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Research on Accessible Digital Musical Instruments (ADMIs) has highlighted the need for participatory design methods, i.e., to actively include users as co-designers and informants in the design process. However, very little work has explored how pre-verbal children with Profound and Multiple Disabilities (PMLD) can be involved in such processes. In this paper, we apply in-depth qualitative and mixed methodologies in a case study with four students with PMLD. Using Participatory Design with Proxies (PDwP), we assess how these students can be involved in the customization and evaluation of the design of a multisensory music experience intended for a large-scale ADMI. Results from an experiment focused on communication of musical haptics highlighted the diversity in employed interaction strategies used by the children, accessibility limitations of the current multisensory experience design, and the importance of using a multifaceted variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to arrive at more informed conclusions when applying a design with proxies methodology.

Although our embodied dimension has been recognised as a generative source of imagination through movement and gesture, the notion of the body as a generator of more symbolic and descriptive expressions of knowledge remains mostly unexplored in human-computer interaction (HCI). This theoretical paper introduces the sensitising concept of reflection through inner presence, in contrast to reflection in action, as a way to differentiate two modes of embodied reflection generating distinct types of materials for design ideation, inspiration, and information. The relevance of this distinction, and the recognition of inner presence in somatic-oriented design, appears as a way to fill the gap of the reported elusiveness in the description of inner experience for design use. Different than design approaches that use reflection in action, reflection through inner presence generates detailed accounts of somatic and aesthetic qualities, which can be potentially incorporated into the design of artefacts.

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