Or it will be shortly, and I thought I'd post one more time before the Christmas break and the start of 2014. I had intended to end the year by coming to come conclusions about the whole K005 project, and what we learned from it - but I'll leave that to the New Year.
Instead, the classic way to end the year is with a Year in Review type post! I'm sure you'll be thrilled. It's be an interesting year and no mistake, and as 2013 turns into 2014, there's a sense of a change in eras, for a few reasons. Alexis Lefevre, one of my PhD students, has just successfully passed his viva (congratulations, Alexis!), exploring how age, object size and texture impacted the reach-to-grasp action. He did a really nice piece of work, though to date we've only published one paper from it so far - but if you're interested it's available Open Access via PLOS One:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0069040
It was another piece of Alexis' design that gave me the idea for the prototype manipulandum I was showing off not so long ago - his system of interchangeable and end caps attached to a force sensor, allowing rapid variation of size and texture, is quite ingenious. I'll talk you through it, some time: there are a few interesting results, but I don't want to show off too much before we find out where we are with publications. Mark Mon-Williams and I will hopefully be completing the revised version and wiring it up to Opotrak in the New Year.
The massively talented Ian Flatters, another of my PhD students, is now finishing his time with us - off to take a well-deserved place with a surgical tech company, and awaiting viva. But he's still in Leeds, and will be getting a day a month as a visiting researcher, so it isn't goodbye quite yet.
On top of that, Together Through Play ends in about week - and since neither myself, Angharad or Anne-Marie will be doing any more work before the new year, it is, too all intents and purposes, finished. I've just got to right the report, now!
So, there is more of a sense of wheels turning, and a changing of the guard than usual this year. But of course, that just means new things to look forward to, and I'm hopeful that 2014 is going to be a cracker. Mark Mon-Williams gave a rousing speech to our PACLab (Perception Action Cognition Lab) meeting on Wednesday, and as I wind down to take a break, there's a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming online in the new year. Here's a few:
1) Getting the manipulandum up and running. That'll be a good one - I've taken Alexis' design and run with it, and I'm really excited to keep expanding the grip work that Mark and I have been doing. There are some fresh collaborations coming up related to DCD and Spinal Cord Injury. Exciting stuff!
2) Playday 2014: Having missed every Playday during the course of the project, I promised myself we'd do something for 2014, and Leeds Philosopohical and Literary Society have kindly put money towards running an inclusive play event. So, we've assembled a student team, and we're working with Leeds City Council's Breeze initiative to offer something good this year. We have user panels coming up in February - I can't wait!
3) LUDI - I'm part of an EU-funded COST action (Collaboration on Science and Technology), looking at the issue of play for disabled children, bringing together researchers from across Europe - and beyond! I'm really looking forward to it - it feels like there's a lot of opportunity coming up now!
.
It's been interesting getting started with the blog, and I'm still finding my feet. Finding time to blog regularly is much harder than I had imagined, but it's a nice opportunity to get my thoughts and reflections down, so I'll be pressing on in the new year. A few things I'd like to cover are the final outcome of K005, findings from Alexis's PhD, the outcomes of K005, and I'd like to reflect a little more on a recent Twitter discussion on Accessibility vs Inclusivity - it's a really interesting debate, and ties in a lot with what we've discovered in K005. That and the manipulandum, of course!
Anyway, have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year - I'll be back in 2014!
Saturday 21 December 2013
Wednesday 4 December 2013
The project formerly known as K005... Part 2!
I won't repeat the question about where the time goes. It's been
busy, busy times here in Leeds - three of my research students have
submitted their theses since I last posted, and there are two more in
the process of writing up. And a new one has started. And on top of
that, we're finishing off the Together Through Play project, which is
exciting, but time consuming, especially in the middle of teaching!
Trying to get into schools for the final round of feedback (with
prototypes!) really puts the pressure on!
Anyway, there's lots to say about that, but I'll save it for another time. For now, I wanted to recount a little more about our K005 rehabilitation joystick, especially since it got a plug from the Royal Society on Twitter today! This project was funded through the NIHR, who allocated it the code K005 - it's official title was "Novel interactive peer-group activity movement exercise (iP-GAME) System for children with Cerebral Palsy", which is quite a mouthful, so we always just called the project "K005". It was punchy, and we grew fond of it, even if it's a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't know the project! The system is known as hCAAR these days
I mentioned in my previous post, that I'd been brought on board a project to develop a home-based rehabilitation joystick by Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta, whose brainchild the whole system is. We'd developed and tested a simple joystick to allow children to practice reach/retrieve type exercises at home, with power assistance to help guide them through an appropriate trajectory. The results were promising, but the children who participated indicated that they liked to play with friends. And so we were off, trying to extend the system to multiplayer games for use in a school environment.
This is much, much easier said than done. Originally, we had envisaged a set of standalone joysticks, where they could be plugged into any PC by USB, and the games played on them. They'd be portable, flexible (in use I mean – rather than physically bendy, which would have been interesting, but not much help!), easy to move and store... and you could get four or so of them attached to a computer, and a few friends could play together. What could go wrong?
Well, we've always adopted a user-centred approach to our design, so the first order of business was to visit schools, speak to teachers, look at the intended environment – and it quickly became obvious that our original idea wasn't going to work. Portable, plug-in joysticks were a lovely concept, but the teachers who we worked with pointed out that time was at a premium – they couldn't afford to have the class sat waiting for even a few minutes while they got joysticks out of cupboards, made space for them, plugged them in, and so on.
They wanted something self-contained: something that you could push a button on, and it would just work. That meant a self-contained system, and that opened up a whole new world of challenges – on top of the intrinsic problem of developing a game that would be therapeutically useful and enjoyable for both children with and without arm impairments.
Below is the “rich picture” that I drew based on our interaction with schools. It isn't the whole story – I went on to expand it significantly based on subsequent interactions with children, parents and physiotherapists. This raised new concerns – the desire to win (there's no fun in playing a game when you already know you're going to be beaten) – anyone who's played a game against someone who's miles ahead of them. They all went into a version of the Rich Picture that's now lost to history. Well, to a reimaging of my PC's hard drive over the summer, at any rate. It didn't cross my mind that I might ever have need of it again!
Anyway, I'll spare you the details of the development that followed – except to say that the pain largely fell on Andy Weightman (now a lecturer at Manchester University), who was looking after the detail design, and Justin Gallagher, who was responsible for programming the game, and providing an adaptive algorithm that varied the amount of assistance provided based on a player's performance, as well as the input of undergraduate students from our Product Design and Mechanical Engineering courses.. Instead, I'll fast forward to the finished system, which now looks like this:
We also implemented four games, representing combinations of co-operative vs competitive play, and simultaneous vs sequential play, but all were based around the same basic plot: the player plays as a monkey who has to rescue his or her fellow monkeys from a hungry crocodile who plans to eat them for his tea, and the games represented some form of racing against the croc to rescue their friends.
You'll note that our ambitions for six players had to be rather scaled back! Nevertheless, there you have it: a self-contained unit that will allow children to play games that provide reach/retrieve exercise, through joysticks that offer power assistance to aid with a smooth trajectory. Both two player and single player versions exist (the single player version just has one of the joysticks and screens removed).
And it was this version that we took through to the participating schools. I'll save the outcomes for another post (hopefully in less than two months, this time!), but if you're really in a hurry to find out what happened next, we published a fairly detailed account in the Journal of Usability Studies:
“A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment” Raymond Holt, Andrew Weightman, Justin Gallagher, Nick Preston, Martin Levesley, Mark Mon-Williams, and Bipinchandra Bhakta; Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4, August 2013, pp. 111 - 126
Enjoy!
Anyway, there's lots to say about that, but I'll save it for another time. For now, I wanted to recount a little more about our K005 rehabilitation joystick, especially since it got a plug from the Royal Society on Twitter today! This project was funded through the NIHR, who allocated it the code K005 - it's official title was "Novel interactive peer-group activity movement exercise (iP-GAME) System for children with Cerebral Palsy", which is quite a mouthful, so we always just called the project "K005". It was punchy, and we grew fond of it, even if it's a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't know the project! The system is known as hCAAR these days
I mentioned in my previous post, that I'd been brought on board a project to develop a home-based rehabilitation joystick by Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta, whose brainchild the whole system is. We'd developed and tested a simple joystick to allow children to practice reach/retrieve type exercises at home, with power assistance to help guide them through an appropriate trajectory. The results were promising, but the children who participated indicated that they liked to play with friends. And so we were off, trying to extend the system to multiplayer games for use in a school environment.
This is much, much easier said than done. Originally, we had envisaged a set of standalone joysticks, where they could be plugged into any PC by USB, and the games played on them. They'd be portable, flexible (in use I mean – rather than physically bendy, which would have been interesting, but not much help!), easy to move and store... and you could get four or so of them attached to a computer, and a few friends could play together. What could go wrong?
Well, we've always adopted a user-centred approach to our design, so the first order of business was to visit schools, speak to teachers, look at the intended environment – and it quickly became obvious that our original idea wasn't going to work. Portable, plug-in joysticks were a lovely concept, but the teachers who we worked with pointed out that time was at a premium – they couldn't afford to have the class sat waiting for even a few minutes while they got joysticks out of cupboards, made space for them, plugged them in, and so on.
They wanted something self-contained: something that you could push a button on, and it would just work. That meant a self-contained system, and that opened up a whole new world of challenges – on top of the intrinsic problem of developing a game that would be therapeutically useful and enjoyable for both children with and without arm impairments.
Below is the “rich picture” that I drew based on our interaction with schools. It isn't the whole story – I went on to expand it significantly based on subsequent interactions with children, parents and physiotherapists. This raised new concerns – the desire to win (there's no fun in playing a game when you already know you're going to be beaten) – anyone who's played a game against someone who's miles ahead of them. They all went into a version of the Rich Picture that's now lost to history. Well, to a reimaging of my PC's hard drive over the summer, at any rate. It didn't cross my mind that I might ever have need of it again!
Anyway, I'll spare you the details of the development that followed – except to say that the pain largely fell on Andy Weightman (now a lecturer at Manchester University), who was looking after the detail design, and Justin Gallagher, who was responsible for programming the game, and providing an adaptive algorithm that varied the amount of assistance provided based on a player's performance, as well as the input of undergraduate students from our Product Design and Mechanical Engineering courses.. Instead, I'll fast forward to the finished system, which now looks like this:
We also implemented four games, representing combinations of co-operative vs competitive play, and simultaneous vs sequential play, but all were based around the same basic plot: the player plays as a monkey who has to rescue his or her fellow monkeys from a hungry crocodile who plans to eat them for his tea, and the games represented some form of racing against the croc to rescue their friends.
You'll note that our ambitions for six players had to be rather scaled back! Nevertheless, there you have it: a self-contained unit that will allow children to play games that provide reach/retrieve exercise, through joysticks that offer power assistance to aid with a smooth trajectory. Both two player and single player versions exist (the single player version just has one of the joysticks and screens removed).
And it was this version that we took through to the participating schools. I'll save the outcomes for another post (hopefully in less than two months, this time!), but if you're really in a hurry to find out what happened next, we published a fairly detailed account in the Journal of Usability Studies:
“A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment” Raymond Holt, Andrew Weightman, Justin Gallagher, Nick Preston, Martin Levesley, Mark Mon-Williams, and Bipinchandra Bhakta; Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4, August 2013, pp. 111 - 126
Enjoy!
Monday 7 October 2013
Where does the time go?
Well, I set out with the aim of posting fortnightly blog updates - and by my reckoning, that puts me exactly one month overdue. Whoops!
There have been a few reasons for that. Getting ready for the start of term, four research students in various stages of writing up (two now handed in, two to go in the next two months!), a plethora of grant deadlines - organising accreditation from the IED for our Product Design programme, visitors from the Ukraine, Georgia and Uzbekistan as part of the Engitech project... the back end of summer has been a busy, busy time! Well, at least it's interesting stuff. It might have been
And of course, a certain videogame has been released in the last month - you might have noticed.
I am referring, of course, to 22cans' "Godus" (why, was there another big videogame release in the last month? ;o)). I backed it through Kickstarter, and I've already had my money's worth, I can say. For someone who lost an unholy amount of their youth to Populous 2, the game is certainly compulsive! My excuse, of course, is that it's in Beta at the moment. 22cans need me!
Anyway, that's been sucking up a lot of the free time that I might otherwise have used to keep writing the blog (sorry). That, and I've been building a manipulandum out of Lego, cheap force sensors and a couple of National Instruments' MyDAQs (it's pretty swish - I'll post more about it in due course). I haven't even unpacked my Raspberry Pi camera module yet, despite having had it three weeks!
So, I'll be back with more information on my early adventures in inclusive play with the K005 project soon, and more of the output from the Together Through Play project (now in its closing stages!) - which the K005 stuff was meant to be a preamble to! And somewhere amongst that, I'm going to get all the formatting on this blog sorted out, and my LinkedIn and ResearchGate profiles and... well. We'll see.
But just to prove that I've been doing productive stuff with my time, feast your eyes on these pics:
It's a manipulandum - originally proposed by Johansson and Westling (1984) as a way of measuring fingertip forces during manipulation tasks. This one isn't intended for experimental use (it's made of Lego, after all!): rather, it's a concept demonstrator for testing the Honeywell force sensors I've been using. They're pretty good, actually - and at £50 each, pretty reasonably priced, and very compact compared to those you might spend a few hundred or thousand pounds on. My hope is that this will be the basis of small fleet of devices we can deploy in our school-based projects. Not made of Lego, obviously - Lego structures are just a bit too prone to exploding when too much force is applied (though, in fairness, they're easy to repair, so maybe Lego kit isn't quite as crazy as it sounds!). But this is a concept demonstrator. The one shown here is the early prototype: it'll measure finger and thumb forces (which will be roughly equal and opposite in a straight lift). The version I'm currently working on will do thumb, forefinger and middle finger forces, as well as measuring the vertical load force.
But that's a tale for another time!
References
Westling, G. & Johansson, R. S. (1984). Factors influencing the force control during precision grip. Experimental Brain Research, 53, 277-284
There have been a few reasons for that. Getting ready for the start of term, four research students in various stages of writing up (two now handed in, two to go in the next two months!), a plethora of grant deadlines - organising accreditation from the IED for our Product Design programme, visitors from the Ukraine, Georgia and Uzbekistan as part of the Engitech project... the back end of summer has been a busy, busy time! Well, at least it's interesting stuff. It might have been
And of course, a certain videogame has been released in the last month - you might have noticed.
I am referring, of course, to 22cans' "Godus" (why, was there another big videogame release in the last month? ;o)). I backed it through Kickstarter, and I've already had my money's worth, I can say. For someone who lost an unholy amount of their youth to Populous 2, the game is certainly compulsive! My excuse, of course, is that it's in Beta at the moment. 22cans need me!
Anyway, that's been sucking up a lot of the free time that I might otherwise have used to keep writing the blog (sorry). That, and I've been building a manipulandum out of Lego, cheap force sensors and a couple of National Instruments' MyDAQs (it's pretty swish - I'll post more about it in due course). I haven't even unpacked my Raspberry Pi camera module yet, despite having had it three weeks!
So, I'll be back with more information on my early adventures in inclusive play with the K005 project soon, and more of the output from the Together Through Play project (now in its closing stages!) - which the K005 stuff was meant to be a preamble to! And somewhere amongst that, I'm going to get all the formatting on this blog sorted out, and my LinkedIn and ResearchGate profiles and... well. We'll see.
But just to prove that I've been doing productive stuff with my time, feast your eyes on these pics:
It's a manipulandum - originally proposed by Johansson and Westling (1984) as a way of measuring fingertip forces during manipulation tasks. This one isn't intended for experimental use (it's made of Lego, after all!): rather, it's a concept demonstrator for testing the Honeywell force sensors I've been using. They're pretty good, actually - and at £50 each, pretty reasonably priced, and very compact compared to those you might spend a few hundred or thousand pounds on. My hope is that this will be the basis of small fleet of devices we can deploy in our school-based projects. Not made of Lego, obviously - Lego structures are just a bit too prone to exploding when too much force is applied (though, in fairness, they're easy to repair, so maybe Lego kit isn't quite as crazy as it sounds!). But this is a concept demonstrator. The one shown here is the early prototype: it'll measure finger and thumb forces (which will be roughly equal and opposite in a straight lift). The version I'm currently working on will do thumb, forefinger and middle finger forces, as well as measuring the vertical load force.
But that's a tale for another time!
References
Westling, G. & Johansson, R. S. (1984). Factors influencing the force control during precision grip. Experimental Brain Research, 53, 277-284
Saturday 24 August 2013
The Project Formerly Known as K005...
It's been another busy fortnight in Leeds. Fifteen days, in fact,
if you're counting (and I am - I'm like that). You'd think that
things would calm down over the summer, but they stay as busy ever!
I keep promising myself that I'll get round to sorting the formatting on this blog - and getting my ResearchGate profile up to date, and getting a LinkedIn profile together... Ah, well. One step at a time.
I was going to say something more about the Together Through Play project, but I guess before I start drilling down into the detail, I should probably say something about my other research, and how TTP (as it's affectionately known) fits into the rest of my work.
I got interested in the issue of inclusive play through the work I was doing with Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta here at the University of Leeds on upper limb rehabilitation. This is high up in my mind at the moment, because we've just published a paper in the Journal of Usability Studies [1] outlining our experiences!
The project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research, under the title “Novel Interactive Peer Group Activity Movement Exercise”. We had intended this to abbreviate to iP-GAME, but it was always easier to refer to it by the code assigned to it by the NIHR, which was K005. The project ran from 2008 to 2012, so in fact, it overlapped a fair bit with Together Through Play. But let's dial back a bit further.
The whole project was based on the principle of assisted arm exercise: the idea that for children with upper limb impairments due to cerebral palsy, their motor skills can be improved significantly by regular practice, and that practice can be even more effective if it receives guidance. It's a principle that we've applied with stroke patients as well, and it replicates the sort of activity that a physiotherapist would carry out with a patient. The thing is that physiotherapists are in short supply in the NHS and often patients have to supplement the time they get with a home exercise plan. This got Martin and Bipin interested in developing robotic systems that could provide the kind of support offered by a physio, but in the home. And since the sort of reach/retrieve exercise prescribed for these home exercise plans is dull and repetitive, it seemed logical to give the whole thing a game interface, and they had received an NIHR grant (this one by the catchy code “G006”) to develop a powered joystick that would provide the kind of supported exercise described above by playing a videogame.
This sort of Interactive Computer Play-based therapy (ICP-based therapy) is a hot topic with the Wii, and the Kinect – though this grant was back in 2006, before either arrived on the scene – back when the PlayStation 2's EyeToy (remember those?) was the only kid on the motion controller block. This was where I was brought on board, to help with the User testing and to lead the user-centered design of the games. So, the joysticks and games were duly constructed (by Andrew Weightman, now a lecturer at Manchester Met) and deployed in children's homes for evaluation – you can find more detail in our Journal of Engineering Design paper on the subject [2].
Anyway, the results were promising, but the children who helped with the evaluation told us that really, they played videogames as a social activity, and they wanted a game they could share with their friends. And that was the motivation behind K005, and the “peer group” part of the activity. I mean, multiplayer games – how hard could it be? Well, I'll spare the details for next time, but though I didn't know it at the time, I was taking my first steps on the path of inclusive play...
References
[1] Holt RJ, Weightman APH, GallagherJF, Preston NJ, Levesley MC, Mon-Williams M, Bhakta B (2013) A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment. Journal of Usability Studies pp. 111-126
[2] Weightman APH, Preston N, Holt RJ, Allsop MJ, Levesley MC, Bhakta B (2010) Engaging children in healthcare technology design: developing rehabilitation technology for children with cerebral palsy. Journal of Engineering Design 21 (5), 579-600
I keep promising myself that I'll get round to sorting the formatting on this blog - and getting my ResearchGate profile up to date, and getting a LinkedIn profile together... Ah, well. One step at a time.
I was going to say something more about the Together Through Play project, but I guess before I start drilling down into the detail, I should probably say something about my other research, and how TTP (as it's affectionately known) fits into the rest of my work.
I got interested in the issue of inclusive play through the work I was doing with Professors Martin Levesley and Bipin Bhakta here at the University of Leeds on upper limb rehabilitation. This is high up in my mind at the moment, because we've just published a paper in the Journal of Usability Studies [1] outlining our experiences!
The project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research, under the title “Novel Interactive Peer Group Activity Movement Exercise”. We had intended this to abbreviate to iP-GAME, but it was always easier to refer to it by the code assigned to it by the NIHR, which was K005. The project ran from 2008 to 2012, so in fact, it overlapped a fair bit with Together Through Play. But let's dial back a bit further.
The whole project was based on the principle of assisted arm exercise: the idea that for children with upper limb impairments due to cerebral palsy, their motor skills can be improved significantly by regular practice, and that practice can be even more effective if it receives guidance. It's a principle that we've applied with stroke patients as well, and it replicates the sort of activity that a physiotherapist would carry out with a patient. The thing is that physiotherapists are in short supply in the NHS and often patients have to supplement the time they get with a home exercise plan. This got Martin and Bipin interested in developing robotic systems that could provide the kind of support offered by a physio, but in the home. And since the sort of reach/retrieve exercise prescribed for these home exercise plans is dull and repetitive, it seemed logical to give the whole thing a game interface, and they had received an NIHR grant (this one by the catchy code “G006”) to develop a powered joystick that would provide the kind of supported exercise described above by playing a videogame.
This sort of Interactive Computer Play-based therapy (ICP-based therapy) is a hot topic with the Wii, and the Kinect – though this grant was back in 2006, before either arrived on the scene – back when the PlayStation 2's EyeToy (remember those?) was the only kid on the motion controller block. This was where I was brought on board, to help with the User testing and to lead the user-centered design of the games. So, the joysticks and games were duly constructed (by Andrew Weightman, now a lecturer at Manchester Met) and deployed in children's homes for evaluation – you can find more detail in our Journal of Engineering Design paper on the subject [2].
Anyway, the results were promising, but the children who helped with the evaluation told us that really, they played videogames as a social activity, and they wanted a game they could share with their friends. And that was the motivation behind K005, and the “peer group” part of the activity. I mean, multiplayer games – how hard could it be? Well, I'll spare the details for next time, but though I didn't know it at the time, I was taking my first steps on the path of inclusive play...
References
[1] Holt RJ, Weightman APH, GallagherJF, Preston NJ, Levesley MC, Mon-Williams M, Bhakta B (2013) A System in the Wild: Deploying a Two Player Arm Rehabilitation System for Children With Cerebral Palsy in a School Environment. Journal of Usability Studies pp. 111-126
[2] Weightman APH, Preston N, Holt RJ, Allsop MJ, Levesley MC, Bhakta B (2010) Engaging children in healthcare technology design: developing rehabilitation technology for children with cerebral palsy. Journal of Engineering Design 21 (5), 579-600
Friday 9 August 2013
Playday!
Wednesday just
gone (the 7th) was Playday (http://www.playday.org.uk/),
the “national day for play”! Last year, which was the first time
I'd ever heard of Playday, we at the Together Through Play team
(which is a grand way of saying “Angharad, Anne-Marie and I”)
said “We must do something for that next year...”.
Whether they will materialise, remains to be seen – many a slip twixt cup and lip, and I've been in academia long enough not to count my chickens before they hatch, (not to mention acquiring a natty collection of stock phrases!). Hopefully a year gives us good time to get things together – or for everyone to forget I mentioned this if it all comes to naught...
Well, we didn't. Apart from anything
else, August's a tough time for organising something ourselves,
because all the kids we work with are on school holiday, and because
these things don't half take a lot of organising (and I doff my cap
to anyone who organised one of the many events going on for this
year!). Next year, though... well, next year might be different.
We've given ourselves more time this time (*more* than a year, you
see), and we're aiming to hook up with an external partner who knows
a thing or two about organising summer time play events. So suffice
to say, plans are afoot.
Whether they will materialise, remains to be seen – many a slip twixt cup and lip, and I've been in academia long enough not to count my chickens before they hatch, (not to mention acquiring a natty collection of stock phrases!). Hopefully a year gives us good time to get things together – or for everyone to forget I mentioned this if it all comes to naught...
Just two more things:
Inclusive Play have run a survey on,
er, Inclusive Play to celebrate Playday:
http://www.inclusiveplay.com/playday-survey-2013/
And I've been spending the
last few weeks playing around with a Raspberry Pi, PyGame, switch
controls and PiFace – it's been a lot of fun, and I look forward to
sharing the results...
Friday 26 July 2013
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.
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 26th July, 2013.
[2] Cohen D.
(2006) The Development of Play. 3rd 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.
Thursday 11 July 2013
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 1st 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.
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