The ReacTickles project, based at Cardiff School of Art and Design, was awarded funding by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in 2005. The funding supported two years of participatory development, which involved teaching staff and children with autistic spectrum conditions (ASCs) aged between four and seven years, at a school for children with special educational needs in Wales, UK. The overall aim of the project has been to encourage children to playfully engage with technology in a variety of settings, both at home and at school and to evaluate whether an interpretive and explorative, rather than a directly purposeful environment, can reduce the anxiety that inhibits social communication and imaginative thinking for children on the autism spectrum. The outcomes of the project have included the ReacTickles software, the ReacTickles website [www.reactickles.org], and the ReacTickles Creativity Box.
The ReacTickles software has been designed to run on technology systems that are in use in most mainstream and special education schools. Broadly speaking, these are desktop, tangible (for example touch screen and interactive whiteboard), mobile and networked technologies. ReacTickles can be played in any input mode, for example, mouse, keyboard, microphone, touchscreen, interactive whiteboard or a range of assistive technologies; the ubiquity of these ordinary devices proved to be important for the research, as they were familiar to all participants thus reducing the need to provide additional. ReacTickles are specifically designed to promote interactive play; the “look” of Reactickles is non-representational and supports inclusive experiences that are independent of verbal communication. As 2-dimensional abstract forms, they react to sound or touch as though they are 3-dimensional objects, an effect that is achieved through a variety of phenomenological and chromatic effects, for example elasticity, velocity, gravity, inertia, translucency, proximity and layering.
(i) Participatory Design
Participatory design (PD) is a method whereby people who use the design and those who are affected by it are included throughout the process. The participatory design movement does not conform to a single orthodox line of investigation; its core aim is to engage people from diverse perspectives, backgrounds and areas of concern, in meaningful and purposeful collaboration and change. Children have been involved in the design of ReacTickles through classroom activities organised by teachers. Video analysis and observation of children playing and teachers being innovative as they acted on prototypes formed the basis of the participation. The level of prototyping ranged from low fidelity look-like screens to more sophisticated interfaces, developed in response to the patterns of interaction that were revealed by children through the play experience . In addition, a workshop was held that invited children to create mobile ReacTickles by exploring other forms of non-verbal, non-digital and digital communication. Other workshop activities involved stakeholders, designers and researchers in developing playful ReacTickle-style interfaces in interdisciplinary teams.
(ii) Phenomenological distinctions
Much of the success of ReacTickles is understood to have arisen from the fact that they are simple, non-representational forms. So much of new technology is concerned with "reality" or hyper-reality, claiming to introduce lighting, shadow and spatial attributes of 3-dimensionality to make interaction more immersive and plausible. The cognitive impact too much information is that it heavily determines the mode and purpose for interaction. ReacTickles work on the basis that inanimate forms, represented 2-dimensionally, become engaging and irresistible when subject to force, triggered by interaction. In deliberately avoiding the trend towards realism, ReacTickles foster ambiguous, imaginative, creative and highly personal interpretations. The joyfulness experienced by audiences of early animation films is testimony to the pleasures derived when we perceive the phenomenologocal properties of objects. Compelling narratives emerge that challenge and transcend belief as objects assume character through the forces that act on them.
Building on the idea of physical phenomena that situate objects in the world, new ReacTickles in development are classified through the way they respond to five forms of energy: elasticity, velocity, gravity, inertia and momentum. An elasticity ReacTickle can be distorted under tension or compression as the user pulls it in different directions; a gravity ReacTickle will be pulled downwards at different speeds depending on the impact the user makes on its perceived dimensions; a velocity ReacTickle is defined by acceleration visible in the both speed and direction triggered by interaction; an inertia ReacTickle continues moving at its current speed and in its current direction until interaction causes its speed or direction to change. A ReacTickle that is not in motion will remain at rest until some force causes it to move. A momentum ReacTickle has residual power that directs its motion in relation to its position, orientation and other properties in the environment —in this scenario the user is seen as an important element of the environment as he or she interacts.
By virtue of having no predetermined purpose a ReacTickle can act as a tool for focusing attention and making meanings in contexts that arise through personal interest, a less reductive means of yielding imagination. The image belowshows a ReacTickle on a monitor screen; it looks like a number of circles. When the user interacts with the circle it appears to pop, wobble or float off screen.
The captured responses of children playing with this ReacTickle show them describing the ReacTickle as a “bubble”, expressing delight and excitement as it responds to their exploration. There are many variations on this theme, which have emerged when children, both individually and in groups, repeat their actions and become immersed in anticipating the response of the bubble and realizing that it may behave differently depending on how often it is touched, its size and how close it is to the edges of the screen. In another example, a child used a stylus pen to point to and control circles on the interactive whiteboard, and held them just above the shadow created by his head exclaiming, “look - the bubbles are coming out of my head”. He then proceeded to make his shadow eat the bubbles. The narrative extends as children add their own complexities through interacting with each other and the technology (input and output) in an embodied manner.
(iii) Sensory exploration
“Prescence of colour should include hybrid identities: effects that change colour according to variations in conditions – translucency, overlapping colours, layers and pressure” (Ceppi & Zinni, 1998, p6)
The ReacTickles environment is conceived as a multisensory place where each ReacTickle offers different sensory characteristics to enable experimentation with colour, light and shadow, and a choreographic and improvisational form of interaction.
Simply by creating an interface that elicits varying experiences with colour, enormous creative responses can be enabled. For examaple, intrinsic colour, that is the colour that belongs to the environment, for example this could be a monitor screen. can be explored when we apply colour. To illustrate this, a simple ReacTickle screen responds to interaction by changing colour, when a circle appears the interaction develops through the changes in foreground and background colour. Children playing with this ReacTickle were seen to perform a variety of movements, both graceful and excited, as they we able to introduce new colour through their actions. These movements had a distinctly rhythmic quality and demonstrated a desire to be observed by others. In considering how colour might encourage imagination, it is worth thinking of colour for its kinesthetic value. Colour can be shiny, smooth, dazzling, loud, harmonious. When interaction is applied to colour through strategies for feeling, smoothing, stroking, pressing, circling, squeezing, pulling, in other words, exploring, extraordinary possibilities arise that are highly personal, individual and enchanting. This is the basic premise of how ReacTickles works, affording a holistic engagement between the sensing person and the environment, an experience necessary for emotional growth. DEWEY??
(iv) Contexts should emerge through experimentation
One of the most frequently asked questions that a teacher asked when introduced to ReacTickles was, “What am I supposed to do with it.” Seemingly ambiguous in its use, on initial inspection it was unclear how something that had no obvious purpose could engage children or fit into curriculum frameworks. However, as soon as the software was installed and introduced to children, their teachers discovered many possible contexts, influenced by their own knowledge and experience and the settings in which they regularly taught. Most significantly, the teachers discovered contexts by responding to children. In interviews following multiple sessions with ReacTickles over an extended period, varying from a few months to one particular group who used it over a period of two years, it appeared that both teachers and learning support assistants were able to invent new contexts as they identified creative responses in children that may not have been possible in more traditional Information Communication Technology (ICT) settings.
On an anecdotal but highly relevant note, an outcome of the abstract nature of ReacTickles was that they were not perceived as conforming to a particular genre. By this I mean that they did not have “cartoon-like” features, which are typical of most children’s games. As a result many parents, siblings and teachers expressed a desire to join in demonstrated pleasure through interaction with ReacTickles and the children.
