Empowering Expression for Users with Aphasia through Constrained Creativity

Abstract

Creative activities allow people to express themselves in rich, nuanced ways. However, being creative does not always come easily. For example, people with speech and language impairments, such as aphasia, face challenges in creative activities that involve language. In this paper, we explore the concept of constrained creativity as a way of addressing this challenge and enabling creative writing. We report an app, MakeWrite, that supports the constrained creation of digital texts through automated redaction. The app was co-designed with and for people with aphasia and was subsequently explored in a workshop with a group of people with aphasia. Participants were not only successful in crafting novel language, but, importantly, self-reported that the app was crucial in enabling them to do so. We refect on the potential of technology-supported constrained creativity as a means of empowering expression amongst users with diverse needs.

Comic Spin: A Comic Creation Tool Enabling Self-expression for People with Aphasia

“…Our recent work has begun to consider how digital tools can support people with aphasia in being creative. We have designed CreaTable [32], a tangible platform for people with aphasia to create and curate multimedia digital content, and MakeWrite [31], an app that supports people with aphasia in creative writing. We have also explored how people with aphasia might build upon their skills in physical visual art (e.g.…”

“…As mentioned above, we have applied the concept of constrained creativity to creativity tools for people with aphasia. The MakeWrite [31] app supports people with mild/moderate aphasia in creative writing by 'erasing' pre-existing texts to ofer a limited set of words that the user can 'arrange' to create something new. CreaTable [32] similarly uses the concept by ofering the user a limited set of tangible multimedia objects that can be arranged on a tabletop computer and then played in a repeating loop, thus supporting people with more severe aphasia in multimedia content creation.…”

“…We set out to explore how the idea of computationally-supported constrained creativity, irst used in [31] as an approach to designing creative technology for people with aphasia, could be applied to a comic creation tool. Within this overarching paradigm, we followed a Design Thinking [14] process because of its focus on empathy and creative ideation.…”

“…The use of proxies has been shown to be efective in designing for people with aphasia [8] when access to users is limited, as was the case in the initial design of Comic Spin. Two researchers with expertise in human-computer interaction and speech and language therapy were interviewed to learn about their experience designing technologies with and for people with aphasia, including the MakeWrite and CreaTable tools [31,32]. These two researchers (AR and TN), who are also authors of this paper, were not otherwise involved in the initial design and development of Comic Spin, but led the testing reported in section 4.4 and were involved in the studies described in sections 5 and 6.…”

“…The design of Comic Spin drew on the concept of constrained creativity applied previously in other work on other creative tools for people with aphasia. These constrained creativity tools ofer limited choices and structured processes to enable people with aphasia to engage in creative writing [31] and in the creation of rich multimedia content [32].…”