From Music Therapist to Action Research Designer A Narrative Account

The participation of stakeholders in the design of technologies for disabled people is a key focus in the 21st century and is crucial to ensuring their uptake and supporting bottom-up innovation. However, there have been few investigations of user-led innovation by practitioners in music therapy. This chapter is a reflective case study on developing technologies for music therapy with autistic children. We explore how the first author’s background as a music therapist and her later training as a researcher in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have affected the design process, including the opportunities for design which were identified, and the choice of a technical approach for prototyping. Additionally, we outline the difficulties for practitioners in transitioning to academia, an issue still largely unresolved in design research.