Contemporary considerations of childhood research ethics recognize children's competence and agency, their rights to be informed about research, and their capabilities to negotiate participation. There is also a recognition of children's assent as on-going and formed in the relationship with the researcher. Drawing on two different data sets, we investigate information and assent as they appear in child-researcher, child-child and child-parent interactions. We argue for the need to pay attention to participants' own meaning-making with regard to informed assent, and show how the presence or non-presence of the researcher in data collection may affect information and assent.

This study explores children with complex communication needs, their peers and adult support persons in play with the talking and moving robot LekBot. Two triads were filmed playing with LekBot at pre-school. LekBot was developed to facilitate independent and enjoyable play on equal terms for children with significant communication disabilities and their peers. Using Conversation Analysis, participatory symmetry and enjoyment were investigated in relation to spoken and gestural communication, embodied stance, gaze, and affective display. Data originated from three video-recorded sessions that were approximately 2 hours long. Four different interaction situations were identified and explored: Participatory Asymmetry, Adult Facilitation, Greater Participatory Symmetry and Creativity, and Turn-taking and Enjoyable Play with LekBot. Neither participatory symmetry nor enjoyment were easily achieved in the play sessions and may require considerable effort, including adult involvement, but creative, spontaneous and highly enjoyable play, correlating with participatory symmetry to various degrees, was observed in a few instances. The findings are discussed with regard to play, AAC and the future development of robots to facilitate play.

The focus of this study is how intended users of the built environment are categorized in strategies, policies, and guidelines for the planning and building process. The image of the intended user reflects a disabling society that also is in conflict with established policies on a society for all. Patterns of inequality are found in the materials, both within and across groups of users. With youth, health, and mobility in the foreground, older persons and persons with disabilities are almost never evident. Disability is made visible only through its mirror: the ability norm.In the review of planning documents from a medium-sized Swedish municipality, the study sought to identify if and how users are described and to analyse which users are included in or excluded from the urban environment during planning stages. The article argues that new ways of thinking, to include a diversity perspective in planning, are needed.

Our goal is to improve the contextual appropriateness of spoken output in a dialogue system. We explore the use of the information state to determine the information structure of system utterances. We concentrate on the realization of information structure by intonation. We present the results of evaluating the contextual appropriateness of varied system output produced with a text-to-speech synthesis system that supports intonation annotation.

Universal Design (UD) is a design approach that recognises and anticipates diversity as a fundamental human condition. UD is also frequently referred to in relation to the social dimension of sustainable development. Central to both UD and sustainability is the way “everyone,” as the target of UD and sustainability goals, is understood. The purpose of the study is to identify how UD’s “everyone” is conceptualised in Swedish UD policy and to provide a set of recommendations for how to categorise people with regards to UD. A qualitative text analysis is used, which investigates semiotic modes in relation to the content, form, and social relations of texts. Based on the analysis, two challenges for UD policy are identified: (i) how to convey that UD is design for everyone, and (ii) how to move away from a thought pattern of norm and deviation. Seven recommendations for how to approach categorisations of people in UD policy are formulated. We argue that an adoption of UD has the potential to bring about sustainable living environments for all, if integrated with social, economic, environmental, and spatial dimensions of development, but that in order for this to succeed, careful attention needs to be paid to how UD is conceptualised, and a radically different way of categorising people is necessary.