Playful E-textile Sonic Interaction for Socially Engaged and Open-Ended Play Between Autistic Children

Research on the potential benefits of technology for autistic children is an emergent field in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), especially within the Child-Computer Interaction Community. This thesis contributes a design approach grounded in theories of play, cognitive development, and autism to expand the discourse on methodological guidelines for performing empirical studies with non-verbal autistic children and to extend the design space to cater to the socio-emotional and sensory needs of this population. The thesis reveals how sonic e-textile Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can be used effectively to mediate children’s social participation in playful activities. This is demonstrated through developing three explorative field-studies conducted at a specialist school based in North-East London where two sonic e-textile playful TUIs, namely Mazi and Olly, have been created and tested with three groups of autistic children aged between 5-10. The three studies ran over the period of three years and were designed to investigate the potentials of TUIs as shareable toys during leisure and recreational activities to a) support social and playful interactions among peers and b) provide opportunities for self-regulation. The key contributions of this thesis are the designs of two tangible user interfaces, which offer a set of design approaches to guide researchers through creating shareable and playful tangibles for non-verbal autistic children; a framework for analysis and a thorough evaluation process that other researchers could use to assess the efficacy of playful TUI designs for nonverbal autistic children; and an in-depth discussion about the research process, which offers a new perspective about holistic designs and evaluation of technologies that aim to scaffold play in groups non-verbal autistic children

Evaluating beyond the metrics: understanding the value of participatory arts through plurality of voice

This thesis investigates the potentialities of holistic and participant-centric approaches to evaluating the social impact of participatory arts programmes. The current framing of the social impact of the arts is problematised through exploration of existing discourse, before interrogating principles and methods from ethnographic and reflexive research, drawing upon Freirean pedagogy and constructivist approaches to knowledge generation. I consider how the binary of top-down instrumentalised evaluation frameworks and bottom-up approaches can be disrupted, to build a stronger knowledge base of social impact of participatory arts engagement. Through a critical case study of Lyric Hammersmith Theatre’s work with young people, with a focus on its START programme for participants not in education, employment or training, this thesis invites participants to be the knowledge holders and changemakers of their lives. Through the exploration of pluralistic experience and emerging outcomes, I move towards defining impact, and placing ownership of change with participants, as a result of participation. My research contributes to the current discourse on the evidence base and value of participation in the arts and to emerging evaluation methodologies. The findings which emerge through this research, humanise and celebrate both the individual and collective experience. Finally, this thesis proposes a new conceptual framework for evaluating the impact of participatory arts programmes and understanding change, underpinned by friendship, with-ness, and hope

Musical vulnerability: Receptivity, susceptibility, and care in the Key Stage 3 music classroom

Over the past decade, music education policy, pedagogy, and research in England has been shaped by a neoliberal discourse of invulnerability, in which the benefits of music upon academic achievement, health and wellbeing, and social development have been extolled for their influence upon the education of prosperous and independent individuals. However, research in music studies suggests that such benefits are far from universal. On the contrary, music-making—especially within compulsory classroom education—often reveals individuals’ shortcomings and dependencies. Such diverse experiences in the music classroom highlight an urgent need for music education to be reframed by an understanding of ‘musical vulnerability’: individuals’ inherent and situational openness to being affected by the semantic and somatic properties of music. Drawing on existing vulnerability studies, I evaluate how music can foster both positive receptivity and negative susceptibility, depending on its delineation of self-identity, social identity, and space, and its embodiment through aural receptivity, mimetic participation, and affective transmission. Using a two-phase phenomenological ethnography, I investigate teachers’ and pupils’ lived experiences of musical vulnerability in the Key Stage 3 (KS3) music classroom (ages 11–14). In Phase 1, interviews with music teachers reveal the interaction between interpersonal and personal vulnerabilities—including musical, personality, and neurological differences—in instances of musical receptivity and susceptibility. Phase 2 comprises ethnographic observations and a focus group interview with pupils in one KS3 music class. It exposes how values espoused in the music classroom require pupils to negotiate conflicting musical expectations, identities, and abilities while making music together. While this can prompt fruitful compromise and resilience, it can also cause exclusion and resignation. I therefore conclude that music education policy, pedagogy, and research should prioritise a ‘critical pedagogy of care’, acknowledging music’s capacity both to heal and to harm, and equipping teachers and pupils to respond critically and care-fully in situations of musical vulnerability

The Funambulist Papers 2

This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011. The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political questions about bodies. This choice is informed by Léopold Lambert’s own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal politics do not exist in a void of objects, buildings and cities; on the contrary, they operate through the continuous material encounters between living and non-living bodies. Several texts proposed in this volume examine various forms of corporeal violence (racism, gender-based violence, etc.). This examination, however, can only exist in the integration of the designed environment’s conditioning of this violence. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues in the conclusion of this book’s first chapter, “the process of attending to the body — unhooded, unveiled, unclothed — cannot be the solution to racism, because that body is always already an abstraction, an effect of law and its violence.” Although the readers won’t find indications about the disciplinary background of the contributors — the “witty” self-descriptions at the end of the book being preferred to academic resumés — the content of the texts will certainly attest to the broad imaginaries at work throughout this volume. Dialogues between dancers and geographers, between artists and biohackers, between architects and philosophers, and so forth, provide the richness of this volume through difference rather than similarity. The Funambulist Papers are published by the CTM Documents Initiative imprint, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School. CTM is a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings