The master thesis by Linda Persson and Liza Arvidssons is finally published and availble for all. Linda and Liza, in cooperation with Touch AT!, have been working hard all through the spring with evaluation of TellMe in three different special education schools and in five different classes in the Gothenburg area. More information about the work and the app can be found here:

Liza Arvidsson, Linda Persson. Evaluation of TellMe, a three-way communication tool for the Special Education Context. Göteborg : Chalmers tekniska högskola, 2016. 134 s. Master thesis – Department of Applied Information Technology, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden; 2016:130, 2016. http://studentarbeten.chalmers.se/publication/242967-evaluation-of-tellme-a-three-way-communication-tool-for-the-special-education-context

This autumn, several of us in the Touch AT! project have been invited to give talks in different places. A few examples are Peter Börjesson who gave a talk on ”Utveckling av teknologi för och med barn i särskolan” at the VHETT-fair in Gothenburg, and Eva Eriksson talked about ”Participatory Design in Special Education” at Aarhus University at the Participatory Information Technology 2016 Symposium, see more here: http://pit.au.dk/pages/the-2016-fall-pit-symposium/

IDAC PhD student Peter Börjesson has a paper accepted for the Doctorial Consortium at PDC that will run in Aarhus in August this year. The paper is based on the field studies and participatory design workshops that he has made in the http://touch-at.se/ project, in special education schools for the last two years. The paper is titled: “Participatory Design with and for Children and Teachers in Special Education Schools”.
Further, we will run a workshop at the same conference titled: “The Clothes Line Approach to Notions in Participatory Design”. Here we invite researchers and practitioners to bring a plurality of perspectives and expertise related to the use of problematic notions in participatory design. How could a change of notions affect our perspective on participation and design? The aim of the full day workshop is to apply a clothesline approach in order to identify and sort, wash and tumble, some of the notions used in the community, and air them for better alternatives. We will do this by 1) critically identifying why certain notions are or have been problematic, 2) elaborating on them to raise awareness of their possible interpretations and implications in order to find alternatives that are usable across different Participatory Design (PD) settings. The outcome of the workshop is to contribute to elucidate how notions and their connotations frame participatory design practice.

It’s time for small update on what is happening in the http://touch-at.se/ project. This spring we are very busy evaluating the TellMe app in different special education schools around Gothenburg. One part of it is a Contact book between the home and the teachers, while the other is a Diary application where the children can post images and messages for their parents. Luckily, as a great helping hand, we have the two excellent master thesis students Linda Persson and Liza Arvidsson to help us out in the best possible manner. We can soon look forward to see the result of their hard work!
Moreover, our excellent programmer Markus Norén is about to wrap up the final implementation of a special education questionnaire app, that among other things can support children in self-reporting psychological health in children with intellectual disabilities The design is further described here, and more information is to come.
We are also running participatory design workshops with children in special education schools and their teachers in order to come up with and further develop ideas for applications to train cooperation and social skills.
Busy, but very exciting spring!!!

These days, IDAC is on tour in USA for knowledge exchange and inspiration. Right now we are visiting the worlds largest maker faire www.makerfaire.com in San Mateo outside San Francisco. Previously, the tour has included talks at Stanford d.school, Palo Alto, Disneyland, Disney Imagineering in Los Angeles, Universal Studios, etc. What a great trip!!

Grant application accepted from Post och telestyrelsen (PTS)!!
IDAC is part of the application Språkbussen – Plan and Do, that will develop an app for children with special needs in order to motivate them to participate in social spare time activities. Looking forward to exciting new cooperations!

At IDAC we are looking forward to travel to Manchester for http://www.idc2016.org/ in June to give a workshop and present two papers. The workshop concerns “Roles and Values of Children in Design”, and the paper categorised as a Note is titled: “Legitimate Participation in the Classroom Context – Focusing on Children’s Learning Opportunities in Participatory Design”, and the second paper categorised as a Work in progress is titled: “The Role Definition Matrix: Creating a Shared Understanding of Children’s Participation in the Design Process”. It will be a great conference!!

This week Olof visited the MobileHCI conference in Copenhagen where he presented the demo Thrimage: An Empathy-Oriented Discussion Tool for Classroom Use developed by the MOSAIK project.

Eva and Olof are in Aarhus this week for the The Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference Critical Alternatives http://aarhus2015.org/ . Among many other things, Eva co-hosted the workshop “Unfolding Participation”, aiming to outline an agenda for the next 10 years of participatory design and participatory HCI research. The position paper “Getting it Right – Unfolding Factors for Reporting on Participatory Design with Children with Special Needs”, co-authered by Wolmet Barendregt, Peter Börjesson, Eva Eriksson and Olof Torgersson, made sure that the IDAC perspective was present during the workshop as well.

IDAC is represented at the Interaction Design and Children conference IDC’15 at Tufts university in Boston, USA, by Peter Börjesson and Eva Eriksson. Today, Peter successfully presented the paper “Designing technology for and with developmentally diverse children: a systematic literature review”. Check out the paper here:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfmid=2771848&CFID=683536956&CFTOKEN=79882207