This paper reports on a co-design method that involves subjects with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) in the design of smart interactive experiences for themselves, i.e., aimed to enhance situations of their everyday life. Through a user-centered process that involved a sample of subjects with NDD and their therapists, we have identified a co-design toolkit that aims to favour reflection, by allowing subjects to feel engaged and empowered in solving concrete problems.
Participatory Design (PD) has been adopted in the last years for designing products and applications
for people with NDD. The inclusion of subjects with NDD in the design process has impact not only on
the quality of the final products but also on educational goals for the participating group itself. Card
toolkits are often used in the generative phase of co-design methods to collaboratively build prototype
artefacts [
The idea and layout of the cards are based on the Tiles Ideation Toolkit [
Given the SNaP capability of facilitating reflection on needs and possible solutions, its focus on physical material (i.e., cards), and its regular scheme guiding the design activities, we wanted to assess in which measure the game could be adopted to empower subjects with NDD to reflect on their needs. We tried to engage them in the ideation of smart interactive experiences for themselves, i.e., able to support and enhance situations of their everyday life starting from the city park scenario. One of the main goal in education for people with disabilities is to give them as much autonomy as possible, even in travel and life outside their homes: we chose the urban park scenario in order to give them the chance to design an inclusive environment, where they feel comfortable. We thus conducted a workshop involving 4 subjects with NDD (see Table 1), followed by an interview with 2 therapists.
The workshop (see Figure 3) was conducted to favour the familiarization of the subjects with NDD
with the original game; the literature indeed considers familiarization an important element to
improve subjects’ contributions to the final design [
We interpreted these results as an indication of the subjects’ engagement and understanding of the design context. The subjects also commented on the game dynamics. They suggested to include tricks during the game to further engage the players (for example, traps or going back a number of positions). They appreciated a lot having missions, because they provide guidance through the game and set a goal. One subject suggested adding a new (super-)mission for helping the other game participants to conceive their new ideas. This is an indication that they grasped the collaborative spirit of the game, till the point to think about a specific role to encourage ideation by every participant.
Adopting the game to involve subjects with NDD in the design of digital devices for their everyday activities soon emerged as a benefit. There are some work in the literature (see for example [10]) highlighting that, in spite of the growing focus on assistive technologies for children with NDD, there is a lack of approaches addressing other age ranges in which technologies might help subjects gain diferent types of skills. During an interview (see Figure 4), the two therapists who participated to the workshop indeed emphasized the opportunity for the subjects to reflect on their needs and on possible solutions. Very often, therapies focus on getting subjects to become independent in everyday tasks, especially those to be accomplished outdoor. Experiences at the park represent activities that can favour subjects’ well-being and can encourage them to go outside. The therapists were therefore in favour of adopting the game in their therapies; they also suggested extensions (e.g., new cards) focusing on further activities, for example, reaching the grocery store, the pharmacy, the best friend’s house. Reflecting on how digital devices can support all these activities becomes a means to reflect on the related adversities. The therapists remarked that the physicality of cards was a strength from a psychological point of view, because CD subjects need to see and touch physical material to improve their understanding of the context they have to focus on. The therapists suggested us to introduce additional interactive, physical-digital elements to further help players understand how to combine diferent cards and what the concrete efect of using sensors and actuators is in their interactive experiences.
Thanks to the co-design approach this work focuses on, all participants had the chance to feel engaged and empowered in solving a concrete problem, i.e., the design of interactive park activities. On the other hand, they also played a crucial role in the design process of the method itself, as they gave very important feedback about the game. Therapists’ feedback was important as well, as they suggested that a concrete and tangible board could enhance the participants’ ability to think about diferent solutions. As shown in literature [11], people with NDD show some dificulties in abstraction, which could occur in a simple card game. These findings are coherent with other works [12] and suggest that tangibles could be very helpful for enhancing both learning and the creativity process. Our future work will concentrate on systematically assessing these benefits through the design and implementation of an interactive game board, to be used in combination with the original paper board, where the diferent sensors and actuators could be plugged in to see the efect of card combinations. We expect that spatial combination of tangibles can positively afect also participants’ collaboration [13]. Then we will organize further workshops with the same subjects to have a feedback on prototypes of the interactive board.