Materiality, Making, and Empowerment: Designing Squeeze Interactions in a School for Disabled Children

The world around us is filled with a richness of materials. Through and with our bodies, we experience, explore, and manipulate these materials throughout the day; materials that are sticky or smooth, that bend or break, that wrap them selves around us or that melt away upon touch. Translating this physical way of interacting and being in the world to interacting with and being in a digital environment, one can wonder where the richness went. While interacting with the physical world allows for nuance and expression, interacting with digital technology is mostly limited to clicks and swipes. Examining the materiality of digital technology – the algorithms, the signal processing, the data – we notice that rigid materials of computers influence our interaction with computers and limit our expressivity in the digital.

In this doctoral research, I explore the materiality of soft, conductive materials, and how these lend themselves to create expressive, soft, squeeze interactions. Additionally, I investigate the potential of squeeze interaction to empower children, teachers and therapists in a school for disabled children. Finally, I investigate how to share the multidisciplinary knowledge underlying squeeze interactions with the wider maker community, via a toolkit.

To study these topics, I draw upon Empowerment Theory and maintain a materiality-centered perspective. Moreover, methodologically I apply a combination of research-through-design, reflexive ethnographic practice, and critical making.

To this end, I first present an anthropology, i.e., a yearlong participant observation study in a school for disabled children. I investigate the role of (making) technologies to support children, teachers, and therapists in their empowerment in a school setting, and elucidate how (making) technology risks ignoring the intertwined dynamics between the individual, the organisational, and the community. Next, building on the findings of the anthropology, I present the design and evaluation of the Droplet, a soft device to use squeeze interactions with children with multiple, complex disabilities.

In parallel, I explore the essence of squeeze interactions. To this end, I performed a visual ethnography of softness, reflecting on the diverse dimensions of softness and how these can be captured in a digital materiality. Additionally, I explored the expressivity of squeeze interactions through Brun’s framework of Expressivity in interaction. Upon this analysis, I also present and reflect on the use of a toolkit to materialise interactive squeeze technology. I argue that the decision to build a toolkit is a methodological, epistemological, and ideological decision.

Finally, I present the Skweezee toolkit. The ultimate aspiration of the redesigned toolkit is to leverage the softness and to bring expressivity in squeeze interaction design to practice. This is done via accessible theoretical knowledge including working principles and mathematical foundations of the digital materiality of squeeze interactions, ready to use technical resources including cross-platform hardware and software, and hands-on instructions to make squeeze interactions with available materials. I conclude the research with a reflection on the valorisation of the outcomes of this doctoral study.