Cara Wilson
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Expressing one's thoughts and feelings is a fundamental human need - the basis for communication and social interaction. We ask, how do minimally-verbal children on the autism spectrum express themselves? How can we better recognise instances of self-expression? And how might technologies support and encourage self-expression? To address these questions, we undertook co-design research at an autism-specific primary school with 20 children over one school year. This paper contributes six Modalities of Self-Expression, through which children self-express and convey their design insights. Each modality of self-expression can occur across two different dimensions (socio-expressive and auto-expressive) and can be of a fundamental or an integrative nature. Further, we contribute the design trajectory of a tangible ball prototype, the ExpressiBall, which - through voice, sounds, lights, and motion sensors - explores how tangible technologies can support this range of expressive modalities. Finally, we discuss the concept of Self-Expression by Design.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376171
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)