Exploring Diminished Reality for Attention Support: A Co-Design Study with Students with ADHD
Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS), 2026.
Overview
Diminished reality (DR) modifies or removes elements of the perceived environment. We explored its potential for attention support through diary studies, interviews, and speculative co-design with 15 university students with ADHD. Participants documented everyday distractions and imagined how their surroundings could change to better support their activities.
Participants described a persistent gap between intention and attention, alongside strategies for externalizing control that encountered limits in physical environments. Their designs focused on which properties of a stimulus they wanted to perceive or filter. They sometimes sought to preserve useful information or a sense of company while diminishing distracting details. Their accounts also revealed cases where reducing visibility could sustain or increase unwanted engagement.
We contribute an account of participants’ attentional challenges and DR design preferences, and propose Attentional Diminishment as a sensitizing concept for designing around attentional effects. The study grounds this perspective in participants’ experiences and speculative designs, providing a basis for subsequent prototype development and evaluation.