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Providing leisure to people with dementia is a serious challenge, for health care professionals and designers and engineers of products used for activity sessions. This article describes the design process of ''the Chitchatters,'' a leisure game for a group of people with dementia in day care centers. The game aims to stimulate social interaction among people with dementia. Different stakeholders, such as older adults with dementia, their relatives and care professionals were involved in the design process via qualitative research methods as participant observation and the use of probes. These methods were applied to give the design team insight into the experiential world of people with dementia. This article presents how design insights from practice and literature can be translated into a real design for a leisure product for group use by older people with dementia, and shows designers how to work with, and design for, special groups.

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Contextmapping techniques have been tried and tuned for participants in Western cultures and are known to provide inspiration in the conceptual phase of design. Because these techniques rely heavily on activities such as expressing feelings in public and discussing in groups, they are less attuned to participants from more 'reserved' cultures, e.g. East Asia. In this project we adapted the techniques for use with East Asian participants. Our findings indicate that, when conducted in appropriate forms, contextmapping techniques can work in East Asia. However, more than in the West, a welldemarcated script is needed. By 'script' we mean a construct that frames the roles of the participants and the researcher, and provides a clear stage on which the participant plays the role of 'expert of his experience' and outside of which he/she is free from the burden of expressing him-or herself. The importance of a script in East Asia led us to review the value of scripting and staging as design parameter for the techniques in general.

This paper presents guidelines for designers to help them consider what children with autism value in interactions with their environment. The guidelines were developed during the LINKX project in order to design a language learning toy for these children and are based on literature study, expert interviews, generative techniques, and prototype testing with users. We present both the theoretical or practical background of each guideline together with a discussion how the guideline was evident in the prototype of LINKX. Testing the prototype in the real world helped us to shape the prototype and the guidelines. This paper aims to share our guidelines with the design research community, so that others can use them as steppingstones in their work.