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A conversation with a friend who stayed with me

Before this module had even started, I was talking to my friend Ellie, who is autistic and had recently been travelling for the first time. She told me about a particularly difficult experience she had had while travelling independently. I wasn’t looking for a project topic at the time, but the conversation stayed with me.

When I later began the module and mapped out the subjects I was naturally interested in, I noticed that travel and accessibility repeatedly appeared across my previous work and interests. That made me think again about Ellie’s experience and question why it had resonated with me so strongly.

2. Connecting the subject to my own experience

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Realising why I cared about this problem

Thinking about Ellie also made me think about my sister. I remembered travelling together, conversations we had had about travel, FaceTime calls while I had been away and some of the difficulties she has experienced in environments that I find relatively manageable.

I also thought about how important independent travel has been in my own life and how sad it felt to realise that some of those experiences might be considerably harder for us to share. This was the point where travel, autism and accessibility stopped feeling like three separate interests and started feeling like the area I genuinely wanted to investigate.

3. Narrowing the project

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From neurodiversity and travel to the live airport journey

The project began much more broadly around travel and neurodiversity. As the research developed, I gradually narrowed this to autistic adults and independent international travel, and then more specifically to autistic adults travelling independently through airports.

This narrowing was important because it gave me a much clearer environment to investigate. Airports contain many of the things that were beginning to emerge within the research: sensory intensity, unfamiliar processes, time pressure, crowds, communication demands and unpredictability.

4. Discovering how much support already exists

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The question changed from “what is missing?” to “why does it still break down?”

My first major research stage looked at the barriers autistic passengers experience and what airports already provide. I found Hidden Disabilities Sunflower schemes, assistance services, sensory and quiet spaces, Social Stories, maps, familiarisation programmes, staff support and accessibility information.

Initially, I was looking for something that airports simply were not doing. Instead, I realised that a surprising amount of support already exists and people are still experiencing significant difficulties. So, where does the passenger experience break down despite all of these existing interventions?

5. Rethinking independence

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Support does not automatically reduce independence

My research into what autistic adults actually want from travel began to challenge the way I was using the word “independent”. Independence could easily be interpreted as travelling without asking anybody for help. However, both my secondary and primary research suggested something much more complicated.

Autistic adults repeatedly valued choice, autonomy and control over the support they receive. Support can actually enable somebody to remain independent if they are able to decide when, how and whether they use it. One of the clearest ideas to emerge from this stage was Support is not the opposite of independence.

6. Different people require different levels of support

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One solution. Different levels of need.

Another pattern became increasingly difficult to ignore. Autistic people do not all experience environments in the same way and they do not all require the same type or amount of support. Support needs can also change according to circumstances.

I kept thinking back to taking my sister to an autism-friendly cinema screening. It was supposed to make the experience easier, but she actually found it harder than a normal screening because everyone in the room had different sensory and regulation needs. The extra noise and activity became overwhelming for her, and it made me realise that putting people with very different needs into one “accessible” space does not automatically make that space accessible for everyone.

This is where the phrase “One solution. Different levels of need.” started to feel important to me. It is deliberately simple, but it captures a problem that seems to run throughout the project: airport accessibility often provides a shared intervention to a group of people whose actual needs can be extremely different.

7. Hearing directly from autistic travellers

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Four themes began to organise the problem

My primary research involved ten autistic adults, and after coding the responses I arrived at four final themes. Independence appeared strongly connected with control rather than simply doing everything alone. Unpredictable events could suddenly increase somebody’s support needs. Airport environments could make it much harder to self-regulate, while fragmented travel systems created additional difficulty for independent travellers.

This was an important shift because the project was no longer being shaped only by what the literature said or what I assumed might be difficult. The same ideas were appearing directly in autistic adults’ descriptions of their own travel experiences.

8. The app direction

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Useful for information, but was information really the whole problem?

For quite a long time, an app seemed like a logical design direction. Participants talked about wanting structured information, connected travel plans and somewhere that could guide them through their journey. I could imagine an app combining tickets, schedules, airport information, navigation and communication support. But as the research continued, something about this started to feel incomplete.

An app could potentially tell somebody what is happening, but the difficult moment was not always caused by somebody lacking information. A traveller could know exactly where they were supposed to go and still be overwhelmed by noise, crowds, uncertainty or sensory overload.

If the problem is missing information, an app could be an appropriate solution. If the problem is in-the-moment sensory or emotional regulation, information alone may not be enough.

9. Preparation → its limitations → regulation

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Could better preparation prevent the difficult moment?

I became interested in whether better preparation could make airport travel easier for autistic adults, looking at Social Stories, airport maps, familiarisation programmes, videos and virtual tours, including Gold Coast Airport’s 360-degree tour. For a while, I was particularly interested in whether difficult stages such as security could be rehearsed in advance. The more I researched this, though, the more obvious the limitation became: familiarisation can show someone what usually happens, but it cannot predict the actual queue, crowd, gate change, delay, things they might encounter on the day.

This shifted my thinking away from only preparing someone for the expected journey and towards supporting them when the journey stops going to plan, especially as my primary research showed how much harder travel can become when timelines change or delays happen outside someone’s control. My question therefore began to shift towards: what support could help an autistic traveller regulate and continue when something unexpected happens?

12. Remembering an experience with my sister

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When an “accessible” environment was actually harder

At this point I kept returning to an experience I had had with my sister at an autism-friendly cinema screening. The environment had been deliberately adjusted to make it more accessible for autistic people, but my sister actually found it more difficult than a standard screening.

There were people in the room with very different needs and ways of regulating themselves. Behaviours or sounds that may have helped one person could become additional sensory input for somebody else.

This is my personal reflection rather than research evidence, but it made me question the assumption that putting people with different sensory needs into one specially designated environment automatically makes that environment accessible.

13. Then my primary research echoed the same problem

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“The sunflower lounges are often still quite open and loud…”

One participant said: “The sunflower lounges are often still quite open and loud and not tailored to autistic people/sensory needs.”

This was one of the strongest moments in the project for me because it connected directly with something I had already been questioning through my own experience. It challenged a very simple assumption: Sensory room = sensory problem solved. A room may remove somebody from the main terminal without necessarily providing the individual sensory environment that person actually needs.

14. Changi made the question more complicated

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Even a good shared sensory space is still shared

Singapore Changi’s Terminal 2 Calm Room stood out because it is considerably more sophisticated than a basic quiet room. It includes multiple zones and different sensory environments. But instead of simply seeing Changi as an example to copy, it made me ask a more difficult question: How much individual control can any shared sensory environment realistically provide when the people using it may have completely different sensory requirements?

This was the point where personalisation began to feel much more important.

15. Moving away from “what technology should I use?”

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Looking instead at what the technology needs to achieve

My research into technology and autism helped me stop thinking about technology as a solution in itself. The useful part of the research was identifying particular qualities certain technologies could offer, including predictability, repetition, adjustable stimuli, control, customisation and individual pacing.

16. Discovering that an environment could adapt to the individual

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A major technological turning point

One of the most important papers I found explored an adaptive VR system using physiological information such as heart-rate signals to change elements of a virtual environment. The work is an emerging technological precedent rather than proof of an effective clinical system, but the principle behind it was extremely important for my project.

Until this point I had been thinking about personalisation largely as something somebody manually selected.

This research showed me that an environment itself could potentially respond to the individual.

That immediately connected with the problem I was already seeing in shared accessibility spaces.

Instead of asking one environment to regulate everybody, could one system create different environments for different people?

17. Realising why VR might actually offer something different

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Not VR because it is exciting — VR because it can alter the immediate sensory experience

Further research into immersive technology began to show qualities that an ordinary information app could not easily provide. VR could potentially offer visual isolation, spatial audio, adjustable sensory environments, individual pacing, biofeedback and personally controlled immersive spaces.

This was the point where VR began to feel relevant for a specific reason. It was no longer: “I want to make a VR project.” It was “There may be something about immersive technology that responds specifically to the problem I am uncovering.”

18. The regulation systematic review

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Evidence that this was more than a speculative idea

The 2026 systematic review examining VR for sensory and emotional regulation in autism became one of the strongest papers in this new strand. It reviewed thirteen studies and found promising short-term findings around anxiety, emotional lability and sensory hypersensitivity, while also highlighting personalisation, repetition, immersive exposure and physiological biofeedback. Only three of the included studies primarily focused on autistic adults, meaning the adult evidence base is still relatively limited.

This gave much stronger academic support to something that had previously been an emerging design thought.

19. Evenness and the virtual sensory room

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A direct connection with the problem I had already identified

Evenness was particularly significant because it transformed a traditional physical sensory room into a virtual sensory environment. The study included autistic adults and reported reduced anxiety as the most common benefit. hat created a very direct connection with my existing research.

I had already identified a potential weakness in shared physical sensory spaces. Evenness demonstrated that an individually experienced sensory environment inside VR already had a research precedent.

This did not prove that VR would work in an airport, but it made the idea considerably less speculative.

20. Biofeedback and personalisation

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Moving from a fixed environment toward a responsive one

Other research developed this idea further. DEEP, for example, uses breathing as part of the virtual environment, demonstrating how physiological self-regulation can become connected with what the environment itself does.

Together with the adaptive VR research, this made me think much more seriously about the difference between designing one predetermined calming environment and designing something that could potentially respond to the individual.

That brings me back again to the same pattern:

One solution. Different levels of need.

Mini thread

Personal experience → autistic lived experience → existing airport support → independence and control → unpredictability → limits of preparation → regulation → shared sensory spaces → individual need → personalisation → adaptive technology → immersive regulation → live airport support → possible design gap.