The project Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism (acronym PIUMA) aims to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move and live within cities by means of a new digital service that provides interactive personalized maps. ASD is marked by a tendency of withdrawal from social relationships, is characterized by a reduced capacity for extracting a Gestalt from a collection of details,
and implies the need of finding reassurance in repetitious routines, making hard to manage unexpected events. These characteristics entail peculiar spatial representation modalities and the need of tailored supports for orientation and movements in the urban environment. The project aims to provide such support especially to adult individuals with medium or high functioning autism, or with Asperger’s Syndrome (now categorized as a form of ASD), since an orientation support for such people could highly impact on their autonomy, making the transition from a state of (partial) dependency to a state of autonomy.
