Marc Fabri

Marc Fabri
Leeds Beckett University | LEEDS MET · Leeds School of Arts

PhD

About

60
Publications
33,234
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Introduction
My research revolves around the Participatory Design of technology, or in other words finding new solutions to old problems. I lead Autism Research Lab (https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/larc/live-research/autism-research-lab/), the Erasmus-funded projects IMAGE (www.imageautism.com) and DesignMyFuture (www.designmyfuture.eu). Previously I led Autism&Uni, an EU-funded project that produced now widely-used resources to help autistic students during their transition into HE (www.autism-uni.org).

Publications

Publications (60)
Article
Full-text available
Purpose of this paper: The paper reflects on engaging young autistic people in the participatory design of the Autism&Uni online toolkit. The purpose of the toolkit is to provide autistic students with information and strategies for dealing with the challenges they may encounter when entering higher education. The study adds to existing research on...
Book
Full-text available
This guide is for specialists directly supporting autistic students. This may be as part of a disability support team within a HEI, or for an independent organisation that provides services to HE. We share insights from our research and from good practice across Europe that will help you improve student experiences and engagement with your informat...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper reports on a study aimed at creating an online support toolkit for young autistic people to navigate the transition from school to university , thereby empowering this group in developing their full potential. It is part of the Autism&Uni project, a European-funded initiative to widen access to Higher Education for students on the autism...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The application of persuasive technology has been shown to be effective in a weight management context. However, it has been observed that the impact is not as significant as predicted. The aim of this project was to investigate whether a Design Thinking approach could generate new insights that could be used to drive the development of an innovati...
Article
Full-text available
The use of avatars with emotionally expressive faces is potentially highly beneficial to communication in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), especially when used in a distance learning context. However, little is known about how, or indeed whether, emotions can effectively be transmitted through the medium of CVE. Given this, an avatar head...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Many technology designers strive to involve end users in the design process, aiming to produce better outcomes. However, designers may struggle to engage autistic users effectively due to a lack of understanding of autistic characteristics and preferences. This systematic literature review aimed to identify how autistic adolescents and adul...
Article
Full-text available
An unprecedented number of autistic people are completing university and they frequently face unemployment after graduation. However, research focusing on the forms of graduate capital and their employability is scarce. The focus of existing research has been on non-autistic, or neurotypical, graduates. The human, social, cultural, identity and psy...
Book
Full-text available
This guide has been created to support you as an employer who wants to employ and include autistic workers in their organisation and gain some insight and awareness of autism. You may have already considered autistic students or graduates for a job role, perhaps without even knowing it. Here you will find key information, tips and guidelines, based...
Book
Full-text available
This guide has been created to support you in your role as an academic. You may have already helped autistic students or graduates develop their employability skills or with finding a job, perhaps without even knowing it. Here you will find key information, tips and guidelines, based on the experiences of other academics and autistic people. As ac...
Book
Full-text available
This guide has been created to support you in your role as a careers advisor who works with university students or graduates. You may have already supported autistic students or graduates, perhaps without even knowing it. Here you will find key information, tips and guidelines, based on the experiences of other careers advisors and autistic people....
Book
Full-text available
This guide has been created to support you in your role as a senior manager or policymaker in HE. Your past decisions may have directly impacted autistic students or graduates, perhaps without you even knowing it. Here you will find key information, tips and guidelines, based on the experiences of other senior managers and autistic people.
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper presents a literature review investigating the suitability of participatory design when conducted with autistic adults. Six relevant papers were discovered, with key information extracted prior to analysis. A thematic analysis revealed six core themes of adaptations and considerations to be made when working with autistic adults: (1) app...
Article
Full-text available
Although an unprecedented number of autistic students are entering higher education, research focusing on their sense of belonging is scarce. Autistic students’ sense of belonging can be jeopardized due to the students’ encounters with a network of social expectations, activities, responses and biased attitudes. Using a participatory approach, our...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose: The study aimed to reveal barriers and their coherences between discrimination and self-perceived employability which students and employees on the autism spectrum often face and need to overcome. These include discrimination based on disability, when applying for a job or retaining employment. This research located barriers in three diff...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose This research aims to examine effective support strategies for facilitating employment of autistic students and graduates by answering the following research question: What constitutes effective employment support for autistic students and graduates? Design/methodology/approach Data were collected using the method of empathy-based stori...
Article
There is a growing population of young people with autism entering higher education and successfully completing qualifications, however, their postgraduate outcomes are often some of the poorest. This study responds to the gap in research regarding the transition out of higher education and into the labour market for this group. It outlines a two-p...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the steps taken to improve support in universities, many students and graduates with autism face a substantial employment gap when completing university as compared to any other student group with disabilities. The literature shows that often students with autism do not have appropriate support to prepare them for entering the workforce. Th...
Article
Full-text available
Increasing numbers of students on the autism spectrum enter higher education (HE), hoping to develop their skills and independence. However, many find it difficult to transition to and succeed in this environment, and the support provided by universities can be inconsistent as highlighted by a recent review. This study explores the personal experie...
Conference Paper
This contribution focuses on autistic people’s transition from education into work, and the substantial employment gap that exists. Many young autistic people successfully complete their education, yet regularly fail to secure or retain employment afterwards. Reasons are multi-fold: ineffective careers advice, poor employability skills, biased rec...
Article
Full-text available
EXTRACT FROM EDITORIAL: This Special Issue focuses on examining methods, approaches and theoretical underpinnings for effective participation of autistic end users. We received 17 submissions to the Special Issue. After three rounds of rigorous reviews by an international panel of reviewers, five papers were eventually accepted for publication. We...
Chapter
Full-text available
Autism is a lifelong developmental condition that affects how a person communicates with and relates to other people, and to the world around them. It is also a spectrum condition, which means that it affects different people in different ways. It is estimated that around 1 in 100 people are autistic (Brugha et al. 2012). A substantial proportion...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
User participatory design is considered to be one of the best methods for understanding the needs of a target audience and creating high quality, well designed solutions to meet their needs. For many design students, the principles of participatory design in the creation of new user experiences are part of their curriculum. However, the involvement...
Book
Full-text available
This guide is for teaching staff at Higher Education Institutions. We share with you practical tips based on evidence from our research to enable you to make your learning and teaching practices more accessible and support you to build better relationships with autistic students. We have developed this guide with the help of autistic students, the...
Book
Full-text available
This guide is for managers and senior academics at universities and higher education institutions, providing you with information and evidence to help you develop policies and practices that will benefit autistic students and improve the student experience at your institution. We have developed this guide with the help of autistic students, their...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Autism&Uni is an EU-funded project which aims to support greater numbers of young adults on the autism spectrum to gain access to HE and to navigate the transition successfully. This paper reports on the research done as part of the project, specifically an in-depth literature review and a multi-national mapping survey in five European countries. T...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper reports on the insights gained from introducing Design Thinking into the final year of a UK university course where students created positive behavior change interventions. The rationale for course design and teaching process is outlined, with a discussion of design as an engineering process versus an innovation process. The students fol...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The application of persuasive technology in web-based and mobile phone-based systems is well established, particularly in the health domain. However, a greater understanding of the effectiveness of the techniques deployed is needed to facilitate the successful transfer of research findings into practical applications. The context explored here is t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Immersion, referring to the level of physical or psychological submergence of a user within a virtual space relative to that user’s consciousness of the real-world environment, has predominantly been established as an indispensable part of interactive media designs. This is most prevalent in Virtual Reality (VR) platforms, as their applications are...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper reports on the results of a study investigating how nutritional eating behaviors can be improved by presenting a cooking-based website for parents to use with their children. Participants’ eating behaviors were closely monitored via questionnaires and food diaries. Results show that over the course of the study, children’s willingness to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Levels of overweight and obese individuals have been seen as rising across the globe. This has caused concerns with regard to how active individuals are and realization that a high percentage of the population do not meet the weekly requirement of physical activity. Current focus has been on the capabilities that new technologies can offer as an in...
Article
Emotion influences both human-human and human-computer interactions in most of our daily experiences. They affect our physiology, facial and bodily expressions, decision making, and social interactions, and are what make our interactions human. As computing is changing and becoming increasingly social in nature, the role of emotions in computing ha...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
As computing is changing and becoming increasingly social in nature, the role of emotions in computing has become ever more relevant and commercial. Emotions are central to culture, creativity, and interaction. The topic attracts more and more researchers from a range of multidisciplinary fields including design, gaming, sensor technologies, psycho...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We present our work on emotionally expressive avatars, animated virtual characters that can express emotions via facial expressions. Because these avatars are highly distinctive and easily recognizable, they may be used in a range of applications. In the first part of the paper we present their use in computer mediated communication where two or mo...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents part of our wider research project concerning the design, development and evaluation of computer systems for children with autism. Research currently being carried out concerns how children with autism recognise human facial expressions of emotion and how the use of computer- based animated characters might help them in this rec...
Article
Full-text available
Instant Messaging (IM) has become an effective and convenient way for many to chat in real-time, over a distance with friends, family, student peers and colleagues. Messaging Tools such as Microsoft's MSN® Messenger or Yahoo!® Messenger typically support text chat, show a picture of each interlocutor, and allow exchanging emoticons which are small...
Article
Full-text available
We argue that the use of collaborative virtual environments (CVE) which incorporate emotionally expressive avatars has the potential to engender empathy amongst users of such environments, and that the use of this technology is potentially valuable for people with autism. Empirical work in both areas is discussed. Results suggest that the introduct...
Article
Full-text available
Instant Messaging has become an effective way for many to chat with friends and colleagues. The Messaging tool typically shows a picture of each interlocutor, supports text chat and allows exchange of emoticons, small emotional representations of one's feelings. This paper investigates how different ways of visualising such emotions can affect the...
Article
Full-text available
Instant Messaging (IM) tools such as Microsoft® MSN Messenger or Yahoo!® Messenger enable people to communicate in real-time, via text-chat, over a distance. Typically emotional icons, or emoticons, can be embedded into messages as intentional communicative signals. Recent IM versions also allow display of a picture representing oneself, and in tur...
Article
Full-text available
The use of avatars with emotionally expressive faces is potentially highly beneficial to communication in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), especially when used in a distance learning context. However, little is known about how, or indeed whether, emotions can effectively be transmitted through the medium of CVE. Given this, an avatar head...
Article
Full-text available
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are distributed virtual reality systems with multi-user access. Each inhabitant is represented by a humanoid embodiment, an avatar, making them virtually present in the artificial world. This paper investigates how inhabitants of these CVEs can communicate with each other through channels other than speech,...
Article
Full-text available
We outline an experimental study investigating the use of facial expressions of emotion, as a means of non-verbal communication in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). The premise is that by incorporating an emotional channel alongside the conventional informational content, the user experience may be enriched. We established detailed knowled...
Article
Full-text available
Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) have evolved to being virtual communities, places for communication and collaboration, today easily accessible via the World Wide Web. Inhabitants of CVEs are represented by their virtual embodiments, so-called avatars. They can meet and interact with each other and the environment, making them virtually pr...
Article
Full-text available
This paper investigates how inhabitants of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) can communicate with each other through channels other than speech, and it is primarily concerned with the perception of facial expressions of emotion in CVEs. We outline our experimental work on emotion recognition and investigate to what extent findings from real...
Article
Full-text available
The premise of this paper is that agent t echnology in collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) may be e nriched by incorporating an emotional channel alongside the conventional informational content, and that this would b e best achieved through an associated visual human embodiment or avatar. Since humans express emotion in face- to-face encount...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are distributed virtual reality systems with multi-user access. Each inhabitant is represented by a humanoid embodiment, an avatar, making them virtually present in the artificial world. This paper investigates how inhabitants of these CVEs can communicate with each other through channels other than speech,...
Article
Full-text available
This paper describes an ongoing PhD research project at Leeds Metropolitan University. It investigates the usability and potential benefits of Networked Virtual Environments as tools for communication and collaboration in Distance Learning systems. The project explores the interface aspects of a system conducting the virtual counterpart of face-to-...
Article
Our work is concerned with interaction between inhabitants of 3D collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Such environments are arenas for people who cannot, or do not want to, come together physically, to meet virtually and debate, discuss, even dispute certain issues. However, important indicators that we employ and take for granted in face-to-...

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