Merry Christmas one and all...

Well,  I'd had it in mind to write two blog posts before the end of the year (other than one to say "Merry Christmas"): one on the robotics facility launch,  and one on FATKAT - the Finger and Thumb Kinetic Assessment tool (the device formerly known as "the manipulandum").

But as ever,  my posting plans have gang aglee, due to the end of term rush and the need to nurse two theses to submission, and away days and grant proposals. Somehow, blog posts are always bottom of the list! But I say that every time,  if course.

Suffice to say that in January I'll give a 2014 retrospective and see how things figured out against the goals I set last January: and what I hope will come out of 2015. And I'll give you that long awaited  FATKAT update.

For now,  this is just a placeholder to remind you that the blog is still alive, I haven't forgotten it - and of course, to wish you all a Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year.

And in true Columbo fashion, there's just one more thing: you should really,  really check out the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures this year.  They are given by the University of Manchester's Danielle George, and is all about Hacking the Home. They chime nicely with the Calderdale event I blogged about from September,  and she hits the notes on playfulness and experimentation that have got me so excited in my recent discussions on the Maker Movement.

And if that doesn't tempt you,  then surely the prospect of a robot orchestra playing the Dr Who theme (inspired by and including our very own Dr Andy Jackson's robo-bass player!) will. I'm looking forward to it!

Anyway, peace and goodwill to all men,  women and robots: I'm signing of to eat mince pies,  turkey and Christmas pud, and keep my fingers crossed that Santa's got a wi-fi adapter and TFT touchscreen for my Raspberry Pi.

Enjoy!

LUDI

Teaching term is always a busy time - especially around this mid-term point. Work set in the first half of term must be marked, while other projects are just starting off, and lectures still need to be delivered. Still, I managed to find time to attend the first full meeting of the LUDI network in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania at the back end of October. Of course, if you've been following my Twitter feed, you'll already know that, since I tweeted pretty much the whole event, including some snaps of Vilnius.

First up, a little background. LUDI is an EU COST (Co-ordination on Science and Technology) action. It isn't a research grant exactly - it doesn't pay for any research to be undertaken. Instead, as the name suggests, it's all about co-ordination: create a network, surveying current research to identify gaps and so create the opportunities for future research collaborations. LUDI's focus is on play for disabled children. I won't give you all the details: you can find some details on the COST website, and at LUDI's own website, which will be kept up-to-date with the network's activities.

LUDI is concerned with play for play's sake, not play-like activities: so no therapeutic play - just play as an end in itself. So from my projects, Together Through Play is in; myPAM is out. Which isn't to say that play-like activities are bad, or irrelevant, just that play for play's sake in disabled children has so far received a lot less attention.

There are four working groups (WG), looking at the definition and major concepts of play (WG1); technologies for enabling play (WG2 - that's the one I'm in!), the current context of play for disabled children (WG3 - my colleague, Angharad Beckett from Sociology is leading this one!) and looking at the aspirations and views of children and parents (WG4). My working group is looking to compile a database of systems that have been used for enabling play, and what evaluation has been undertaken of them.

Of course, the real benefit of these things is that you get to find out about other research and spend some time really thinking about and discussing new ideas. Here are a few of the really interesting things that stood out for me.

First and foremost, that play is the goal, and learning is incidental - a point made by Playware's Jari Due Jessen. We learn and practice skills in order to play - not the other way round. It's easy to put the cart before the horse, especially with educational, therapeutic and even accessible games or toys. The problem is that if the goal isn't play but something else, then the motivation often isn't there. That has significant implications for Button Bash, and the Together Through Play - did we overemphasize accessibility at the expense of playfulness? Could we have done more to find both?

This was neatly captured by the second thing that stood out for me: Prof. Anita Bundy's (of Sydney University) Test of Playfulness, which provided a framework for observing how playful children were. This captures the main ingredients of play (level of control, suspension of reality, source of motivation, and framing), and provides a neat way of thinking through the whole issue of what play is. It emphasises the creative aspect, and the ability to choose freely - that's interesting, because many videogames are the exact opposite. Not all, of course, and there's a reason why "sandbox" games have become so popular - but even so. Options are limited to a pre-defined set, and simple control schemes tend to limit options even further.

The Test of Playfulness also appeared in the third item of note: the work of Kim Adams, Adriana Rios and Pedro Encarnação - who have been doing some interesting work using a Lego Mindstorms based manipulator, that allows children to interact with their environment through switch control. Fascinating stuff - and particularly interesting because it focuses on extending the agency of the child into the environment, allowing them to use it in surprising and playful ways.

All told, a really interesting time, and it's left me with lots of food for thought! More as it comes.

Hack the Home Halifax!

You can tell teaching has resumed - I'm pretty sure yesterday was late September, and yet here we are - a quarter of the way into term! The blog, as ever, goes to the bottom of the To Do List, despite a steady accumulation of things to add. But with new lectures all written, exam nearly ready, upcoming trip to Lithuania for the LUDI workshop sorted out, projects allocated, a PhD thesis examined, another reviewed - time has finally turned up when I can actually get down to some more Blogging.

What I wanted to reflect on today was the Hack the Home event that ran in Halifax with Calderdale Council, FutureGov and Enabled by Design last month. I've been following the Enabled by Design Designathons from their inception, so I jumped at the chance to get involved and provide technical support.

 

The event was taking place at the mighty Dean Clough Mills in Halifax. I have a soft spot for Halifax. Not least because you get some spectacular views, but also because Eureka,  the Children's Museum is there ( and very handy from the Station!), and one of my favourite  bands (not-so-popular beat combo and pioneers of Gothic Metal,  Paradise Lost) hail from the City.

 

If you're not familiar with the Designathon concept, it's this: you get a group of service users and staff from Calderdale Council, put them together with designers, and get them to brainstorm solutions to the service users' problems. Prototyping and testing is a huge part of this, since ideas that sound good on paper don't always work out in practice. Normally, the Designathon lasts two days, giving time to make higher fidelity prototypes to test out on the second day. In this case, only one day was available,  so low fidelity prototypes were the order of the day. But you learn a lot through lo-fi prototyping and testing, and part of the goal was to introduce the concepts of user-centred design, rapid prototyping and  bespoke manufacturing to Calderdale. Calderdale Council have a big push on digital innovation, and they're aware that they have a really strong manufacturing base that can provide these services. The big question for them is how they can bring together these businesses,  their clients and the R&D activities of nearby Universities, which was why they had brought Futuregov and Enabled by Design in.

 

It was a good day. We had five service users, and about forty-five participants from Calderdale Council and local creative (including my colleague Dan Trowsdale from the University of Leeds, and two of our students). This gave five teams of ten, to brainstorm around each user's problems (including the user themselves), each with a facilitator from FutureGov, plus technical support from Mike Willshaw from Radius Creatives (whose 3D printer was a huge hit), and my good self.  There was a lot of energy, and I was really pleased by the way everyone rolled up their sleeves and pitched in. Everyone got into the swing of sketching and model making, which was a relief - there's always the worry that people will be too shy.

 

It's difficult to convey the whole thing in words. Suffice to say it was an exciting day, and a great opportunity to establish links with Calderdale Council on which we hope to build in the future - we're already looking at getting some projects together to address their needs, and hopefully this is the first step in an ongoing partnership. It was also great to meet the FutureGov chaps (particularly Marc Barto, with who had been tirelessly working to set the event up!), and Denise Stephens who set up Enabled by Design. I had some really good chats with service user David Jacques and dedicated biker Andrew Evans, who introduced me to the "Nippi". Both were really excited by the opportunities this opened up.

 

Also - and it's a big also - I was reminded that actually, designing is something that everyone can do. And I was also struck by something that Andrew said: that this wasn't just about design, or about providing a service, but about allowing disabled people to have an active role in designing their environment and future, and take their rightful place in society. Amen to that. I hope we can achieve it.

A Playday Post Mortem ( Part 2)

September's an interesting time for the academic. The divergent stage of early summer - when you dream up new ideas, new studies,  new proposals,  new modules and assignments - gives way to the convergent stages of actually finishing things,  and deciding what will be kicked into next year, or given up on completely. It's been a good summer - a busy one (as the chaos in my office will attest!) but a good one. Lots of opportunities: the manipulandum brought to fruition, a mechanical systems catalogue written, a Playday event run,  new links made, a proposal submitted,  a new module designed,  and a Hack the Home event attended. Plus three Open Days, two PhD students passed viva and corrections. Yeah, busy. But all good stuff - and all in good time. 

I'll have a write up of the exciting Hack the Home event from last week soon.  But first,  I really should get the second part of my Playday Post Mortem up!

In essence: could we have done better?

The answer is: of course we could - but how?  Well,  here are my main thoughts:

1) Better External Branding: we had been warned by Breeze that we needed a snazzy stand to attract people in. And we put a fair bit of effort into this: horse cushions, banners, posters of the Bashians. And then,  because of the rain,  we posted them all at the back of the tent. They looked good,  but you had to get quite close before you saw them.  When you're competing with inflatables,  dress up and craft sessions in a big space, it's difficult to be to be the centre of attention. If I were doing this again,  I'd have a big roller banner at the front of the stand to say what we were, so people could see it from a distance. If people came looking for Button Bash,  it wasn't easy to find us - until you'd found us,  if that makes sense? So, that's one lesson learned.

2) A Snappy Message: How do you describe Button Bash in a few seconds?  Accessible Videogame?  Inclusive?  Switch-based? It's all a bit jargon heavy. And if your core message is: Disabled Children,  Here is a Game You Can Play, then the only hook you've got is patronising at best.  I've yet to figure out the best way of selling this: I just know that we need a better-articulated message about what the game is and its selling points. One to muse over.

3) Going for the Relaxed Opening: Breeze offer Relaxed Opening on certain days, where they open early for disabled children to have a chance to try things out before things get too hectic. They did This on the 7th of August, and - logically - this would have been a good day for us to come on.  However, we were fixated on Playday: so we went for the 6th. That had its advantages from a publicity perspective,  but I still feel that we missed a trick by not going on the day most likely to attract disabled children.

So there you go: the three main messages,  and next time we do this ( and there will be a next time,  make no mistake! ), that's would I'd do differently!

A Playday Post Mortem (part 1)

Hmmm... that title looks alarming like some sort of murder mystery. But here I mean post mortem in the "project review" sense. It seemed like a good time to draw a line under Together Through Play, and since Playday was pure Grand finale,  I thought it would be a good time to review what went right, what went wrong,  and what I've learned for the future. As ever, let's start with the "What was good", before "What could have been better" (you can tell I've done a teaching certificate,  eh? ). Time is short today,  so I'll do what was good today,  and the improvements in my next post.

What was Good

1) That we did it at all.  That's my number one.  It was great to actually show our work of and talk to the public about it. It was great to see the reactions we got,  even the unexpected problems ( as we shall see next post!). I always enjoy showing off what we're doing.  Partly because I'm a show-off, but also because I like to know whether what I'm doing actually means something.

2) Taking a trial run that morning. I'd made some late improvements to the Button Bash code on my laptop. Upon copying it back to the Windows tablet we were using, it wouldn't run at all. I found this out when I did one last check on the morning before setting off. The problem was the number of the COM port for the arduino in the code. Trivial,  easily corrected,  but a headache,  and it would have beem a load more hassle trying to fix during set up. I've demo'd enough kiss to know that you should always test on the morning!

3) Charging the Tablet beforehand.  There was a delay in getting power to us.  In the end it got sorted out in good time before starting,  but knowing I had two hours' charge on the tablet meant there was no stress at all. We had a buffer, even if we didn't need it.

4) Bright posters, bunting and horsey seats. These were courtesy of Sinead Dumigan, one of my Product Design students who supplied the graphics for the game. When you're working on a game,  it's easy to focus on what's on the screen.  You forget that from even four feet away, or just looks like a tablet. Add the posters, bunting and horse seats, and you suddenly have something that looks interesting from a distance and pulls people in.

These were the good.  But what could we have done better?  Tune in next time!

PhD studentship in rehabilitation of grip function

In case you're interested, I've got a potential PhD Studentship up for grabs on Development of a Biofeedback Device to Restore Grasp Function in Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury (click on the link to go the application page!).

This is co-supervised by Drs Sarah Astill and Rachel Coates over in Sports and Exercise Science. Well co-supervised by Rachel Coates and me since Sarah is the lead supervisor!

Anyway, this will look at extending the work I've been doing on the manipulandum to measure grip forces (currently being refined and souped by the outstanding Stuart Watt, a phenomenal undergraduate here at Leeds - thanks to the financial generosity of National Instruments who have sponsored the work!), and developing it to provide feedback to aid the recovery of grip function in individuals with Spinal Cord Injury.

It's a 3.5 year studentship funded via EPSRC, preferred start date is this October, but could be delayed as far as April 2015. The deadline for applications is the 29th of August (two weeks tomorrow - yeah, I know. I know.) Most importantly, it's a super-exciting area for us to be moving into, and I'm champing at the bit to get the manipulandum doing more than just measuring, and actually building in the therapeutic functions. Help me out, people - let's get this show on the road!

I came, I saw, I... played

Or rather, we came, we saw, and we played - since Playday was as much work for Anne-Marie Moore (PhD researcher on Together Through Play) as it was for me.

Anyway, we made it through Playday without the Button Bash kit breaking or the solder giving out, or Windows crashing - or the (at times torrential!) rain stopping play. And I'm bushed. Who knew Play was such hard work? :op 

A lot of fun, though - pics are up on Twitter (You can find me on @rayjholt). Not many of the kit in use (just one, I think). There wasn't much time to grab them. I'd started the day with the idea that I'd be providing a steady stream of Tweets, but that really didn't happen. It's telling that the tweets cover the set up - and then the back end of the day! I soon discovered that trying to "live tweet" an event by taking photos and then posting twitter from your phone makes you look a) anti-social and b) a bit creepy, since the people you've just photographed don't really know what you're doing. 

Anyway, I'll try to get a proper post-mortem of what went well and what we could have improved (you can tell I'm a lecturer, eh?) up here in the next few days. For now, I'm off to have a rest - by getting back to the day job.

Playday Approaches...

Next Wednesday (6th of August) is Playday 2014 - the official day of play! To celebrate, and we've actually got ourselves organised, and arranged to take one of the Together Through Play games, Button Bash, down to the Breeze on Tour event at Roundhay Park.  If you're in the area, feel free to say hello!

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here's a screen shot, and a photo of the whole system:

I'll see you there!

Hello (again) world!

Hi internet! Remember me?

It's over a year since I started this Blog - and more than six months since I last posted! Wowsers! So much for fortnightly, eh?

That is, in part, due to the birth of my second child in the spring (she's doing well, thanks - as are her sister and mother!). You forget how disruptive babies can be! And of course, the rest of life doesn't go away - you can't abruptly refuse to deliver lectures, or mark coursework, or supervise students just because you've had a new baby... And I've had four(!) research students reach viva in the last six months (all passing with minor corrections, thankfully!), with another four in the process of writing up. All stuff that can't easily be dropped!

Anyway life has settled down again, and my bandwidth has returned to the point at which I can think about things like blogs again - so here I am! Where to start? Well, perhaps it's best to start by looking back at the last six months first (and how those aims for the new year are shaping up) and then forwards to the future.

So here we go. I set myself three priorities: funding proposals; getting hands on with the research; and getting more engaged with stakeholders (especially disabled people's organisations). Let's see how the first half of 2014 fared on these fronts!

First up, the Fellowship didn't go in in March. It's still not in, though it's moved on a long way since January, despite babies and PhD Vivas and whatnot. The details are finalised: it's just a matter of costing, letters of support and trying to fit it all down to the requisite seven pages. There can, of course, be something of the old Pareto principle here: it takes a disproportionately long time to dot the 'i's and cross the 't's and it really isn't as exciting as actually having the ideas and working up the proposal in the first place. Still, it's got to be done. On top of that, there's an exciting opportunity to get involved in hosting a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, which would really help us to get some of the seating work I've been doing up and running; and also the possibility of following up some of the work on the engineering imagination, looking at how we can encourage this in engineers. There are other opportunities, but the name of the game is actually getting these submitted: there's always the danger of hopping from one idea to another, and no one measures you on the number of proposals you started.

Second, getting more hands on has been going rather well. I've deliberately carved out some time to work on projects, and one consequence is that I've had the opportunity to flex more of my programming skills. I've implemented a stereoscopic triangulation algorithm for marker tracking using Ian Flatters' Wiimote rigs (which feeds directly into the fellowship); I've built a force platform for measuring centre of pressure; I've been working up the manipulandum in more detail; and I've built a switch-accessible game for Together Through Play from scratch using Pygame and the Arduino (more on that below!). Optotrak has taken a back seat for the time being, as some interesting opportunities have arisen with the manipulandum, and I'm currently working with Sarah Astill over in Sports and Exercise Science to build it into a rig that we can use for studying force control in spinal injury patients. And National Instruments have been kind enough to fund a summer student, the outstanding Stuart Watt, to help develop it, as part a stress test for their new myRIO platform. By the by, we do have a PhD studentship on the go in this area, if you happen to be looking...

Number three, getting more engaged with stakeholders has not moved forwards yet - but I'm optimistic that it's about to. Some opportunities to get involved in an Enabled by Design hackathon offer some promising leads, and we've been showing off the results of Together Through Play down at New Designers, and will be heading off for a Breeze on Tour event next week - so at least my head's above the parapet, there. Just got to make the most of these opportunities...

So, that's the last six months in a nutshell. The immediate future holds more of the same: finishing off those proposals, re-establishing some old partnerships that have rather lapsed in the last 12 months, building new bridges and getting the manipulandum polished off and used. It's going to be a good summer, I reckon.

But what of the blog? Well, I'd like to move away from these lengthy reflective posts, towards something a bit more focussed. And there are two things I'd like to include. One is the outcomes of research. I still owe a summary of the outcomes from K005; and with Together Through Play finished there's a nice opportunity to summarise the outcomes which we're writing up for publication. The other is to do some thinking aloud: Mark Mon-Williams and I are looking into grip modelling, and it seems like this would be a good place to chalk down a few ideas, and describe the major concepts behind it.

So stay tuned!

No New Year's Resolutions

I don't do New Years' Resolutions. Or rather, eighteen years ago, I made a New Year's Resolution to stop making New Years' Resolutions, and it's the only one I've ever managed to stick to! That's partly because I don't see the New Year as anything intrinsically special – if there are things that need to be done differently, then there's no time like the present, right?

That said, there are certain points in the year where the deadlines and daily commitments recede enough that you can spend a bit of time planning ahead, and the New Year is generally one of them. The others, for me, are the start and end of the summer – it's a good time to put your house in order, check that the To Do list is up-to-date, and make sure you're planning in time for the important activities, not just those that are most urgent. Funnily enough, I've just been reading a couple of other posts on exactly that subject. Then again, I've also just been reading that the blog is dead – d'oh! And just when I was getting my into stride, too...

So, what are my plans for the spring, then?

The top priority is funding proposals. I was named as an investigator on just three funding proposals last year, and I wasn't Principle Investigator on any of them. The priority last year really was on tidying up ongoing research – finishing Together Through Play, submitting publications, and reviewing theses. But it's not as if I haven't been working on proposals. I've built up a backlog of four that are getting close to completion, and my goal this year is to get them all submitted. I'm not unrealistic enough to think I'll get them all done this spring, but I would at least like to have my EPSRC Early Career Fellowship in by the end of March. Not least as I'm expecting to take some paternity leave in March! We'll see how that goes.

Another priority is to be hands-on with my research this year. I was going to say “more hands on”, but I think I've been doing this pretty effectively over the last 18 months. Nevertheless, I want to make sure that that continues. The time I've spent with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Python and LabVIEW over that period, and the time spent building the manipulandum has really brought home to me the benefits of keeping your technical skills sharp.

For one thing, it makes you an actual engineer, rather than someone who just “thinks about engineering”. It also means that all the technical skills don't walk out the door with every PhD student who graduates, or PDRA who moves on to better things. And it's much easier to supervise projects when you have a good idea of how to implement things yourself, rather than when you're depending on third parties for support – I found this when I ended up being the technical support on the Together Through Play project. That, and it makes proposal writing much easier.

I've already spent an afternoon with Opotrak this year, looking at getting the manipulandum up and running with it, and developing some data capture and post-processing software to go with it. It's a slow process, not least as this is effectively “overtime” - work I have to put in over and above my day-to-day teaching and supervision duties. Still, it makes me tick, and scratches an itch that you don't get just telling other people about doing this, or in the case of PhD students, watching other people do it on your behalf.

Another thing that I want to do this year is to try and get more engaged with Disabled People's organisations here in Leeds. One of the many things that Together Through Play has opened my eyes to is the number of these organisations here in Leeds, and it makes sense to try and get involved with them. I'm viewing the collaboration with Breeze as a step towards this. Experience tells me that this is anything but easy – you don't get a workload allowance for it, so it's another thing that you end up doing over and above normal duties, mixed in with caring for your family, and trying to sustain some semblance of work-life balance. So I'm always a bit trepidacious: but there's also the risk of having a bunch of ideas that are really just technical toys, or taking disability as an “interesting theoretical problem” to be solved with gadgets. Or research as voyeurism – that's another risk. After all, just because educators or clinicians, or other researchers want the tools you're working on, doesn't automatically mean they'll benefit the people who kindly volunteer for your research. So, we'll see how that goes, too.

No resolutions, then, but a few targets. It's going to be an interesting year.