Chasing Play on TikTok from Populations with Disabilities to Inspire Playful and Inclusive Technology Design

Abstract

There is an open call for technology to be more playful [5, 79] and for tech design to be more inclusive of people with disabilities [80]. In the era of COVID19, it is often unsafe for the public in general and people with disabilities, in particular, to engage in in-person design exercises using traditional methods. This presents a missed opportunity as these populations are already sharing playful content rich with tacit design knowledge that can be used to inspire the design of playful everyday technology. We present our process of scraping play potentials [4] from TikTok from content creators with disabilities to generate design concepts that may inspire future technology design. We share 7 emerging themes from the scraped content, a catalog of design concepts that may inspire designers, and discuss the relevance of the emerging themes and possible implications for the design concepts.