Case Study (2nd individual with diagnosed autism)

Name of Individual: CHARLIE

Age: 17

Gender: Male

Diagnosed Age: 6

The Study:

After studying Charlie for a few days I have noticed similar to Max (my last case study) that his capability in living is slightly challenging, but more to do with his social skills. Unlike Max he finds it hard to remember both simple things and things like events from years ago in his life. Charlie has no interest in anything to do with learning the basics such as math, history, english etc.

Similar to Max, Charlies lifestyle is based around his family and strongly around gaming. I could see similar patterns of interest in Sega and Nintendo. Charlie spends a lot of his day playing games and occasionally filming it for his YouTube channel. He also has loads and I mean LOADS of toys that he actually films into a somewhat comedy sketch which is very creative and a good way to express feelings in a directive way. He as well created the content by using very low budget applications such as Ms Paint, Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Powerpoint. He has great knowledge of these applications and is very skilled on them.

Charlie is a very shy person but he expresses himself through his videography. After talking to his mother and father they told me that he used to be so lively due to the fact that he did used to go to an autistic specialist school, however he had to move school which forced him into a new environment with a few not so friendly faces which led him down a very bad path. They are still trying to seek the right help to fix this issue.

I feel that Charlie is a late developer due to evidence such as he hordes toys and watches a lot of cartoons on YouTube, however I did notice that he took a liking to a few old Sitcoms such as the fresh prince of Belair which were introduced to him through his older brother and YouTube.

Like how I felt in the previous case study I feel Charlie knows what he wants to create in his mind but does not have the tools to get to what he wants to portray.

Case Study (1st individual with diagnosed autism)

Here I will be doing a small case study on an individual to find out a little more about Autism and the wide spectrum that it holds. With the two studies I will be getting two individuals of different ages and diagnosis ages. Here is my first case study.

Name of Individual: MAX

Age: 21

Gender: Male

Diagnosed Age: 4

The Study:

After studying Max for a good couple of days I have noticed that his capability in living is slightly challenging, especially with every day tasks and general know hows. He finds it hard to remember simple things but can remember things like events from years ago in his life. He also has a great skill in maths and can work things out very easily without too much struggle.

His lifestyle is based heavily around his family and gaming. As soon as I stepped in his room I could see he was a massive Sega and Nintendo fan. He spends a lot of his day playing old classics and also filming them for his YouTube channel which is very creative and a good way to express feelings about certain things. I also studied how he created the content for the video by using very low budget applications such as Ms Paint, Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Powerpoint. He has great knowledge of these applications and is very skilled on them.

Max is a very lively individual and slightly shy person but he expresses himself with great literature and can hold a very decent conversation. After talking to his mother she told me that when he was diagnosed with Autism the doctors told her that he would never be able to speak or communicate with anyone and this must have been devastating for her. However after seeking the right help he managed to be able to communicate very well a few years down the line which gave the family so much relief.

I feel that Max is a late developer due to evidence such as he hordes toys and watches a lot of cartoons on YouTube, however I did notice that he took a liking to an english soap and a few old Sitcoms which were introduced to him a couple of years ago.

I find Max has an incredibly open mind and is very creative though I feel he doesn’t have the opportunity to gain skills in a more professional way which is why Autistic Creativity is setting up a school for these individuals. He has a very kind hearted personality and rarely gets angry at all. He also has a girlfriend and the things that he does for her on birthdays and such are very creative.

I feel Max knows what he wants to create in his mind but does not have the tools to get to what he wants to portray.

 

Experience Design and creating a game for practise

After looking at ZombieRun! we were then informed by our lecturer that the technical term for the type of design was known as experience design.

Experience design comes in many ways which include: Everyday, Recognised and Group memory. It can be portrayed as such, Active engagement in a physical sense, not just mentally. Loss of ego (self) and boundaries – no agenda (like an aesthetic experience). Designing for the experiences of others is like choreography or staging a show. Specific experienced cannot be guaranteed (like Intentional Fallacy). Experiences live (“read”) beyond the object/artefact. Fluidity of experience and how it unfolds: – stages – time – narrative – intensity – objects – spaces – textures User co-designs or there is collaboration = interactive in some way.

In order to help us think in this designable way we were then given an objective to create a game to inform people about what our display was going to be about. We decided to go with a nice easy board game similar to the well known monopoly game as we only had 40 minutes to think of something and prototype it. Ours was made up of a few different types of spaces including, Go forward spaces, Go backwards spaces, Go to jail spaces, Jail spaces and Question spaces. We gave the audience motivation to win by saying that the losers would have to buy the winner a coffee from our local coffee shop.

The questions were all to do with coffee and there were a few interesting facts within the pile of questions thus if correctly answered would move the player more steps forward to win. Here is a visual of our BETA board game.

Below is some feedback we got from people acting as persona’s which would help for our future display and we will look back on these reflections to make sure there is no confusion in our display.

In my next blog post I will discuss a new idea that may have been scrapped by the time I write it but there will be a separate post for this.

Our display on Mining by children

Due to illness, I couldn’t make the brainstorming sessions that my group had. Once seeing the finished design and talking to the group I had some idea on the decisions made to come up with the final piece.

Like my Mass shooting booklet I see that the group wanted to bring in emotion to their display by showing two images that describe the issue very well. It doesn’t look sinister either which is good because it makes it more approachable with a striking title being simply “TECHNOLOGY CHANGES CHILDREN”. Along side this image was a few notes, but within the notes I noticed that there may have not have been the communication needed, because the notes didn’t really relate to the image as much as it should.

Below is how our display looked in the end. Very practical and simple though I feel that the group really should have got the piece printed or at least converted into a PDF. This was slightly disappointing as that if I was in I would have suggested to do so.

To my surprise our feedback wasn’t too bad, though as I was exploring the other displays I noticed that most of the displays got the same kind of score and some, including ours I feel did not deserve the scoring given. I think everyone within the class were a little too shy to give honest opinions.

Next I will be showing our feedback. I will also discuss my feelings on the other displays and pointing out good ones and bad ones. I have enjoyed this exercise and I have a clearer idea on what the final outcome is going to be. The ideas I had in the beginning of this project are most likely going to be scrapped as I think each one of us are going to be given an issue to display.

Test prints

I thought it would be very necessary to test out what my menus will print out like on just a standard printer. I wanted to check that it was physically easy to read and looked appealing to the eye.

I tested this on just a standard brothers printer that I own at home so hopefully the print will look a lot more better once professionally printed. This test is just on the front cover.

Below are the results.

As you can see the pattern on the front here is not visible at all, the opacity of the pattern was about 30% so in order to make it more visible I am going to bump up the opacity to about 50%.

Obviously when printing on a bulk standard printer it will cut off the edges. So that is not so much an issue as that when it comes to printing at a print shop it will come out as A3 and will then be trimmed from that format.

The print was also tested through an AI file so that may well be another reason as to that the files layers aren’t flattened until it is exported into a PDF. So I am going to make sure to print it from an PDF format.