Designing Magika, A Multisensory and Multimodal Environment for A New Educational Approach

This paper describes Magika, a multisensory environment that enables new forms of playful interventions for children, especially those with disabilities. Multisensory approaches are grounded on the theories of embodied cognition and sensory integration that emphasizes the formative role of embodiment (the way an organism's sensorimotor capacities enable it to successfully interact with the physical environment) in the development of cognitive skills such as mental imagery, working and implicit memory, reasoning and problem-solving. Differently from current solutions, Magika offers different customizable activities integrated in a synesthetic way; it incorporates digital worlds projected on the wall and on the floor with a large number of connected objects such as toys, ambient lights and materials that allow children to experience tactile, auditory, visual, and olfactory stimuli. The system was designed with the intention of improving “P3S”; a previous version focused on optimizing technology performances (e.g. diminishing connection lags, extend modularity and scalability, etc...). To guarantee a positive user experience our renovation started with a human centered design (HCD) approach and changed the role of final user from being rather marginal in “P3S” to be the core of a new accessible co-design process, considering all players’ characteristics and needs in their singularity and diversity. We explain a process lasting about a year from a design point of view, placing two main objectives. On one hand humanizing technology behind the system starting from user research to define a connected interface for caregivers that give them a control at a level which is not allowed by any other existing tool, added to a procedure that allows an automatic personalization of the child's experience. On the other hand the social impact represented by the democratization of the low-cost and open source technological system and the installation of the multisensory room in the suburbs, that imply a reduction in costs, optimization of local educational resources, higher inclusiveness, and less inconvenience for children and their families that supported by caregivers will experiment new educational and therapeutic approaches. Thanks to a preliminary exploration in two schools we can say that Magika offers unique features that despite being explored initially have already shown their potential.