Description
Balázs Iványi, Truls Tjemsland, Lloyd May, Matt Robidoux, Stefania Serafin · Aalborg University · NIME 2024
A collaborative accessible digital musical interface developed with autistic children at two schools (n=6 at each), using fictional inquiry narratives and tailored non-digital activities to run the design sessions. The result is a tablet app, boxsound, with an identical set of controls at each of the four corners of the screen and one shared object turning in the middle — so up to four children sit around a single tablet and shape the same sounding thing from four sides.
The stated aim is practising social skills by bridging divergent viewpoints: the interface is symmetrical, nobody is the leader, and the only way to change what the group hears is to act on the object everyone else is also acting on. Evaluated through a survey and semi-structured interviews with the children and their educators.
image: Iványi, Tjemsland, May, Robidoux & Serafin, “Participatory Design of a Collaborative Accessible Digital Musical Interface with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder”, NIME 2024 (CC BY 4.0)
On scope. Everyone is around one tablet, so this is co-located, but the bodies barely matter — the interaction is fingers on glass. It is here for its participatory design method and for the four-corner symmetry, not as a case of bodily co-presence.