One ideal of Participatory Design (PD) is active involvement by all stakeholders as co-designers. However, when PD is applied to real projects, certain compromises are unavoidable, no matter what stakeholders are involved. With this paper we want to shed light on some of the challenges in implementing "true" PD in the case of designing with children, in particular children with severe disabilities. We do this work to better understand challenges in an ongoing project, RHYME, and by doing so we hope to provide insight and inspiration for others.
There are many different ways a robot can move in Human-Robot Interaction. One way is to use techniques from film animation to instruct the robot to move. This article is a systematic literature review of human-robot trials, pilots, and evaluations that have applied techniques from animation to move a robot. Through 27 articles, we find that animation techniques improves individual's interaction with robots, improving individual's perception of qualities of a robot, understanding what a robot intends to do, and showing the robot's state, or possible emotion. Animation techniques also help people relate to robots that do not resemble a human or robot. The studies in the articles show further areas for research, such as applying animation principles in other types of robots and situations, combining animation techniques with other modalities, and testing robots moving with animation techniques over the long term.
This paper address Universal Design and Tangible Interaction through the concept of familiarity. Co-creative tangibles are designed and evaluated in the RHYME project, where the goal is to improve health and well being for children with severe disabilities through music and physical interaction. The main contribution of this paper is to make sense of Universal Design of cocreative tangibles through the concept of familiarity. Familiarity is described by engagement, understanding and an intimate or close relationship between the user and the technology. We propose familiarity as a concept for understanding and developing Tangible Interaction solutions for all.
Smart homes contain many useful appliances that can help individuals live independently for longer. A problem with current smart homes prototypes is that each device often has its own remote control or control unit. These control units are often manufactured by different suppliers with totally different and inconsistent user interfaces. This is confusing for most individuals and become a huge barrier for individuals with reduced cognitive function. This paper thus introduces a conceptual sketch of a universal and ubiquitous control wheel, termed UbiWheel that is designed to control most appliances in the home. The user simply moves the controller to the proximity of the device be controlled and adjust parameters by simply twisting the wheel, thereby preventing inactivity as the user need to move around the home. Several cases are explored herein.
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