From Autonomy to Sovereignty - A New Telos for Socially Assistive Technology

This paper argues that socially assistive technology should shift its goal from fostering independence to achieving "relational sovereignty," a framework that empowers disabled individuals to choose between independence and interdependence by integrating self-determination theory, symbolic interactionism, and crip technoscience into a new design matrix and set of interventions.

The Gist

Here is an explanation of the paper "From Autonomy to Sovereignty," translated into simple language with creative analogies.

The Big Problem: The "Do It Alone" Trap

Imagine you are trying to build a house. For decades, the architects (assistive technology designers) have had one golden rule: "The goal is to build a house where the owner never needs to ask for help."

They call this Independence. If you can open your own door, cook your own meal, or cross the street without a guide, you are "successful."

But the authors of this paper say: "Wait a minute. That's not how life actually works."

Disabled people often tell researchers: "I don't just want to do things alone. Sometimes I want help. Sometimes I want to work with a team. Sometimes I want to lean on my community."

The current system creates a weird tension:

• If you ask for help, you feel like a "burden" or "dependent."
• If you force yourself to do it alone, you might feel isolated or exhausted.

The paper argues that the field is stuck on the wrong question. They've been asking: "Can they do it?" (Can they open the door alone?).

The paper says we need to start asking: "Do they get to decide?" (Do they get to choose whether to open the door alone, with a friend, or with a robot?).

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The Solution: From "Autonomy" to "Sovereignty"

To fix this, the authors introduce a new concept called Relational Sovereignty.

Think of it like this:

• Autonomy is like having a key to your own house. It means you can lock the door and be alone if you want.
• Sovereignty is like being the King or Queen of your own kingdom. It doesn't just mean you can be alone; it means you make the laws.

As a Sovereign, you have the power to say:

• "Today, I want to cook alone."
• "Today, I want my friend to help me cook because we like to chat."
• "Today, I want to order a robot to cook, but I want to set the menu."

Sovereignty isn't about who does the work; it's about who sets the rules for how the work gets done.

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The Four "States of Being" (The Matrix)

The authors created a 2x2 grid (a matrix) to explain how people actually feel. Imagine a map with four quadrants:

1. Conditional Independence (The "Abandoned" Zone)

• What it looks like: You are alone, but only because the system forced you to be.
• The Analogy: You are in a room with a locked door. You have a key (the technology), but the battery just died, and no one is there to help you fix it. You are technically "independent" (no one is touching you), but you are actually stuck and helpless.
• The Feeling: Isolation. "I'm supposed to do this alone, but the tools aren't working, and no one is listening."

2. Conditional Interdependence (The "Coerced" Zone)

• What it looks like: You are getting help, but you have no say in how it happens.
• The Analogy: You are in a car with a driver. They are driving you where they want to go, at the speed they want to go. You can't tell them to stop, change the radio, or take a different route. You are being "driven," but you aren't the boss.
• The Feeling: Powerlessness. "I'm getting help, but I have to follow their rules, not mine."

3. Recognized Independence (The "Chosen Solo" Zone)

• What it looks like: You choose to do it alone, and the world supports that choice.
• The Analogy: You decide to go for a solo hike. You have a map, a phone, and a friend on standby who knows your route. If you get stuck, help is there, but you aren't forced to take it. You chose the path.
• The Feeling: Empowerment. "I am doing this alone because I want to, and I know I have backup if I need it."

4. Recognized Interdependence (The "Chosen Team" Zone)

• What it looks like: You choose to work with others, and the group respects your rules.
• The Analogy: You are playing a band. You and your friends are making music together. You decide the tempo, the genre, and who plays the solo. If someone tries to play too loud or off-key, the group respects your lead to fix it.
• The Feeling: Belonging and Agency. "We are doing this together, and we are doing it my way."

The Goal: The paper says we shouldn't try to move everyone to the top-left (Independence). Instead, we should try to move everyone to the Right Side (Recognized Sovereignty), whether they choose to be alone or with others.

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How Do We Build This? (The Design Fixes)

The authors suggest four ways to change how we design technology:

1. Stop "Fixing" People, Start Listening:
   Instead of asking, "How do we make this person walk like a normal person?" ask, "What does this person want to achieve today?" Maybe they want to rest. Maybe they want to move slowly. The technology should support their goal, not a doctor's goal.

2. Ask the Right Questions:
   Designers should stop asking, "Is this tool efficient?" and start asking, "Who gets to decide when this tool is used?" "Who gets to change the settings?" "Who gets to say 'no'?"

3. Build "Lego" Systems, Not "Black Boxes":
   Don't build one giant, unchangeable machine. Build small, modular pieces (like Legos) that users can snap together, take apart, or rearrange.

   • Example: A video call app shouldn't just force everyone to speak in order. It should let the user add a "I'm not done talking" button, or a "mute everyone else" button, so they control the flow of the conversation.

4. Make Power Visible:
   Right now, technology hides who is in charge. Is it the insurance company? The algorithm? The doctor?
   The paper wants designers to make the "rules" visible. Show the user: "This button is controlled by the insurance company. This button is controlled by you." Give the user the power to change the rules.

The Bottom Line

For a long time, we thought the best assistive technology was the kind that made you invisible and independent.

This paper says: No. The best assistive technology is the kind that makes you the Boss.

It doesn't matter if you are alone or with a crowd. What matters is that you get to decide which one you are, and that the world respects your decision. That is Sovereignty.

Technical Summary

Here is a detailed technical summary of the paper "From Autonomy to Sovereignty — A New Telos for Socially Assistive Technology."

1. Problem Statement

Social accessibility research and Assistive Technology (AT) development have long been dominated by a paradigm of functional independence. Historically, success in AT is measured by a user's ability to complete tasks without relying on others. However, this "independence telos" (ultimate goal) creates a persistent tension:

• The Reality: Disabled people's lived experiences often reveal a preference for interdependence (chosen reliance on others or systems) rather than isolation.
• The Gap: Current frameworks struggle to distinguish between empowering interdependence (chosen support) and coercive dependence (paternalism or forced reliance).
• The Core Issue: The field conflates autonomy (the psychological capacity for volition/choice) with independence (the physical state of acting alone). This conflation leads to designs that may technically enable a user to act alone but strip them of the agency to choose how they relate to the world, often resulting in isolation or vulnerability to external gatekeeping.

2. Methodology

The authors employed a constructive grounded analysis combined with theoretical triangulation to investigate the independence-interdependence dynamic.

• Corpus Construction:
  • Scope: 90 theoretically rich papers selected from a systematic search of 605 publications across premier HCI venues (ACM and IEEE) from 2011 to 2025.
  • Selection Criteria: Papers were chosen for their explicit engagement with social dimensions (identity, stigma, relational dynamics) and interpretive methodologies (ethnography, participatory design, theory-building). Purely algorithmic or functional optimization papers were excluded.
• Analytical Process:
  • Phase 1 (Inductive Coding): The authors performed open coding on the 90 papers, extracting 362 discrete concepts and synthesizing them into 46 codes and 6 overarching themes (e.g., Identity Sovereignty, Access Ecologies, Algorithmic Disability Encounters).
  • Phase 2 (Theoretical Triangulation): To interpret the recurring "Independence-Interdependence Complex" (the tension where users need both control and support), the authors applied three distinct theoretical lenses:
    1. The Self: Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to analyze psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness).
    2. The Interaction: Symbolic Interactionism (SI) to analyze how meaning, stigma, and roles are negotiated in social encounters.
    3. The Body: Posthumanism and Crip Technoscience to analyze how bodies are configured by technology and who governs the terms of engagement.
  • Phase 3 (Synthesis): The authors identified productive tensions between these lenses to derive a new conceptual framework.

3. Key Contributions

A. Conceptual Shift: From Autonomy to Relational Sovereignty

The paper proposes Relational Sovereignty as a new telos (goal) for AT.

• Definition: The recognized power of a disabled person to choose their relational mode (independence vs. interdependence) and to define the terms (goals, boundaries, pacing) under which those relationships operate.
• Distinction:
  • Autonomy is often misused to mean "doing it alone."
  • Sovereignty means "having the authority to decide whether to do it alone or with help, and on what terms."
• Telic Sovereignty: Extends this concept to the ends of action—the authority to define what "success" looks like (e.g., rest vs. productivity) rather than accepting external metrics.

B. The Relational Sovereignty Matrix

The authors introduce a 2x2 analytical framework (Figure 5) to categorize user experiences based on two orthogonal axes:

1. Relational Mode: Independence $\leftrightarrow$ Interdependence.
2. Sovereignty: Conditional (terms set by others) $\leftrightarrow$ Recognized (terms set/recognized by the user).

This matrix generates four distinct states:

1. Conditional Independence: "Abandonment." The user is alone, but supports are unreliable, or platforms enforce isolation (e.g., a user forced to use voice-only interfaces when they prefer text).
2. Conditional Interdependence: "Coercion." The user relies on others, but the terms are dictated by external gatekeepers (e.g., insurance mandates, rigid clinical protocols).
3. Recognized Independence: "Willed Solitude." The user chooses to act alone, backed by systems that respect their pacing and boundaries (e.g., rest spaces, reversible solitude).
4. Recognized Interdependence: "Chosen Care." The user collaborates with others on terms they co-define (e.g., collective access, co-designed communication protocols).

Crucial Insight: Dependence is not a relational mode but a sovereignty condition. The goal of design is not to move users from the bottom (interdependence) to the top (independence), but from the left (conditional) to the right (recognized).

C. Design Interventions

The paper outlines four specific interventions to operationalize this shift:

1. Sovereignty-Centered SDT: Reframing Self-Determination Theory to prioritize "autonomy-supportive interdependence" and user-defined competence over normative benchmarks.
2. Generative Design Questions: A set of reflective questions for designers regarding goals, identity, distributed support, and power (e.g., "How might systems honor users' diverse definitions of success?").
3. Sovereign Technical Primitives: Moving away from "black box" AT systems toward modular, interoperable components that users can assemble, reconfigure, and iterate upon (e.g., customizable disclosure badges, "I'm not done" indicators).
4. Explicit Power Consideration: Treating power distribution as a design material. Designers must map decision points to reveal where users hold agency and where structural constraints exist, ensuring recourse when system definitions clash with user reality.

4. Key Results & Findings

• The Instability of Autonomy: The corpus revealed that "independence" is often a myth that obscures reliance on infrastructure. When AT enforces independence against a user's preference for collaboration, it thwarts the psychological need for relatedness (SDT), paradoxically reducing true autonomy.
• Ambivalence of Interdependence: Interdependence can be empowering (community building) or coercive (paternalism). The difference lies entirely in who sets the terms.
• Power Dynamics: The most critical factor in user experience is not how they interact, but who governs the interaction.
  • Example: In video conferencing, "mutes" (users who don't speak) face isolation not because they are alone, but because platform defaults privilege spoken interaction (Conditional Independence).
  • Example: In AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication), users who can switch devices and modalities fluidly demonstrate sovereignty, whereas those locked into a single device by insurance or policy experience conditional interdependence.
• Telic Shift: Success is shifting from "productivity/repair" to "user-defined value/expression." Systems that allow for "crip time" (rest, pacing) and user-defined competence are essential for sovereignty.

5. Significance

• Theoretical Advancement: The paper resolves the long-standing theoretical tension between independence and interdependence in HCI by introducing a third dimension: Power/Governance. It bridges the gap between psychological models (SDT), social interaction models (SI), and critical disability studies (Crip Technoscience).
• Paradigm Shift: It challenges the "functional telos" of AT. The primary question for designers shifts from "Can they do it?" (functional capability) to "Do they get to decide?" (sovereign authority).
• Practical Impact: The Relational Sovereignty Matrix provides a concrete tool for researchers and designers to audit existing systems and prototype new ones. It moves the field toward designs that support collective access, modular adaptability, and user-defined success metrics.
• Ethical Implication: By centering sovereignty, the paper advocates for a move away from paternalistic "care" toward self-determination, ensuring that disabled people are not merely accommodated within existing systems but are the architects of the terms under which they engage with technology.