Autistic Joy Against the Machine: Reimagining Financial Technology

As banking moves online, access to money increasingly depends on systems people may not have chosen and cannot easily change. Or does it?

Drawing on interviews with 20 autistic adults in the UK, this talk explores how participants demonstrated agency, expertise and creativity in designing their own money management systems: They assembled accounts, spreadsheets, notebooks, reminders, rules, colour coding and carefully chosen friction into personal financial systems, finding community support and cultivating autistic joy.

Through a lens of neuroqueer-technoscience, this talk treats autistic adults as makers who expose shortcomings of current financial technologies. By treating these practices as acts of design rather than simply coping strategies, the talk asks what financial technologies could become if they were shaped by autistic lived experience.

About the speaker:

Helena Lyhme is a PhD researcher at the Centre for HCI Design at City St George’s, University of London. Her research explores how autistic adults experience and reshape financial technologies, using participatory design to imagine more inclusive alternatives. With a background spanning social anthropology, computer science, STS and the IT industry, she is interested in creating technology that is responsible, humane and attentive to its wider social consequences.