Inclusive Cross-sensory Social Play
Dr Oussama Metatla’s 5-years ERC Consolidator Grant to study cross-sensory cognition and early development technology interventions for blind and visually impaired children and their sighted peers.
We will soon be recruiting Postdoctoral researcher and PhD students to join an interdisciplinary team working on inclusiveXplay project. Get in touch if you have strong HCI, engineering, cognitive science, and/or co-design skills
Assistive technologies (ATs) help disabled individuals to perform functions that might be otherwise difficult or impossible. However, their design has been largely grounded in a medical view of disability, focusing on addressing the functional limitations imposed by medical conditions at the expense of the situated and social nature of meaning making between a disabled person and their social and physical environments. This has had inadvertent negative impact on the inclusion of disabled people in society, particularly for disabled children.
With inclusiveXplay, I aim to radically change the way we design, engineer and evaluate assistive technologies for blind and visually impaired (BVI) children by integrating notions of cross-sensory experiences with social engagement with sighted peers.
inclusiveXplay will establish a novel interdisciplinary coupling of engineering, scientific foundation and child-centred design to create a new framework for inclusive cross-sensory assistive technologies.We seek to understand cross-sensory cognition that could be shared between BVI and sighted children, to use this understanding to ground the engineering of novel cross-sensory playful shape-changing technologies, and to apply the resulting knowledge to the design of an early development intervention that we will evaluate in-situ.
Findings from inclusiveXplay research will lay the foundations for a new paradigm for inclusive assistive technologies, which will revolutionise assistive technology research, and transform policy and practice around early child development and equity for disabled individuals in society.
Available positions
We are seeking to appoint two outstanding postdoctoral researchers to join the inclusiveXplay in 2026. The two roles form complementary stages of a research pipeline that combines studies of cross-sensory cognition, inclusive co-design research, and the engineering of novel cross-sensory technologies to develop inclusive social play technologies.
- Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Inclusive Co-design (24 months): You will lead the design research and co-design aspects of the project, working with preschool-aged children, their parents, and early-years practitioners. You will develop novel inclusive cross-sensory co-design approaches to generate orienting concepts, scenarios, and early prototypes of meaningful social play experiences that support early development for both blind/visually impaired and sighted children.
- Contact Oussama to express interest or if you have questions.
- Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Cross-sensory Fabrication & Playful Interaction (24 months): You will lead the development and cross-sensory fabrication aspects of the project, translating insights from cross-sensory cognition and co-design into novel technologies that support inclusive play and early development. This role focuses on designing, fabricating, and evaluating cross-sensory interactive systems that combine multiple sensory modalities to create new forms of inclusive social play for blind/visually impaired and sighted preschool children.
- Contact Oussama to express interest or if you have questions.
inclusiveXplay is an ERC-selected, UKRI-funded project.
