Participatory design strategies to enhance the creative contribution of children with special needs

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness about the importance of involving children with special needs in the process of designing technology. Starting from this perspective, the paper presents the participatory design process carried out with children with autistic spectrum disorder for the design of a Kinect motionbased game aimed at fostering social initiation skills. By describing the strategies used for the design of the activities, we will suggest possible approaches aimed toward widening the space for contributions of children and including them at a more creative level. Within that, major emphasis will be dedicated to discussing the "empowering dimension" of participatory design activities as an instrument to enhance benefits both for design results and for the children themselves. Finally, the balance between structure and freedom in the design of the activities will be discussed.

Designing Movement-based Play With Young People Using Powered Wheelchairs

“…This is particularly important when working with audiences with special needs; for example, children or people with disabilities [20].Malinverni et al [20] outline the opportunity of PD as a means of empowering children with special needs, while Holone and Herstad [16] reflect upon challenges that result from differences in abilities among participants, e.g., the use of proxies in communication.…”

Identifying Objectives for a Learning Space Management System with Value-focused Thinking

“…In participatory design, the following statements are understood as guiding principles: participants from diverse Table 1: Methodological approaches to achieve participation and involvement (Kujala, 2003 (Sanders et al, 2010;Sanoff, 2007), participants have the right to influence technological decisions affecting their private and professional lives (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Ståhlbrost, 2008), and especially, participatory design is seen as appropriate in the context of special needs (Benton et al, 2014;Frauenberger et al, 2011;Guha et al, 2008;Malinverni et al, 2014). Thus, we have based our workshops on participatory design to adopt these principles and we have implemented value-focused thinking as a requirements elicitation technique.…”

Participatory Evaluation with Autistic Children

“…In recent years, an increasing number of projects have involved autistic children in participatory design (e.g., [36,17,1,34,26]). However, their participation in the evaluation phase has been nearly non-existent because it is deemed very difficult to elicit concrete feedback from autistic children [15].…”

“…One way to achieve this is by providing a narrative frame in a freely explorable space [34], such that children are guided in their interaction by a background story which they can adhere to in their interaction or not. Malinverni et al [33] also structured the evaluation activities of children, but left space for individually guided exploration of the technology being evaluated.…”