Christopher Frauenberger

Designing Smart Objects with Autistic Children: Four Design Exposès

This paper describes the design work being conducted as part of the OutsideTheBox project. Within the time-frame of eight months, we engaged four children with autism in a participatory design process to develop their own smart object. We re-interpreted Future Workshops and Co-operative Inquiry to demonstrate that a) autistic children can lead processes with a deliberately open design brief and b) this leads us to explore design spaces that are un-imaginable for neuro-typical, adult designers. To capture these four design cases, we have developed Design Exposes, a concept that is inspired by annotated portfolios and Actor-Network Theory. We apply this concept to our cases and present four exposes that subsequently allow us to draw out intermediate-level design knowledge about co-creating technology with autistic children. We close by critically reflecting on the design processes as well as our concept of capturing them.

Disability and Technology: A Critical Realist Perspective

Assistive technology (AT) as a field explores the design, use and evaluation of computing technology that aims to benefit people with disabilities. The majority of the work consequently takes the functional needs of people with disabilities as starting point and matches those with technological opportunity spaces. With this paper, we argue that the underlying philosophical position implied in this approach can be seen as reductionist as the disabled experience is arguably richer and often more complex as can be projected from the functional limitations of people. Thinkers and activists in Disability Studies have conceptualised disability in various ways and more recently, critical realism was proposed as a philosophical position through which the many different facets of the disabled experience could be incorporated. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using a critical realist perspective to guide designers in developing technology for people with disabilities and thereby aim to contribute to the philosophical underpinnings of AT. After a brief review of historical conceptualisations of disability, we introduce the critical realist argument and discuss its appeal for understanding disability and the possible roles technology can have in this context. Subsequently, we aim to translate this philosophical and moral debate into a research agenda for AT and exemplify how it can be operationalised by presenting the OutsideTheBox project as a case study.

When Empathy Is Not Enough: Assessing the Experiences of Autistic Children with Technologies

Capturing and describing the multi-faceted experiences autistic children have with technologies provides a unique research challenge. Approaches based on pragmatist notions of experience, which mostly rely on empathy, are particularly limited if used alone. To address this we have developed an approach that combines Actor-Network Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on this approach, we discuss the experiences autistic children had with technologies resulting from the collaborative design process in the OutsideTheBox project. We construct a holistic picture of the experience by drawing on diverse data sources ranging from interviews to log-data, and most importantly, the first-hand perspective of autistic children. In four case studies, we demonstrate how this approach allowed us to develop unique individual and structural insights into the experiences of autistic children with technology.

Embodied Companion Technologies for Autistic Children

With few exceptions, technology for autistic children tends to be focused on the regulation of perceived deficits. With OutsideTheBox we focus on the strengths of the children as design partners and created in our first year four technological objects together with them. They all have common that they are embedded in the childrens lives and share some degree of embodied interaction. We present a case study along with four objects, two of them with wearable components, two of them focused at sharing experiences in an embodied mode. This opens up the argument not only for more design actually led by autistic children, but also for companion technologies that embody situatedness. Such technologies are then not driven by an outsiders perspective of what an autistic child needs, but rather are intrinsically valuable to them as a user.

Rethinking autism and technology

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

Blending Methods: Developing Participatory Design Sessions for Autistic Children

Over the past two years, we have engaged autistic children in a participatory design (PD) process to create their own, individual smart object. In this paper, we reflect on our methodological choices and how these came about. Describing the design process with one of our participants as a case, we show how we developed participatory activities by combining, blending, re-interpreting and adapting techniques and tools from a pool of methods on the basis of the characteristics of the child, our own skills as designers and the history and context of our collaboration. Reflecting on this practice retrospectively, we seek to make two contributions: firstly, we distill a repertoire of methodological building blocks which draw on our experience of co-designing with autistic children. Secondly, we present a visual tool that captures the process by which we combined, blended and interpreted these building blocks into coherent design activities with a view to provide systematic guidance for future work. While the work presented here is set within the context of designing with autistic children, we argue that the underlying approach can be applicable and useful in a wider co-design context.

Autism and Technology: Beyond Assistance & Intervention

Technologies designed for people with autism are often focused on their particular functional limitations. We argue that this ignores a rich design space in which technologies could play more meaningful and multi-faceted roles in the complex life-worlds of people with autism. This one-day workshop will explore how to go beyond technologies that narrowly focus on concepts of assistance or intervention. We specifically ask a) how autism is conceptualised as a disability and how this impacts on possible roles of technologies, b) how to unlock novel design spaces methodologically and c) how to evaluate the experiences of people with autism with technology. As an outcome, we will collaboratively develop a manifesto to draw attention to the gap we have identified and develop a research agenda to address it.

Empowering people with impairments: how participatory methods can inform the design of empowering artifacts

Participatory Design has developed methods that empower people with impairments to actively take part in the design process. Many designed artifacts for this target group likewise aim to empower their users in daily life. In this workshop, we share and relate best practices of both empowering methods and empowering designs. Participants are therefore invited to bring along cases of designing for- and with people with sensory-, cognitive- or social impairments. Our workshop consists of three parts: (1) Foregrounding empowering elements in PD methods using method stories, containing the backstory of a method put into practice; (2) Reflecting on technological artifacts, exploring the empowering qualities of person-artifact-context interaction; (3) constructing a critical synopsis of the various relationships between empowering products and - methods.

Critical Realist HCI

Against the backdrop of the current debate about HCIs relationship with science and its ways to produce and argue for knowledge, this paper seeks to develop a novel philosophical foundation that rests on the central ideas put forward in critical realism. While it affords many of the features of the post-modern theories that shaped modern HCI, critical realism avoids the danger of slipping into extreme relativism, in which knowledge construction becomes arbitrary and isolated in its context. Moreover, critical realism is inherently multi-faceted and provides a basis on which scientific enquiries of very different natures can be treated complementary rather than as competing with each other. This allows us to develop a non-reductionist view on interaction with technology that accommodates and potentially reconciles the variety of approaches, practices and stances that we see in current HCI.

Scaffolding the scaffolding: Supporting children's social-emotional learning at home

The development of strong social and emotional skills is central to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are being taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into everyday contexts. Traditional SEL programs have however had limited success in engaging parents, and we argue that technology might be able to help bridge this school-home divide. Through interviews with SEL experts we identified central design considerations for technology and SEL content: the reliance on experiential learning and the need to scaffold the parents in scaffolding the interaction for their children. This informed the design of a technology probe comprising a magnet card and online SEL activities, deployed in a school and via Mturk. The results provide a nuanced understanding of how technology-based interventions could bridge the school-home gap in real-world settings and support at-home reinforcement of childrens social-emotional skills.