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Being in Touch With the Core of Social Interaction: Embodied Design for the Nonverbal

The core of human connection is embodied action, with synchrony, coordinated movement, and affective attunement through the body present from infancy. Yet whereas all students have the capacity for co-presence, a common focus of formal educational institutions on spoken language for interaction makes communication inaccessible to some students, thus impeding their participation in learning. As such, toward providing resources for nonverbal autistic students we must ask: How do we design for inclusive social participation of students with diverse interactional modalities? This paper outlines the development of an embodieddesign solution that centers the dynamic body as the nexus of social interaction, thus reclaiming the natural versatility of multimodal interpersonal communication. The Magical Musical Mat is a domain-general platform that allows people to interact through the non-speaking modalities of touch and sound. It removes interactional asymmetry between diverse interlocutors and surfaces the basic human need and capacity to connect with one another, in school and beyond. Background and design objective Social interaction is integral to learning. Whether teacher-to-student or peer-to-peer, learning is inherently situated in social practice (Vygotsky, 1962). Social participation also creates a sense of belonging, an important factor in successful classroom learning (Osterman, 2010). Yet social interaction transpires from the genesis of life, long before it is situated in institutional contexts: even prior to developing spoken language, healthy newborns attend to, and reciprocally attune to others affectively (Trevarthen, 2011). Whereas participation in social interaction within educational contexts is possible for many people, it is not readily accessible to many autistic individuals, who communicate differently, especially nonverbal individuals. According to the American Psychological Association (2013), a core interactional challenge for some autistic learners lies not in speech and language use, but rather with engagement in social communication and social interactions that then may affect language development outcomes. Moreover, autistic individuals do not lack innate desire for social interaction (Mundy, 2016), only they may realize this desire differently from neurotypical individuals, often via non-dominant sensory modalities, attunements, and practices. Thus, given that verbal modalities dominate classroom interaction, extant social practices compromise nonverbal autistic students.