On March 21, 2014, IDAC member Robert Fohlin successfully presented his master thesis titled: Interaction Design in Special Education. Abstract below.

Abstract:

This thesis was written from January 2013 to March 2014 for the Department of Applied IT at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. The thesis sets out to explore how children with intellectual disabilities can participate in a human-centred design process through the approach of research through design. Furthermore two interactive prototypes were developed through user-involvement of children with intellectual
disabilities.
Throughout the work on the thesis, one Special Education School in Gothenburg was involved and 19 pupil in total participated in different design activities, such as focus groups, prototype evaluation, sketching and brainstorming. Moreover, a total of 8 adolescents with intellectual disabilities took part in lling out a digital questionnaire developed for assessing the adolescent’s psychological well-being.
The prototypes developed were a digital questionnaire developed for iOS tablets as well as a tablet-based diary for the children of the school that worked together with a web portal from which parents and school staff could follow the children’s diary entries. Both these prototypes shows promising results in terms of tackling the intended problem dened for each of them.
The thesis concludes that user-involvement of children with intellectual disabilities in a design process are somewhat challenging, but involvement placing emphasise on evaluating involvement, namely testing an existing prototype, were quite manageable; while involvement placing emphasise on conceptualising involvement, namely generating new ideas or concepts were difficult. The thesis argues that involvement of the latter type, for instance participatory design activities might not be useful for this target group
due to the common deciencies of abstract reasoning, organisational skills, empathy and interpersonal communication skills could affect the participation.
Furthermore, the thesis argues that any technology-based design for this user group needs to be well-motivated and have a clear goal before being developed, as this group of children tend to react negatively to changes in their schedules or everyday activities and as such any design activity held with the children should attempt to t into the existing schedule of the children. Moreover, the thesis nds that user-involvement the children with intellectual disabilities in a human-centred design process to be useful but should be well-planned and considered and preferable be done in an environment comfortable for the child, for instance in their school environment.