ABSTRACT
Design thinking is an approach to educational curriculum that builds empathy, encourages ideation, and fosters active problem solving through hands-on design projects. Embedding participatory “co-design” into design thinking curriculum offers students agency in finding solutions to real-world design challenges, which may support personal empowerment. An opportunity to explore this prospect arose in the design of sounds for an accessible interactive science-education simulation in the PhET Project. Over the course of three weeks, PhET researchers engaged blind and visually-impaired high-school students in a design thinking curriculum that included the co-design of sounds and auditory interactions for the Balloons and Static Electricity (BASE) sim. By the end of the curriculum, students had iterated through all aspects of design thinking and performed a quantitative evaluation of multiple sound prototypes. Furthermore, the group’s mean self-efficacy rating had increased. We reflect on our curriculum and the choices we made that helped enable the students to become authentic partners in sound design.
- Maureen Carroll, Shelley Goldman, Leticia Britos, Jaime Koh, Adam Royalty, and Michael Hornstein. 2010. Destination, imagination & the fires within: Design thinking in a middle school classroom. International Journal of Art & Design Education 29, 1 (2010), 37–53. https://doi.org/10.1145/1640233.1640306Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nigel Cross. 2011. Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Berg, New York, NY.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Allison Druin. 2002. The Role of Children in the design of new technology. Behaviour & Information Technology 21, 1 (2002), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/01449290110108659Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel Fitton and Beth Bell. 2014. Working with Teenagers within HCI Research: Understanding Teen-Computer Interaction. In BCS-HCI ’14: Proceedings of the 28th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference. Southport, 201–206. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/hci2014.23Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel Fitton, Janet C. Read, and Matthew Horton. 2013. The Challenge of Working with Teens as Participants in Interaction Design. In CHI ’13 Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Paris. https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468394Google ScholarDigital Library
- Visda Goudarzi, Katherina Vogt, Robert Holdrich, and Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. 2015. Observations on an interdisciplinary design process using a sonification framework. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display. Graz, 81–85. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/54108Google Scholar
- Elin Irene Krog Hansen and Ole Sejer Iverson. 2013. You are the real experts!: Studying teenagers’ motivation in participatory design. In IDC ’13: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. New York, 328–331. https://doi.org/10.1145/2485760.2485826Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Lynne Harden and Emily Moore. 2019. Co-adapting a design thinking activity to engage students with learning disabilities: Insights and lessons learned. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, IDC 2019. Boise, ID, 464–469. https://doi.org/10.1145/3311927.3325316Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ole Sejer Iversen, Christian Dindler, and Elin Irene Krogh Hansen. 2013. Understanding teenagers’ motivation in participatory design. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 1, 3-4(2013), 82–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2014.02.002Google ScholarCross Ref
- Janet L. Kolodner, Paul J. Camp, David Crismond, Barbara Fasse, Jackie Gray, Jennifer Holbrook, Sadhana Puntambekar, and Mike Ryan. 2003. Problem-Based Learning Meets Case-Based Reasoning in the Middle-School Science Classroom: Putting Learning by Design™ into Practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences 12, 4 (2003), 495–547. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327809JLS1204_2Google ScholarCross Ref
- Linda Little, Daniel Fitton, Beth T. Bell, and Nicola Toth(Eds.). 2016. Perspectives on HCI Research with Teenagers. Springer International Publishing, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33450-9Google ScholarCross Ref
- Joanne McElligott and Lieselotte van Leeuwen. 2004. Designing sound tools and toys for blind and visually impaired children. In IDC ’04: Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Interaction Design and Children. College Park, MD, 65–72. https://doi.org/10.1145/1017833.1017842Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oussama Metatla and Clare Cullen. 2018. “Bursting the Assistance Bubble”: Designing Inclusive Technology with Children with Mixed Visual Abilities. In CHI ’18: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Montréal, QC. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173920Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oussama Metatla, Fiore Martin, Adam Parkinson, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Tony Stockman, and Atau Tanaka. 2016. Audio-haptic interfaces for digital audio workstations: A participatory design approach. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 10, 3 (2016), 247–258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-016-0217-8Google ScholarCross Ref
- Oussama Metatla, Alison Oldfield, Taimur Ahmed, Antonis Vageas, and Sunny Miglani. 2019. Voice User Interfaces in Schools : Co-designing for Inclusion With Visually-Impaired and Sighted Pupils. In CHI ’19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Glasgow, 15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300608Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers. 2008. Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign 4, 1 (2008), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068Google ScholarCross Ref
- Taliesin E. Smith. 2016. Access, Action, & Agency: Inclusive Design for the Non-visual Use of a Highly Interactive Simulation. Master’s thesis. OCAD University, Toronto. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/713/Google Scholar
- Marc Steen. 2013. Virtues in Participatory Design: Cooperation, Curiosity, Creativity, Empowerment and Reflexivity. Science and Engineering Ethics 19, 3 (2013), 945–962. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9380-9Google ScholarCross Ref
- Brianna J. Tomlinson. 2020. Auditory Display in Interactive Science Simulations: Description and Sonification Support Interaction and Enhance Opportunities for Learning. In CHI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu, HI. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376886Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jelle Van Dijk, Niels Hendriks, Christopher Frauenberger, Fenne Verhoeven, Karin Slegers, Eva Brandt, and Rita Maldonado Branco. 2016. Empowering people with impairments: How participatory methods can inform the design of empowering artifacts. In PDC ’16: Proceedings of the 14th Participatory Design Conference. Aarhus, 121–122. https://doi.org/10.1145/2948076.2948101Google ScholarDigital Library
- R Michael Winters, Brianna J. Tomlinson, Bruce N. Walker, and Emily B. Moore. 2019. Sonic Interaction Design for Science Education. Ergonomics in Design 27, 1 (2019), 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/1064804618797399Google ScholarCross Ref
- KatieAnna Wolf, Genna Gliner, and Rebecca Fiebrink. 2015. End-User Development of Sonifications using Soundscapes. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display. Graz, 281–288. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/54150Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Co-Designing Accessible Science Education Simulations with Blind and Visually-Impaired Teens
Recommendations
Designing While Blind: Nonvisual Tools and Inclusive Workflows for Tactile Graphic Creation
ASSETS '23: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and AccessibilityBlind individuals encounter access barriers while leading the design of media they consume, particularly with tactile graphics. Blind designers are underrepresented in the field of tactile graphic design, where sighted designers routinely control the ...
Designing sound tools and toys for blind and visually impaired children
IDC '04: Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Interaction design and children: building a communityIn this paper, we highlight the issue of integrating the audio and tactile sensory experience into the design process of toys and computer games. Our approach is to address and incorporate design issues for the sensory impaired at the beginning of the ...
Learning through Participatory Design: Designing Digital Badges for and with Teens
IDC '16: Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenChildren and teens have valuable insights to offer in the design of sociotechnical learning tools and environments. Prior work has identified a range of participatory design (PD) techniques that have been used successfully to engage youth of various ...
Comments