MM: The biggest challenge, as with most research is funding. This topic lies - where I believe much of the innovations of our future generations lie - at the intersection of many disciplines: namely built environment research, autism research, environmental research, education, special needs advocacy, accessible design, and inclusion. You would think this would multiply your chance to receive funding. Unfortunately more often than not, it actual divides your chance - at least in a country that has minimal state funds for national research as compared to the US. For example much of the funding for autism today is for medical research, which the project is not. Much of the funding for autism education is for curriculum development and therapy interventions - not for the built environment.
On a more specific front, and as ArchDaily has reported on before, this research is challenged with what most experimental research in the built environment is challenged with, particularly those dealing with behaviour- controlling for all variables and confounding factors. Unlike blind testing, the users and their teachers or parents know they are in an altered environment, and this may colour- positively or negatively- their reporting of results. It is very difficult to eliminate bias completely.
AD: What inspired you to take this approach towards architecture?
MM: Like many things necessity was the mother of invention. In 2002 I was asked to design the first educational centre for autism in Egypt: the Advance School for Developing Skills of Special Needs Children. This was a retrofit project of an existing residential building where the school was to be temporarily housed. I wrote an article in the National Autistic Society's magazine Communication in 2006 outlining the experience.
At the time I was in the first year of my PhD, weeks away from my final proposal review which I had been preparing for for over 18 months - on a completely different topic. Simultaneously, and as we began the design project, I naively searched mainstream design guidelines and accessibility codes, expecting to find a section on designing for autism. I had a rude awakening; there was virtually nothing. I made what I believe to be one of the best decisions of my career, supported tremendously by my wise and wonderful thesis advisor, Zakia Shafie (herself an architectural pioneer as one of the first female architects in Egypt and the first female chair of an architectural department in the middle east), and asked to change my thesis topic, effectively discarding 18 months of work and starting from scratch. She bravely agreed.
The work that was done for this new dissertation is summarized in several articles, most importantly in this IJAR article An Architecture for Autism which was the journal's most downloaded article in 2012. Since then I have continued to work on research to broaden and verify these initial findings, and to raise awareness about the subject.