Living Lab @ Magic
The Rix Centre is building a 'Living Lab' with its neighbours in East London.
Together we are developing and trialling lots of different ways of using multimedia to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities and their supporters.
The Rix Centre is bringing their Living Lab into the Play Room at the Magic Lab to explore the potential of multimedia and gaming to enrich the social lives of people with learning disabilities.
The Rix Centre has already developed an array of accessible multimedia games designed to help people who have difficulty reading social signs and understanding the different ways we communicate.
In the magic lab we'll be taking this work forward in a dynamic partnership with Soda, the BAFTA award winning creative technology team. Young people with learning disabilities find popular youth network sites like Myspace and MSN difficult to use. The Rix Centre and Soda will work together to adapt the 'Sodafolio' package so that young people with learning disabilities can find their own ways of joining the online 'social networking' boom. This work will build on the Rix Centre's pioneering work in Multimedia Advocacy, whereby people without conventional language use cameras and computers to have a voice, plan their lives and tell their own stories. Our aim is to build tools, games and sites with partners in East London and then to roll these out online via The Big Tree, our learning disability web portal. We aim to make the Internet truly inclusive and to tap its potential to contribute to wider social inclusion in the real world!
The Living Lab is a long-term project of the Rix Centre for innovation and learning disability funded by BP and the Jack Petchey Foundation.