This research explores the materialization of hormonally influenced sensations related to intimate health through interactive design. Drawing on critical menstruation studies, it reacts to how menstruation has been historically silenced, stigmatized, and framed as dysfunction, leading to disembodiment and emotional disconnection. We propose an introspection and translation of hormonal sensations into tangible, visible, and audible material expressions, namely that are, interactive felt-sensation pillows enhanced with embedded technologies such as heating elements, vibration modules, and sound. These multisensory artefacts externalize intimate experiences, encouraging selfreflection, and bodily awareness. By making the invisible perceptible, the project challenges dominant narratives of shame and introduces new ways of learning and relating to the hormonal body. This work contributes to the feminist design discourse by proposing a re-embodied, empowered approach to menstruation and hormonal life through material and sensory expression.

In designing for dementia, the concept of person-centered care (PCC) effectively shifts attention away from deficit orientations. However, it predominantly focuses on the roles of humans in sustaining personhood, leaving the roles of nonhuman actors in care assemblages under-explored. To address this, we propose a theory–method package that extends PCC with posthumanist perspectives. We applied it in a six-month participatory design process to develop a conversational agent (CA) with four people living with dementia (PlwD), their relatives, and care workers. We report both the design process and analysis of conversations between the CA and one PlwD. Tracing the socio-material and ethical assemblages that emerged in these intra-actions, we identify moments of recognition, validation, holding, and facilitation. Situating these within broader discussions of care, process-oriented ethics, and posthuman design, we illustrate opportunities and limits to design for meaningful experiences of personhood between people with dementia, CAs, and other nonhuman actors.

Designing for dementia care is challenging due to its complexity, relational nature, and diverse needs.Meaningful design outcomes require bridging a deep understanding of dementia care and the experiences of people with dementia with technological possibilities and constraints.This paper explores hackathons for facilitating such translations in the design of robotic technologies.We conducted two hackathons -one with researchers and care professionals, and another with HCI Master's students -integrating ethnographic insights, theoretical framings, first-hand experiences, and designerly knowledge.Participants' reflections highlight how the format fostered open-ended exploration, interdisciplinary collaboration, and mutual learning through tailored inspiration materials and structured design processes.Evaluating the concepts using Kitwood's framework of person-centred care needs, we find that the hackathons generated meaningful concepts for human and non-human care relations.However, the outcomes also surface ethical considerations related to these relations, emphasising the need for further participatory design processes to refine and situate the outcomes.

Abstract In this paper, we investigate how everyday playfulness can create opportunities for agonism. Playfulness and agonism have only rarely intersected in HCI research, such as using game design elements in Agonistic Participatory Design, or proposing agonism as a theoretical foundation for Political Play. Building on these foundations, our work aims to broaden the design space where playfulness and agonism meet. Drawing on methods from Situated and Emergent Play, we created a design intervention that prompted reflection and empathy among participants, while establishing a shared understanding of the latent conflict the intervention aimed to address. Based on our findings, we propose considerations for designers seeking to use playfulness to create opportunities for agonism. Grounded in Situated and Emergent Play, we furthermore contribute the method of tracing frictions, which offers a new avenue for designing at the intersection of playfulness and agonism.

In this article, we locate and trace responsibility from a posthuman standpoint. We start by reviewing philosophical origins of responsibility and depict views of responsibility in HCI and Interaction Design. Arguing that prevalent notions of responsibility fall short in covering the complexity of realities that are not least a consequence of entanglements of humans with emerging technologies, we make use of posthumanist perspectives (in particular actor-network theory, agential realism and postphenomenology) to rethink where responsibilities sit or are enacted within hybrid assemblages of relations. Considering responsibility as "being done" within such assemblages allows to understand it as something fluid, rooted in relations rather than entities, and being temporally dispersed, responsibility starts within different milieus of innovation, is found in design practice as well as in use and appropriation. We discuss how the notion of doing responsibilities can serve different purposes, such as looking at how change is induced within an assemblage, and conclude by sketching methodological, theoretical, and designerly consequences.

Child-centred AI advocates and protects children’s rights in the development and design of AI systems. Most approaches are narrowed to children’s interactions with AI. However, children develop relationships with and through AI, beyond just interacting with it. We aim to shed light on the manifold relations that children have with/through AI-enabled systems on the back of entanglement theories and philosophy of technology, for evolving our conception of child-centred AI: How do children relate to/through AI? How do these entanglements change their being, knowing, acting and growing in the world? How can our understanding of child-AI entanglements inform child-centric approaches?

This paper reports on the evaluation of digital play things that scaffold social play. We have engaged two neurodiverse groups of children in a participatory design process to explore meaningful technologies in their co-located play experiences. The resulting technologies are systems composed of multiple connected artefacts that aim to strike the balance between structure and ambiguity to allow children to interpret social play in their own way, while providing structures that offer a common frame for interaction. We report on the two systems, MusicPads and LightSpaces, and their comparative and participatory evaluation, in which we assessed the impact of these technologies on the playing experience of children, and collected the children’s own reflections. Our results suggest that technologies indeed can play an important supporting role when designed as boundary objects across disparate needs and ideas of play. Building on this, we discuss implications for design and evaluation.

In HCI there have been calls for diversity-driven research and insights into how this may be carried out in practice. One way of conducting diversity-driven HCI research is by doing participatory design. In this paper we contribute with lessons identified from organizing a PD workshop that enabled diverse ways of participating for our participants. The workshop design is based on insights from two years of doing diversity-driven PD with two middle school classes, which are particularly interesting settings to explore as diverse children spend substantial time together in a period of their development that is formative for their socialisation. We describe the workshop itself before reflecting on its structure and facilitation as well as the role of the physical space and the choice of design materials with the aim to distil insights and recommendations about what researchers can do to enable diverse pathways of participation in design processes.

We present the insights from participatory design work that explores notions of Diversity Computing (DivComp) and how HCI can meaningfully engage with designing technology around diversity without resorting to tokenistic approaches. A future goal overarching the initial findings in this paper is to design technologically mediated, physical spaces (DivComp Spaces) within a school context where children meet, experiment and learn the complex dynamics of othering. We report on a series of nine workshops with 48 children. Based on a thematic analysis, we present four themes — Technology as Utility and Authority, Individual and Collective Place-Making, Staged and Emerging Conflicts, Belonging to the Group and Self-Expression — which we use to inform three design directions for developing DivComp Spaces specifically in the context of school. Finally, we critically reflect on our design practice and the difficulties of designing not only for, but also with diversity meaningfully embedded into design processes.

The effects of social media on our society are heavily researched and discussed, but few insights about the role of aesthetic design therein have been gained to this date, despite research in related areas providing precedent: drawing from existing theory on persuasive design, nudge, dark patterns, and advertising, we suggest the term Aesthetic Design Power to conduct a preliminary critical analysis of the design of four influential social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) as a foundation for critical discussions about the aesthetic design of social media and its impact. We present salient design attributes and elements shared by these four platforms, speculate about the possible motivations and effects of these design decisions, and argue for an urgent need for further research into, and discussions about, the visual design and connected Aesthetic Design Power of social media.

Leaving the field when conducting research in situated contexts, and finding ways to sustain project outcomes beyond academia, is an ongoing struggle in HCI. In our research project, we co-designed technologies with children in classroom contexts for three years. Nearing the projects’ end, we focused on creating resources that enable teachers to continue our work with their pupils. In collaboration with teachers, we developed socio-material tools that support them in empowering neurodiverse children to engage with technology in creative ways and create their own technologies. While the majority of technology design toolkits are stand-alone artefacts, part of our toolkit is an infrastructure to keep guiding and supporting teachers beyond the project’s end. In this paper, we discuss the teachers expectations and requirements for a toolkit and argue that an infrastructure must be part of a toolkit. We present a set of guidelines for researchers planning for a project’s end.

This article argues that our intimate entanglement with digital technologies is challenging the foundations of current HCI research and practice. Our relationships to virtual realities, artificial intelligence, neuro-implants or pervasive, cyberphysical systems generate ontological uncertainties, epistemological diffusion and ethical conundrums that require us to consider evolving the current research paradigm. I look to post-humanism and relational ontologies to sketch what I call Entanglement HCI in response. I review selected theories—Actor-Network Theory, Post-Phenomenology, Object-Oriented Ontology, Agential Realism—and their existing influences on HCI literature. Against this background, I develop Entanglement HCI from the following four perspectives: (a) the performative relationship between humans and technology; (b) the re-framing of knowledge generation processes around phenomena; (c) the tracing of accountabilities, responsibilities and ethical encounters; and (d) the practices of design and mattering that move beyond user-centred design.

We present Sensorstation, a research product to explore the effect of smart sensors and services on the communal life within a shared apartment. Sensorstation utilizes wireless sensors and a shared output device displaying a steady data stream of sensor based notifications. It was deployed on the kitchen table in a shared apartment for 19 days to enable communal residents to co-design and to co-speculate on smart sensors and services in the context of their shared apartment. We synthesize and interpret findings to illustrate how residents created positive connections between each other, while simultaneously exercising self-monitoring, control over others, and contemplating reward systems and penalties. Our work contributes to a nuanced understanding of smart technology for shared apartments. We argue that design has an obligation to consider smart technology that acknowledges boundaries and to provide negotiation spaces to configure agency.

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children -- both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar events at previous conferences and aims to foster and strengthen the debate about ethical conduct and moral responsibilities in IDC. In this year's panel, we seek to broaden the discussion by collecting ethical concerns, issues or dilemmas from within the community to be discussed at the conference. To this end, we will issue an open call for input that will be publicised via the usual channels. The organisers then will synthesise the responses and facilitate the discussion and debate at the panel.

Participatory design (PD) with heterogeneous groups poses particular challenges, requiring spaces in which different agendas or visions can be negotiated. In this paper we report on our PD work with two groups of neurodiverse children to design technologies that support co-located, social play. The heterogeneity in the groups in terms of abilities, conceptions of play, motivations to be involved and individual preferences has challenged us to think of the design process and its outcomes as spaces for continuous negotiation. Drawing on the notion of agonistic PD, we sought not to necessarily reconcile all views, but foster constructive disagreement as a resource for and possible outcome of design. Using our project work as a case study, we report on controversies, big and small, and how they manifested themselves in the processes and outcomes. Reflecting on our experiences, we discuss possible implications on the notion of democratising technology innovation.

Mobile applications have a great potential in making everyday environments more accessible from the cognitive point of view, allowing neurodiverse people, such as individuals with autism, dementia, or ADHD, to gain independency and find continuous support. This workshop will discuss the main technological, methodological, theoretical and design issues that researchers and practitioners are facing when designing mobile devices and services for neurodiversity, exploring novel strategies to address them. In doing so, we want to focus on the neurodiverse people's idiosyncratic needs, also exploring ways for directly involving them in the design process.

This article offers a synopsis of and a critical reflection on the research project OutsideTheBox Rethinking Assistive Technology with Autistic Children. The aim of the 3-year project was to develop digital technology that would holistically respond to the complex life-worlds of autistic children, affording positive experiences that they could share with others. Through a series of long-term participatory design processes, smart objects were developed individually with nine children employing a wide range of different methods (e.g., Co-operative Inquiry, Future Workshops, Fictional Inquiry, Magic Workshops, Drama and Making & Digital Fabrication). In this article are presented the cases of all children worked with and tie them together by a critical reflection across them. The discussion offers insights along three main themes: we a) substantiate the argument for a theoretical shift in conceptualizing roles for technology in the lives of disabled people, b) discuss our methodological contributions in participatory design processes and c) propose alternative, participatory approaches to evaluate outcomes.

Autistic children are increasingly a focus of technology research within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. We provide a critical review of the purposes of these technologies and how they discursively conceptualise the agency of autistic children. Through our analysis, we establish six categories of these purposes: behaviour analysis, assistive technologies, education, social skills, therapy and well-being. Further, our discussion of these purposes shows how the technologies embody normative expectations of a neurotypical society, which predominantly views autism as a medical deficit in need of ‘correction’. Autistic children—purportedly the beneficiaries of these technologies—thus become a secondary audience to the largely externally defined purposes. We identify a lack of design for technologies that are geared towards the interests, needs and desires of autistic children. To move HCI’s research into autism beyond this, we provide guidance on how to consider agency in use and explicitly allow for appropriation beyond externally driven goals.

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and persistent or emergent ethical challenges. As a starting point, this panel aims to focus on questions around the involvement of children in our research and we aim to hear from designers and researchers in this community with different backgrounds and perspectives to reflect the diversity of work being done and cultures in which they are conducted.

This article examines the educational efficacy of a learning environment in which children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) engage in social interactions with an artificially intelligent (AI) virtual agent and where a human practitioner acts in support of the interactions. A multi-site intervention study in schools across the UK was conducted with 29 children with ASC and learning difficulties, aged 4--14 years old. For reasons related to data completeness and amount of exposure to the AI environment, data for 15 children was included in the analysis. The analysis revealed a significant increase in the proportion of social responses made by ASC children to human practitioners. The number of initiations made to human practitioners and to the virtual agent by the ASC children also increased numerically over the course of the sessions. However, due to large individual differences within the ASC group, this did not reach significance. Although no evidence of transfer to the real-world post-test was shown, anecdotal evidence of classroom transfer was reported. The work presented in this article offers an important contribution to the growing body of research in the context of AI technology design and use for autism intervention in real school contexts. Specifically, the work highlights key methodological challenges and opportunities in this area by leveraging interdisciplinary insights in a way that (i) bridges between educational interventions and intelligent technology design practices, (ii) considers the design of technology as well as the design of its use (context and procedures) on par with one another, and (iii) includes design contributions from different stakeholders, including children with and without ASC diagnosis, educational practitioners, and researchers.

Over the past two years, we have engaged autistic children in a participatory design (PD) process to create their own, individual smart object. In this paper, we reflect on our methodological choices and how these came about. Describing the design process with one of our participants as a case, we show how we developed participatory activities by combining, blending, re-interpreting and adapting techniques and tools from a pool of methods on the basis of the characteristics of the child, our own skills as designers and the history and context of our collaboration. Reflecting on this practice retrospectively, we seek to make two contributions: firstly, we distill a repertoire of methodological building blocks which draw on our experience of co-designing with autistic children. Secondly, we present a visual tool that captures the process by which we combined, blended and interpreted these building blocks into coherent design activities with a view to provide systematic guidance for future work. While the work presented here is set within the context of designing with autistic children, we argue that the underlying approach can be applicable and useful in a wider co-design context.

With this workshop we aim to bring together researchers who explore interactive technologies in the context of autistic children. At a point at which considerable effort has been invested in this area and results are promising, but hardly conclusively convincing, we argue that it is time to critically reflect on our work. We do this by posing three provocative questions: 1) Are we trying to do the right thing? 2) Is it working? and 3) Does it matter? With all three questions we aim to kick-start a debate about the goals and intentions with which research is done in this area, how we define that technology is successful and how we can ensure that our research has real-world impact beyond the people involved directly.

Designing for reflection is becoming an increasingly important part of many HCI systems in a wide range of application domains. However, there is a gap in our understanding of how the process of reflection can be supported through technology. In fact, an implicit assumption in the majority of existing work is that, just by providing access to well-selected data, in-depth reflection can and will occur. To counter this view, we draw on Schön's notion of reflective practicum and apply it as a sensitising concept to identify the complex interplay of factors that support transformative reflection in the context of two social-emotional learning (SEL) studies. The results highlight the need to carefully scaffold the process of reflection, rather than simply assume that the capability to reflect is a broadly available trait to be 'triggered' through data. Building on this analysis, we develop a conceptual framework that extends the concept of the reflective practicum towards identifying appropriate roles of technology to support transformative reflection. While our case is within the context of SEL, we argue that a deeper understanding of these opportunities can also benefit designing for reflection in other areas.

Capturing and describing the multi-faceted experiences autistic children have with technologies provides a unique research challenge. Approaches based on pragmatist notions of experience, which mostly rely on empathy, are particularly limited if used alone. To address this we have developed an approach that combines Actor-Network Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on this approach, we discuss the experiences autistic children had with technologies resulting from the collaborative design process in the OutsideTheBox project. We construct a holistic picture of the experience by drawing on diverse data sources ranging from interviews to log-data, and most importantly, the first-hand perspective of autistic children. In four case studies, we demonstrate how this approach allowed us to develop unique individual and structural insights into the experiences of autistic children with technology.

Participatory Design (PD) has become a standard methodology in HCI, however, the evaluation of the outcomes of participatory processes is often exclusively driven by researcher defined measures of success. Through our work with autistic children, who have radically different life worlds from our own, it became evident that their criteria for the success of a project are most likely also very different. In order to address the limitations of researcher defined and led evaluations in this context, we developed an approach for participatory evaluation called PEACE (Participatory Evaluation with Autistic ChildrEn). Using this approach, we were able to include autistic children in dedicated evaluation phases through the co-definition of goals and methods, joint processes of data gathering and the co-interpretation of results. We discuss three case studies in which we successfully applied our approach and conclude with a reflection on the novel insights created through participatory evaluation and researchers' roles in such a process.

The emergence of ‘third paradigm’ Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) was driven by the shortcomings of existing approaches to adequately describe and understand the ways people interact with a new breed of pervasive digital technologies in everyday life. In response, new approaches became situated, value-driven and participatory with a shift towards studying HCI in the wild. With technology reaching into every aspect of our lives, the ethical and moral responsibilities of designers and researchers have increased. However, while HCI's design and research methodology have become fluid and responsive to reflect the paradigm shift, ethics is still widely interpreted as a static, anticipatory and formalised process. In this article, we address this gap and propose In-Action Ethics as a novel framework that links anticipatory ethics with the practice of HCI research. We start by laying out the foundations for In-Action Ethics by reviewing relevant work in ethics and moral philosophy, and discuss the current state of ethical perspectives in HCI, Action Research and Responsible Science and Innovation. We provide two examples from our own work to show how situated, explorative and design-oriented HCI projects raise issues of ethical importance that formal ethics is struggling to manage. On the basis of our experiences and those of others, we start developing key qualities for an In-Action Ethics framework and show how those qualities can be operationalised in relation to the realities of existing structures by introducing the concept of ethos building and care.

This paper describes the design work being conducted as part of the OutsideTheBox project. Within the time-frame of eight months, we engaged four children with autism in a participatory design process to develop their own smart object. We re-interpreted Future Workshops and Co-operative Inquiry to demonstrate that a) autistic children can lead processes with a deliberately open design brief and b) this leads us to explore design spaces that are un-imaginable for neuro-typical, adult designers. To capture these four design cases, we have developed Design Exposes, a concept that is inspired by annotated portfolios and Actor-Network Theory. We apply this concept to our cases and present four exposes that subsequently allow us to draw out intermediate-level design knowledge about co-creating technology with autistic children. We close by critically reflecting on the design processes as well as our concept of capturing them.

The development of strong social and emotional skills is central to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are being taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into everyday contexts. Traditional SEL programs have however had limited success in engaging parents, and we argue that technology might be able to help bridge this school-home divide. Through interviews with SEL experts we identified central design considerations for technology and SEL content: the reliance on experiential learning and the need to scaffold the parents in scaffolding the interaction for their children. This informed the design of a technology probe comprising a magnet card and online SEL activities, deployed in a school and via Mturk. The results provide a nuanced understanding of how technology-based interventions could bridge the school-home gap in real-world settings and support at-home reinforcement of children's social-emotional skills.

With few exceptions, technology for autistic children tends to be focused on the regulation of perceived deficits. With OutsideTheBox we focus on the strengths of the children as design partners and created in our first year four technological objects together with them. They all have common that they are embedded in the children's lives and share some degree of embodied interaction. We present a case study along with four objects, two of them with wearable components, two of them focused at sharing experiences in an embodied mode. This opens up the argument not only for more design actually led by autistic children, but also for companion technologies that embody situatedness. Such technologies are then not driven by an outsider's perspective of what an autistic child needs, but rather are intrinsically valuable to them as a user.

Assistive technology (AT) as a field explores the design, use and evaluation of computing technology that aims to benefit people with disabilities. The majority of the work consequently takes the functional needs of people with disabilities as starting point and matches those with technological opportunity spaces. With this paper, we argue that the underlying philosophical position implied in this approach can be seen as reductionist as the disabled experience is arguably richer and often more complex as can be projected from the functional limitations of people. Thinkers and activists in Disability Studies have conceptualised disability in various ways and more recently, critical realism was proposed as a philosophical position through which the many different facets of the disabled experience could be incorporated. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using a critical realist perspective to guide designers in developing technology for people with disabilities and thereby aim to contribute to the philosophical underpinnings of AT. After a brief review of historical conceptualisations of disability, we introduce the critical realist argument and discuss its appeal for understanding disability and the possible roles technology can have in this context. Subsequently, we aim to translate this philosophical and moral debate into a research agenda for AT and exemplify how it can be operationalised by presenting the OutsideTheBox project as a case study.

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements. To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings.

In this paper we discuss participatory approaches to designing interactive technologies for children with disabilities. While participatory design (PD) has been increasingly influential in the field of Human-Computer Interaction as a whole, applying its methods and theories to children with disabilities raises challenges specific to this target group and poses more fundamental questions about the limits of PD. We will first build the underlying argument of why we believe PD is particularly important when designing for children with disabilities, before discussing the challenges and opportunities that come with implementing PD in this context. We ground this discussion in our own experiences with developing a learning environment for children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). We then consider future perspectives and develop research questions by reflecting on our experiences.

In this paper we describe the development of a tool to support the contributions of children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) in a design critique activity. The work is part of the ECHOES project in which we have included children with ASC in a participatory design process to create a technologically enhanced learning environment. We first discuss the general difficulties of involving children with ASC in participatory design work, particularly a socially demanding activity such as design critique. Based on theory from autism research and the results from our own previous design work, we then lay out requirements for a tool to allow children with ASC to become meaningfully involved in a design critique of the ECHOES environment. Subsequently, we describe a prototype of an annotation tool based on these requirements, a pilot study, and feedback elicited from special education teachers. We then report on a study in which seven children with ASC were involved in critiquing a prototype of the ECHOES system using the annotator. In our analysis of the children's annotator use, we found that it served the intended purposes as a visual support, but also that it was appropriated for other means, such as emotional self-regulation. We discuss examples of these different uses and close by asking how these findings could be applied in other contexts where tools are required to facilitate a discourse in design, rather than directly capture its output.

Involving children in the design process of interactive technology can greatly enhance its likelihood of successful adoption. However, children's input and ideas require careful interpretation to reach viable designs and technical specifications, which poses a significant challenge to an adult design research team. In this paper we discuss our approach to managing the complexity of combining concepts and ideas that were generated through participatory design work with the practical, technical, ethical and theoretical constraints of developing a technologically enhanced learning environment for children with and without Autism Spectrum Conditions. We found that the nature of this design problem did not lend itself to be rationally reduced to produce a single solution, but required an understanding of interpretive and speculative approaches for us to be able to cope with the complexity of requirements. We describe a workshop in which members of the design team used such approaches to develop a design brief that is faithful to the children's input. By making this process transparent, we aim to contribute to the methodology of using such designerly approaches in combination with participatory and human-centred methods to develop interactive technology.

The development of social communication skills in children relies on multimodal aspects of communication such as gaze, facial expression, and gesture. We introduce a multimodal learning environment for social skills which uses computer vision to estimate the children's gaze direction, processes gestures from a large multi-touch screen, estimates in real time the affective state of the users, and generates interactive narratives with embodied virtual characters. We also describe how the structure underlying this system is currently being extended into a general framework for the development of interactive multimodal systems.

This paper proposes an approach for cross-modal user interface design using interaction patterns. A meta-domain is introduced in which the user interface can be designed without the determination of its realisation in a particular interaction domain. When fully described in the meta-domain, the user interface can be realised in different domains (visual, auditory, tactile etc) exploiting the strengths of each different mode to its maximum. The paper proposes a set of interaction patterns along with visual and auditory realisations. To prove the concept, a prototype was designed for a real-world application, Microsoft Explorer. An auditory display prototype was developed making extensive use of virtual audio environments for non-visual visualisation of objects in the Explorer interface, taking advantage of a spatial layout. The prototype was evaluated with visually impaired, blind and sighted computer users.