Designing Interactive Visual Supports for Children with Special Needs in a School Setting

Visual support (VS) is one of the effective ways of facilitating activities of children with neurodevelopmental disorder (ND). This paper reports on an interactive VS provided by a large-scale floor projection system in an augmented gymnasium called FUTUREGYM, designed for children with ND. The study focuses on students’ cleaning, and two interactive VS activities-Mop Game, an exergame involving group cleaning, and Mop Guide, a VS for training about vocational cleaning-were designed with the teachers with the aim of motivating students toward cleaning and help them acquire fundamental cleaning skills. The study attempts to design a VS for cleaning that is suitable for the students by conducting an empathic design approach, which helps us understand what are the problems, obtain new perspectives, and gather ideas into demonstrative prototypes by sharing values and thoughts with the teachers and their students. This is a case study of deploying an empathic design approach in a special needs school setting.

Conference paper

In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems DIS ‘18, pp. 265-275.
[Honorable Mention]