sara Inácio, and Carrie Hyde-Riley. 2026. “Who are you, the feelings machine?!”: Using digital technology to support self-directed creative emotional expression among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’26), July 13–16, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.

Abstract

We explore how creative, digital technologies can be leveraged to support the self-directed emotional expression of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Many individuals with IDD face significant mental health challenges and are not having their needs met by existing care systems, leaving them to navigate difficult emotional experiences without support. Following the guidance of disability advocates, we focus on how services can be designed to support people in coping with emotions in ways that honor their fundamental right to make decisions about their actions and lives. We utilize non-verbal, creative mediums to support individuals in processing and expressing complex emotions that may be difficult to verbalize, as well as integrate digital technologies to facilitate independent reflection and creation. Specifically, we design a series of technology-based activities to encourage arts-based emotional reflection and expression, and introduce them to individuals with IDD in an environment that encourages them to make their own decisions about how and when to engage. In this paper, we analyze program artifacts to understand how individuals with IDD naturally use creative technologies for emotional processing and expression, in order to surface recommendations for how technology-based programs and tools can be designed to support these goals and honor individual needs, desires, and autonomy.