Covid19 has heightened physical and mental challenges for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). One of the main difficulties that parents of children with ASD faced during the pandemic was to plan and structure a daily routine for their kids. The disruption of the routine, together with the difficulty of combining work and the care of children has resulted in behavioral problems and stress, and anxiety for children and their parents. For these reasons, the main goal of this work was to develop an adaptive robot that helps children with autism to plan and self-manage their day, allowing children to become more independent. While most interactive tools for children with ASD are meant for professional use in therapy, Pepe robot is developed as a support tool for these children to use along the way, with adaptability, agencies, senses, and playfulness at the core of the design. By collecting information from the performance of the kid, it is able to adapt its behavior to the child ' s (and parent ' s) needs and desires, and therefore progress with the child. Building upon the principles of Positive Behavioral Support, emotional crises are prevented by embracing a long-run negotiation process, by which the child gets gradually closer to the end goal of self-autonomy. Intended to be adapted to the accentuated needs of these children, the robot combines traditional and computational elements to make the most out of the experience. This project included in-depth user research together with parents and experts, an interdisciplinary design approach, and a prototyping phase in which a prototype was tested with children with ASD.

This paper presents restraints - directly imposed restrictions on players' bodily movements, as a mechanic for bodily play in HCI. While this is a familiar mechanic in non-digital movement-based games, its potential in designing bodily play experiences in HCI has been scarcely explored. Three types of restraints observed in non-digital movement-based games, are explored here: fixating body parts, excluding body parts and depriving/manipulating bodily senses. Then, we investigate the experiential dynamics of restraints as a bodily play mechanic bridging a phenomenological perspective on bodily movement with theories on play. These investigations form the theoretical framework for the subsequent analysis of five digital body game examples. Building on this analysis and theoretical framework, we formulate five design strategies for implementing restraints as a mechanic for bodily play in HCI. We propose restraints as a generative resource for researchers and designers interested in understanding and designing bodily play experiences in HCI.  

A re-materialisation of the visual in terms of viscosity is provided by this article. The argument is grounded in practical design processes from on-going research in the integration of archival material into AR/MR environments (Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality). This is an approach to emergent materiality not because new materials are invented but because existing visual, digital and traditional craft materials are re-configured. The archival material we use for this project is visual rather than textual, and it portrays moving bodies. The re-materialisation happens through experimentation with materials, affect and perception. Visual materialities, in this case viscosity, rely on a phenomenological approach to vision whereby design materials cannot be separated from the active perception of the designers, the participants and even the materials themselves. This article outlines the final iteration of the AffeXity project where glass was used as a design material to enhance viscous materiality. Viscosity is experienced as depth, layers, stickiness, reflections, motion, and an affective quality of dreaminess or the passage of time.

This paper is based on outcomes from SID (http://sid.desiign.org), a three-year project where twenty-four children with profound intellectual disabilities visited three MSE centres. SID's aim was to develop and demonstrate the potentials of interactive design in and for MSE practices together with the children and the pedagogical staff. In the project, we developed artefacts that were designed to be part of and mediate the explorations rather than to become end products. The designs were explored by the children at the MSE centres and further developed depending on what the children did and what seemed relevant to them. There are few documented examples in the literature where children with profound developmental disabilities are involved as active participants in design activities. We present and discuss the participants' roles in SID's research and development process based on experiences and material from the project, with a hope that this paper can serve as an example of what such a development process might look like and as inspiration for future initiatives.

The notion of design research entails research where design practice forms part of the knowledge production. Based on our characterization of the nature of design, we propose to conceptualize this kind of research as programmatic design research. Two ongoing PhD projects in interaction design are presented as examples of programmatic research processes, highlighting issues to do with the virtues and qualities of the processes, the interplay of optics and engagements in a hermeneutical dynamic, and the production of takeaways for the academic community.

We present an approach and examples of design artefacts from on-going work on how children with profound disabilities can participate in formative design processes. It involves the pedagogical use of digitally interactive multisensory environments. Rather than mimic participatory design from more symmetrical contexts, we address potentials in the situation at hand as well as the key issues ofvoice by proxy and thinking in deficits. Our design artefacts draw on the rich heritage of tangible design experiments cherishing the generative qualities embodied in human actions. The inspiring actions of the children take centre stage in cross disciplinary design efforts by means of a) long term involvement, where b) designerly understandings of qualities emerge through ‘questioning’ by series of truly interactive yet deliberately basic tangible design artefacts, c) staging extensive video coverage of the children’s action as the pivotal point of ideation, and d) an open mind-set thinking in potentials and working by wonderings rather than fixed judgments