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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 currently recruiting for two postdoc positions:

  • Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Inclusive Co-design: we are looking for candidates with strong co-design background engineering background to imagine, design, prototype interactive technology to support playful interaction for early development of disabled and non-disabled preschool-aged children.
  • More and information and how to apply here. Contact Oussama if you have questions.
  • Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Playful Edible Interfaces: we are looking for candidates with strong background in human-food interaction and edible interfaces to imagine design and engineer playful edible interfaces and study their impact on early development of disabled and non-disabled children.
  • More information and how to apply here. Contact Oussama if you are interested.
  • PhD in Cross-sensory Shape-changing Interfaces: Contact Oussama for details. We are looking for candidates with strong background in fabrication, design and hardware development to work in the area of cross-sensory shape-changing interfaces and child-computer interaction; in this PhD project you will design and engineer shape-changing interfaces and study their impact on early development of disabled and non-disabled children. You will employ iterative hardware design and development to construct and evaluate a range of prototypes. This will contribute new knowledge to the growing body of literature on multisensory interaction, shape-change and particularly how these are applied in the areas of disability, accessibility and child-computer interaction.
  • PhD in Playful Edible Interfaces: Contact Oussama for details. We are looking for candidates with strong interest to work in the area of edible interfaces and human-food interaction; in this PhD project you will design and engineer playful edible interfaces and study their impact on early development of disabled and non-disabled children. You will employ iterative hardware design and development to construct and evaluate a range of prototypes. This will contribute new knowledge to the growing body of literature on multisensory interaction, shape-change and particularly how these are applied in the areas of disability, accessibility and child-computer interaction.

inclusiveXplay is an ERC-selected, UKRI-funded project.