Great to be back at Ysgol y Deri collaborating with teaching practitioners from across the autism and PMLD sector in Wales. With a focus on Enchantment and the new Expressive Arts curriculum, our first “digital imagining” workshop with FabCre8 considered whether co-production could be a viable and feasible method of addressing the digital marginalisation of pupils with profound disabilities.
NAS Autism and Technology
This one-day conference brought a diverse range of speakers and delegates together to share research, practical experiences and ideas for technological innovation. Jamie and Lion set the tone for understanding the impact of technology in day-to-day living – for communication, work and leisure.
Our talk offered a journey through our experiences of developing software, focusing on Attention, Perception, Feedback, Repetition and Flow. We used this opportunity to launch the first release of Somatopia, which aims to bridge the gap between genuine innovation and end users who are disenfranchised through perceptions of disability and lack of resources (human and technological).
We hope that by making the software, code and instructions for designing Somatopia apps available to download, Somatopia will appeal to enthusiasts with expert knowledge, and those who enjoy making and tinkering with technology. See more on the Somatopia page.
Cariad Down Under
Wendy has been in Melbourne, Australia during November, sharing both the Somatopia and Somability projects with Scope Victoria, and presenting at the prestigious 50th Anniversary ASID conference. Both events have led to connecting and sharing ideas with some fantastic people, especially excited to meet up with Sensorium Theatre, Perth, and Back to Back Theatre in Melbourne.
Autism and Good Practice in Design
Great to share insights and experiences of the “flow state” with Damian Milton at the first NAS design and autism conference. From the earliest days of designing ReacTickles we noticed how anxiety reduced and happiness increased when children were absorbed in their flow of interest, so it was fantastic to hear Damian’s view on this.
Accolade Awards Video
Here is a lovely video of the Accolade Awards. The judges were impressed with how the Somability approach to technology could offer new experiences with a traditional service, and cited the project as a “fine example of and co=producing and co-creating”. Here are the judges comments.
Somability finalist in Accolade Awards
We are thrilled to announce that following interviews with the judges we reported on in a recent blog, Somability is one for three finalists in the “Better outcomes through working together” category of the 2015 Accolade Awards. Today the film crew interviewed staff and service users at Rhondda Cynon Taf, Gadlys Learning Curve in preparation for the Awards ceremony at Cardiff City Hall on Thursday, 18 June.
Daniel Marshall wins prestigious Elektra Award
Congratulations to recent Cardiff Met graduate Daniel Marshall for winning the rising star award at the prestigious Elektra Awards in London last week.
Daniel worked with CARIAD on his award winning Empathy project – designing for children with autism. The full project can be seen on his website.
Daniel impressed the panel with his enthusiasm, originality and overall commitment to designing for real
people and real world problems! Well done Daniel and best of luck for the future, we hope to work with you again!
Final workshops underway for ProFoundCoding
Thanks to AnalysisPro and teachers Andrew Walker and Rachel Woodhouse for working with us over the past few months to develop our latest video tagging templates. The project won additional funding from CEWN to create new templates based around concepts of engagement to tag video sessions of children with profound and complex learning and communication difficulties. We will be releasing the template shortly along with instructions on ways to use and interpret the template for teachers in special schools. We will be adding the latest templates and information to our resource and website, ProFoundCoding which we released over the summer.
We spoke about the project at a recent CEWN special showcase event at the University of South Wales, Trefforest where we pitched the next stages to create new employment opportunities in special schools for Performance Analysis. Watch this space 🙂
Showcase event at the Wales Millennium Centre
Thanks to everybody for attending our showcase event at the Wales Millennium Centre especially the staff and service users from the Gladys Resource Centre at Aberdare for creating such a memorable performance. Thanks also to Touch Trust, CEWN, SIP and all of our other supporters for making the past two years so memorable and successful.
New Somability Film released
We are delighted to release our new Somability film, documenting the design and development of Somability from 2013 -2014. Thank you Dan from Dan films, an amazing Job! Thank you also to Cardiff Met for funding the film production.
Watch it here: https://vimeo.com/109148854