Understanding the role of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice

Using designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice is often questioned in a predominantly rationalist practice like HCI and professional interaction design. Perhaps for this reason, little work has been conducted to investigate how designers' personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it's undeniable designers have applied their personal experiences to their design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This paper reports on a multiple case study that looks at how interaction designers worked with their personal experiences in three industrial interaction design projects, thus calling for the need to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of using and better support of the use of designers' personal experiences in interaction design practice. In this study, a designer's personal experiences refer to the collections of his/her individual experiences derived from his/her direct observation or past real-life events and activities, as well as his/her interaction with design artifacts and systems whether digital or not

Co-designing interactive applications with adults with intellectual disability: a case study

Current and emerging participatory design practices are providing opportunities for people with intellectual disability to have a say in how technology can best support them and their individual needs. In this paper, we present lessons learnt from a co-design exercise aimed at designing a mobile application to support people with intellectual disability when using public transports. We investigate more specifically four elements proposed in the literature in order to deepen the engagement of participants: a digital prototype, a non-finito feature, inclusion of a proxy, and a co-development opportunity. Our observations with 3 users with intellectual disability engaging in an hour-long co-design workshop with a carer confirm the benefits of digital prototypes and non-finito features in this context, contribute a better understanding of the role of proxies, and suggest a longer engagement to potentially take advantage of co-development

Designing tangible artefacts for playful interactions and dialogues

This paper reports on the design process and iterative development of two tangible artefacts that aim to encourage and explore playful interactions and dialogues between grandchildren and grandparents living at separate locations. These designed prototypes respond to the Magic Box which is a cultural probe specifically created to explore playful activity at-a-distance in a non-electronic way. This paper reports on the process of project definition, technical design requirements, scenario creation and iterative prototype development. We interpret the ethnographic data from the Magic Box research; we develop activity scenarios to describe potential activities; and we design and develop working interaction prototypes to be tested in the field in future studies