Together Through Play

Well, I said that I'd aim to get new blog posts out fortnightly, and lo and behold, here I am with my second blog post already a day late. Ah well, the best laid plans and all that....

Anyway, here we are: blog post number two and the first one on actual content! Today, I wanted to provide an introduction to a project that currently has me very excited: Together Through Play. I'll try to keep it short: I'll provide an overview today, and go into more depth on certain aspects of the

Together Through Play is the informal name for a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust investigating inclusive play, on which I am Principal Investigator (PI). The official name for the project is “Facilitating Meaningful Play Between Disabled and Non-Disabled Children through Participatory Design”, which is more informative, but also more unwieldy, so we adopted the Together Through Play moniker (TTP, henceforth, to save on my fingers!) as a more user-friendly alternative. In fact, this separation suits me well, as it offers the opportunity to keep the Together Through Play brand going beyond the three-year scope of the “Facilitating Meaningful Play...” project and into future projects. More on that in due course.

Anyway, this is a three year project which started in January 2011, and will end in December 2013 – so we're now onto the final straight, and indeed this blog provides one of the means of disseminating our findings. For now, though, I want to focus on the background of the project, and what it's all about.

Who's Involved?

There are three key people involved in the project: I am the PI, and provide the engineering input to the project; Angharad Beckett from the School of Sociology and Social Policy (and a fellow member of the Centre for Disability Studies) is a co-investigator, and provides the sociological input; and Anne-Marie Moore is the PhD Researcher employed on the project – she does the day-to-day data gathering and product testing, which means a lot of liaising with the participating schools!

In addition, we have a number of schools involved, and some undergraduate Engineering and Product Design students have helped to design and build the toys that we are testing.

What's the Project About, then?
In one sentence: the aim of the project is to explore the aspirations of disabled and non-disabled children for playing together, the barriers that prevent this, and what might be done to overcome them.

Let's unpack what that actually means. There are a few strands to this.

Firstly, let's recognise that play is a really important part of child development. According to the United Nations, “Children have the right to relax and play, and to join in a wide range of cultural, artistic and other recreational activities” [1]. It plays an important part in helping children to develop motor skills, as well as social skills and to explore and experiment through role-play: David Cohen's “The Development of Play” [2] provides a good overview of the value of play in child development, including the helpful observation that researchers have made play into a “serious business”, as if play for the purpose of relaxation was somehow a waste of time. That's a sober warning for us, certainly, and note that the children's rights include the right to relax! Anyway, the key point here is that play is important, and if you don't get access to a broad range of play, then you don't get as much chance to develop skills: be they of the cognitive, motor or social variety.

Secondly, there is the matter of integration. There has been a general move towards inclusive education, meaning that more children with physical or cognitive impairments are educated in mainstream schools rather than being segregated into a separate school system. Not all children, certainly, but more children. However, there is a need to recognise that just because a child is educated in the same class doesn't necessarily mean that they're included. Again, I won't go into that debate here: if you want a good overview, you can refer to Barton and Armstrong [3]. The point is that inclusivity doesn't just mean accessibility: it's not sufficient to have disabled and non-disabled children playing next to each other. They have to be engaging in a way that is positive for both of them, from which they both benefit and which they both enjoy. The question is – does this happen? And if not, is there anything we can do to support this?

Our aim isn't to develop inclusive toys per se – that's something I have to say every time I mention the project, because the immediate assumption is that what we're trying to do is to build inclusive toys. Rather, what we want to find out is: what are children's aspirations for playing together? What helps or hinders this? Children are not the easiest people to interview, especially not on such an emotive subject. So we've adopted Alison Druin's approach of Co-operative Inquiry [4], where we encourage children to co-design inclusive toys and games, not because we assume they'll come up with great toys and games, but as a way of better understanding what they want from play. The designs become a focus for discussion, rather than an end in themselves.

To this end, we've undertaken several rounds of working with groups of disabled and non-disabled children, developing ideas into prototypes, testing and refining them. We're now onto the final stages – we've already carried out all the user testing we need. Anne-Marie and Angharad in the process of carrying out a thorough analysis of the data gathered, and I'm in the process of building one of the two final prototypes that we'd like to take in for final evaluation by the participating children. Which has given me a handy opportunity to get my hands dirty with a Raspberry Pi, PiFace and PyGame, which is always a good thing!

And for all that – the concepts, the testing, the analysis – that's for another post. See you in a fortnight. And who knows? Maybe one of these days I'll actually get some pictures up on this blog, and get some formatting sorted out...

 

References

[1] Article 31 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. An overview can be found at: http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf, accessed 26^th July, 2013.

[2] Cohen D. (2006) The Development of Play. 3^rd Ed. Routledge

[3] Barton L. and Armstrong F. (2007) Policy, experience and change: Cross-cultural reflections on inclusive education. Dordrecht: Springer.

[4] Druin A. (1998) The Design of Children’s Technology. San Francisco: Morgan Kauffman.

Speaking into Space...

I've been meaning to get blogging for ages, but as with all things, it's been difficult to find the time. Still, I set myself a “mid-year” resolution that as of 1^st July, I was going to make a start, so here I am. The thing with starting up a blog is that there's no guarantee that anyone is reading it, so it has the disconcerting feeling of speaking into an empty room. Or a dark theatre, maybe, wondering if there's an audience there at all.

And at the time of writing this first post, of course, I can guarantee that no one is reading – since you couldn't possibly know that this blog exists. Still, here it is – broadcasting into the ether.

Anyway, the purpose of this opening post is really twofold: to introduce myself, and to provide a statement of intent for this blog. So, here we go!

Just Who am I, Anyway?

My name is Raymond Holt, and I am an engineer. And like most engineers, I suspect, I'm quite proud of that. I have a BEng and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Leeds, and I work there as a lecturer. Since September 1998, there has been literally no gap in my time here: between my BEng and my PhD I undertook a summer project at the University, and in 2005 I was appointed as a lecturer before I completed my PhD. And I've been a lecturer here ever since.

My PhD was on the subject of decision support in Integrated Product and Process Design: and because decision-making is a human process, I got very interested in human factors, and how we can develop tools that people actually use. I still haven't solved that one, by the way, but this has led me to get very interested in User Centered Design. When I first started as a lecturer, Martin Levelsey and Bipin Bhakta needed someone to lead the User Centered Design work on their Rehabilitation Robotics theme – and I fitted the bill. And I've been involved in work on disability and rehabilitation of various flavours ever since.

My particular area is the acquisition of motor skills in children with cerebral palsy (mainly prehension), though that takes in a whole range of multidisciplinary work across engineering, design, medicine, sociology, philosophy and psychology (among others). The fact that I get involved in research across disciplines is good fun, but as an engineer at heart, it does mean I'm an interested amateur in these other areas. That means I probably misappropriate concepts all the time. It's a hazard of multidisciplinary work – so if I seem to be barking up the wrong tree, or have the wrong end of the stick on something, just shout.

As a lecturer, I teach as well: I teach on the Product Design programme here at Leeds, which is a mix of art and engineering. So my multidisciplinary interests stand me in good stead there.

Why the Blog?

None of which answers the question of why I would start up a blog, or why anyone would want to read it. So, apart from trying to jump a bandwagon that's a good decade old now, why would I do this? Well, mostly I intend to use this as a space to think out loud. I have a whole load of documents full of notes and musings, and I could really do with somewhere to put them in one place – and a blog is (I hope!) a lot easier to look after than a website, and I could do with a web presence to point people to that doesn't require me to upload content via other people. So even if no one reads this, at least I'll have be getting some benefits!

But the other reason for thinking “out loud” is that if anyone does happen by, it's a good way of getting some comment, or at least getting my ideas out there when they're too vague for publication. In that, I'm taking inspiration from Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka over at Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists. I like their subtitle: “a brave attempt to think out loud about theories of psychology until we get some”. I'm not so interested in theories of psychology, but thinking aloud is definitely my kind of thing.

What's an Engineering Imagination?

I've borrowed the term from C. Wright Mills “Sociological Imagination” [1], which apart from being a natty title for his book, would turn out to be a seminal concept in Sociology. Now, Sociologists may well correct me on the finer points of this, but my understanding of the Sociological Imagination is this. Mills was interested in the relationship between individual and society, and noted that social science wasn't just a matter of getting better data, or analysing it more effectively. Measurements are filtered through a whole set of social norms, and individual assumptions and biases. They colour the way we look at the world, and are often deeply embedded in the methods that we used. The term that crops up again and again in relation to the sociogical imagination is “thinking oneself away” in order to see familiar things in a new light. It highlights the fact that science, far from being an objective pursuit, is rooted in social expectations and assumptions, that scientists may not even be aware of: Mills was thinking of social scientists, I particular – of those who saw social science as a process of devising better questionnaires and measurements. Arguably, it applies to all science – perhaps not in the physical mechanics of the scientific process, but in the directions we choose to investigate, and the way we generalise from scientific findings. Certainly it applies to engineering: at a fundamental level, what engineers choose to devote their time and energy to (or sell their skills for). This is similar to the dichotomy raised by Richard Bowen [2]: do engineers work to develop weapons, or provide water?

And that's what I mean by an Engineering Imagination: not that engineers shouldn't be making weapons, necessarily, or that we should all be developing medicine (and there's a whole raft of considerations when it comes to profiting from medicine and healthcare technology). I'm not in a position to take a position on these things – yet. But it's the sort of thing that I wanted to muse on. It's not just about what we engineer, but about the way we engineer it: decisions made in developing products and systems have huge implications for their accessibility, use and consequences (both intended and unintended).

In Conclusion

Right – enough of the brain dump. My aim is to use this blog as a scratch pad, a place to jot down my ideas and musing – some more formed than others – on a number of topics, as well as keeping you up-to-date on my work. Apart from my research on prehension, and inclusive play, I wanted to muse on a number of areas close to my heart: design decision-making, decision support and engineering ethics in particular. My aim is to update roughly every fortnight: and given the time that it's taken to get this post together piecemeal, that seems like a realistic estimate.

So, I've set out my stall: next time, I promise there'll be some content, and that content will be about the Together Through Play project. I'm pushing off into the great stream of the blogosphere – wish me luck...

 

Oh, and give some time to sort the formatting out, OK?

References
[1] Mills CW (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford Univeristy Press.
[2] Bowen WR (2008) Engineering Ethics: Outline of an Aspirational Approach. Springer.