safely turn my back on my kids (ages six and two) for a few minutes is when they are drawing at the kitchen table. When they play independently, I find they tend to get themselves into trouble. Because of their very different interests (my daughter loves dinosaurs, and my son plays only with trucks), they don’t often engage in collaborative play. But when they do, it is short lived because they’re at very different physical, cognitive, and emotional levels. This premise sparked a research project in 2005, between Carnegie Mellon School of Design and the d.search-labs at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Netherlands).

Our strategy was to develop a system that would engage children of varying ages within a localized play space to give parents a bit of a “breather.” What emerged from the project was a prototype called “Lila,” a digital art board comprising a digital touch screen and digital pegboard to provide two primary sources for input to encourage collaborative or inclusive play. The initial idea was to ^{ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Baskinger is an} combine a digital interface with a separate physi- ^{assistant professor in the School of Design at}

Carnegie Mellon University and the co-founder of cal interface to engage children of varying ages, as _{The Letter Thirteen Design Agency. His work spans} in the case of my two kids. across graphic, product, interaction, and environ- _{With Lila, children can draw pictures in a free-} mental design. Mark’s research at CMU focuses on how artifacts communicate through their behavior, form language,

Anne Jackson

^{form style using their fingers and easily combine} and context to inform interaction and shape user experience. His ^{the drawings with animations that are generated} work has been featured in design publications, and has been through the use of the pegboard. Both children can exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the _{generate visualizations to construct a shared story} Museum of Modern Art (New York), I-Space Gallery (Chicago), the

Krannert Museum (Champaign, IL), and the Regina Gouger Miller
^{or image. The Lila system includes a projector} Gallery (Carnegie Mellon University). For a sample of Mark
mounted in the back of the vertical digital compo- Baskinger’s current work, please see: www.letterthirteen.com and
nent to show their creations at a larger scale. Once ^{www.design.cmu.edu}
something is projected, the children can enter that
space to play and act—taking them from screen-
based play back into the real world. The illustra- DOI 10.1145/1340961.1340980

tions then serve as the backdrop to further play and provide the children an opportunity to move between physical and virtual worlds to create scenarios.

Summary

Inclusive design, universal design, assistive design, and transgenerational design are not new, but they’ve historically been seen as specializations. As our population ages, we may find more opportunities to mainstream inclusive strategies into product development. The key to the success of an inclusive future lies in designing for shared abilities with a keen transparency of assistive features that address human deficiencies. The visual language of product forms, systems, and technologies will have an increasingly critical role in making artifacts engaging, appropriate, and empowering.

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