People with disabilities in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) have limited access to digital assistive technologies (ATs). Most ATs in LMICs are manufactured elsewhere and are expensive and difficult to maintain. Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technologies (DIY-ATs) designed, customized, and repaired by non-technical users offer exciting directions in these contexts. We have been exploring the possibilities and challenges of DIY-ATs in Western Kenya, using community-engaged workshops in rural and urban special education schools for the past three years. We present findings from a concluding-stage research activity: a multiple stakeholder focus group where teachers, disability advocates, and representatives from the local government and technology innovation hubs, discussed the possibilities and challenges of addressing disability issues through DIY-ATs in this context. Participants identified opportunities for DIY-ATs for social inclusion, disability assessment, and inclusive education, and shared concerns about their sustainability, safety, and contextual relevance.

Digital living media systems consist of living organisms combined with electronic components and can reflect or represent information to users (e.g., as an ambient display). We have developed, Rafigh, a digital living media system that utilizes the growth rate of a living mushroom colony to reflect users' digital application use. We used Rafigh to study how digital living media systems can 1) motivate children to use therapeutic and/or learning digital applications, and 2) increase communication and collaboration in the home setting. We conducted two in situ case studies with four children and their caregivers which showed that the system successfully motivated two of the children to use target applications and created communication and collaboration in the home setting. Additionally, the two children were not deterred by the slow changes in the system. We discuss the implications for using digital living media systems to engage and motivate children through dynamics of caring and responsibility.

Including children with communication disorders in the participatory design and evaluation of digital technologies is challenging, as communication between designers and users - an important part of this approach - can be impacted. Using Participatory Design with Proxies (PDwP) supports the inclusion of input from different stakeholders, such as parents, teachers and Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), who can provide valuable insight and feedback to augment direct input from users, which may be severely limited. We describe how we used PDwP to design a digital living media system that motivates children with disabilities to use digital therapeutic and learning applications and supports communication and collaboration between users. We employed an iterative design process to fabricate three functional prototypes and used them as design probes in participants' home and school settings. We present lessons learned in the form of the strengths and shortcomings of using PDwP for designing systems for children with limited communication abilities.

HCI and CSCW researchers and practitioners are increasingly working in complex social and political contexts where their research activities involve emotional labor and where they have to confront moral and emotional dilemmas. Given the potential impact of these challenging situations on the wellbeing of researchers in the field, there is much need for a discourse on affective impact of research on the researcher. In this workshop, we invite discussion and reflection on the experiences of distress and the role of informal coping mechanisms (e.g., personal narratives) to address them. We will create a forum where researchers and practitioners can discuss and share experiences of projects in sensitive settings and work towards guidelines to inform future projects.

Digital media have great potential as tools for selfexpression and artistic exploration. We seek to enrich the discussion of challenges and benefits associated with using digital design methods and materials with children in developing countries through a case study. Our contributions to this discussion are based on our involvement in facilitating a twoday codesign workshop with 25 marginalized children in Oaxaca, Mexico. Together, we explored, designed and implemented digitally augmented paper artifacts based on traditional folk art from the children's native region. We analyzed the artworks and observed the children during the workshop to inform our research. Lessons learned include the importance of establishing trust though local contacts, incorporating relevant cultural and social elements, planning concrete outcomes and using technology appropriately. We hope that this detailed case study may serve as an exemplar, by providing insights and inspiration for other designers, researchers, and developers when planning, carrying out, and studying workshops.

Digital games can engage children in therapeutic and learning activities. Incorporating living media in these designs can create feelings of empathy and caring in users. We present, Rafigh, a living media interface designed to motivate children with speech disorders to use their speech to care for a living mushroom colony. The mushrooms' growth is used to communicate how much speech is used during interaction.

In the face of increasing urbanization and lack of contact with nature, it is important to design systems that facilitate a re-connection or at least dialogue around our interaction with living beings. Rafigh, an empathetic living media interface, is designed to motivate children and adults to care for a living mushroom colony by engaging in collaborative and learning activies.

Previous research has identified many characteristics of social networks that can support creative collaboration. To examine the possibilities and issues involved, we created a collaborative poetry project on the popular social network Facebook. Nineteen participating poets from five cities contributed to a multimedia poem written in two languages.

In this article, we describe theaesthetics of emergence, which is our theoretical framework for an aesthetics of interaction and the underpinning ofLoFi, an interactive A-life artwork that we are developing. We provide a survey of relevant concepts from the A-life and new media research communities, and we establish threads of commonalities with the HCI research community and especially the subset of that community that emphasizes aspects of user experience other than those that are characterized by performance-based measures. We describe and discuss several exemplar A-life artworks that are drawn from the last decade of jury selections of the annual Vida Art and Artificial Life Competition, conducted by Fundación Telefonica. We conclude with a discussion of issues that are common to the A-life and HCI research communities.

This paper introduces a new descriptive model for indirect text composition facilities that is based on the notion of a containment hierarchy. This paper also demonstrates a novel, computer-aided technique for the design of indirect text selection interfaces -- one in which Huffman coding is used for the derivation of the containment hierarchy. This approach guarantees the derivation of optimal containment hierarchies, insofar as mean encoding length. This paper describes an empirical study of two two-key indirect text entry variants and compares them to one another and to the predictive model. The intended application of these techniques is the design of improved indirect text entry facilities for the users of AAC systems.

That multimodal interfaces have benefits over unimodal ones has often been asserted. Several such benefits have been described informally, but, to date, few have actually been formalized or quantified. In this paper, the hypothesized benefits of semantically redundant multimodal input actions are described formally and are quantified using the formalisms provided by Information Theory. A reinterpretation of Keates and Robinson's empirical data (1998) shows that their criticism of multimodal interfaces was, in part, unfounded.

For computational Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) aids, it has often been asserted that multimodal interfaces have benefits over unimodal ones. Several such benefits have been described informally, but, to date, few have actually been formalized or quantified. In this paper, some of the special considerations of this application domain are described. Next, the hypothesized benefits of semantically nonredundant multimodal input actions over unimodal input actions are described formally. The notion of information rate, already well established as a dependent variable in evaluations of AAC devices, is quantified in this paper, using the formalisms provided by Information Theory (as opposed to other, idiosyncratic approaches that have been employed previously). A comparative analysis was performed between interfaces that afford unimodal input actions and those that afford semantically nonredundant multimodal input actions. This analysis permitted generalized conclusions, which have been synthesized with those of another, recently-completed analysis in which unimodal and semantically redundant multimodal input actions were compared. A reinterpretation of Keates and Robinson's empirical data (1998) shows that their criticism of multimodal interfaces for AAC devices, in part, was unfounded.