Interpersonal expression in the special educational needs classroom: An experience-centred design case study

Abstract

This paper describes our Experience-Centered Design (ECD) inquiry into the current and potential role of digital photography to support interpersonal expression in a class of children (aged 11-15 years) at a mixed special education needs school. Presented as a case study, we describe five classroom-based creative workshops that engaged pupils with a broad range of complex special needs, and classroom staff.From these workshops, we generated a set of qualitative considerations for the design of digital photographic tools to support interpersonal expression in this setting. Additionally, we present the evaluation of a photo-sorting system we developed in response to our workshop findings and evaluated in the school over a period of 12 months. Our case study demonstrates how an ECD approach can guide a creative interaction design process in a special education needs setting, supporting interaction designers in empathising and responding pragmatically to the complex and dynamic interactions at play between the stakeholders. We further discuss design research approaches to user groups in such settings, and consolidate our insights about conducting research through design for social inclusion. KeywordsSpecial educational needs; digital photography; experience-centred design; child-computer interaction; universal design; inclusive design literatures [1,13,14,19,21,22]. The SEND classroom arguably poses particular design challenges relating to the complex needs of pupils as well as the resources and strategies that teaching staff members use to support them, and the practical constraints necessarily imposed by the SEND school as an institution. Also, as we emphasise herein, it is important to ensure that pupils and staff can contribute to the research and design process, both to support their self-advocacy as stakeholders and ensure that any subsequent designs are effective and responsive to the setting and population for which they are intended.Our case study sought to explore this challenging design space. Over the course of five 'Creative Photography' workshops, our research team employed an Experience-Centred Design (ECD) [37] approach to understand how photographic tools may be developed to support and enhance interpersonal expression between pupils and staff in a SEND classroom. In this paper, we report the qualitative findings of this study, demonstrating in the process how our ECD method was efficaciously put into practice to develop a novel 'Photo-sorting System' for use in a SEND school. We further report on our evaluation of this prototype to empirically ground our research understanding and design insights. A key proposed contribution of interest to the child-computer interaction research community is the account of our tacit understanding, as a design research team, of the SEND setting, guided by ECD. Furthermore, our case study contributes a set of wider considerations for interaction designers interested in developing photographic tools for SEND classrooms and related learning contexts. BACKGROUNDBefore de...