An official website of the United States government
Today, a great number of people with visual impairment take advantage of mainstream technology via assistive technology. User involvement in the systems development life cycle contributes to addressing user needs accurately. This article presents practical strategies to facilitate participatory design approaches involving users with visual impairment. Both researchers and professional designers will benefit these practical strategies by using them as action checklists for preparing, conducting, and concluding a participatory design session ethically and responsibly.
more »
« less
User-driven product development: Designed by, not designed for
The current state of function and design of accessible assistive technology is lacking, evidenced by low usability and high abandonment rates by people with disabilities (PwD). A significant contributing factor to these negative outcomes is a lack of user-centered design or user-opinion in the product development. The Human Performance and Mobility Maker Lab (HPML) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a new facility dedicated to developing assistive technology by PwDs. Rather than being excluded from the design and innovation process, PwDs are the primary drivers of innovation at the HPML. The HPML’s the central tenet is ‘Designed by, not designed for’. The purpose of this paper is to explore various assistive technologies developed in the HPML while providing an empathic framework for other research groups to follow in integrating PwDs into the development and design of assistive technology.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2024905
- PAR ID:
- 10548364
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor & Francis
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Design Journal
- Volume:
- 27
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1460-6925
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 133 to 152
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- user-driven design, empathy, industrial design, assistive technology
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Clarke-Midura, J; Kollar, I; Gu, X; D'Angelo, C (Ed.)TalkMoves is an AI assistive tool that provides automated feedback to educators to support their daily teaching practices. While originally designed for classroom math teachers, this tool can be useful in a broader context. The University of Colorado Boulder and Saga Education formed a co-design team tasked with re-contextualizing TalkMoves for coaches of novice math tutors to use in their ongoing professional development. To effectively adapt an existing technology to a new problem space, the co-design team iteratively exchanged ideas of what exactly TalkMoves could achieve, as well as the specific needs of the coaches. Facilitators used strategies such as communal orientation, expansive dreaming, backcasting, and revoicing to promote productive collaboration. Three main goals emerged: maximize opportunities for user agency, center design around goal setting, and integrate the tool into the existing workflow. Any adaptation of an AI tool would benefit from this approach.more » « less
-
Clarke-Midura, J; Kollar, I; Gu, X; D’Angelo, C (Ed.)TalkMoves is an AI assistive tool that provides automated feedback to educators to support their daily teaching practices. While originally designed for classroom math teachers, this tool can be useful in a broader context. The University of Colorado Boulder and Saga Education formed a co-design team tasked with re-contextualizing TalkMoves for coaches of novice math tutors to use in their ongoing professional development. To effectively adapt an existing technology to a new problem space, the co-design team iteratively exchanged ideas of what exactly TalkMoves could achieve, as well as the specific needs of the coaches. Facilitators used strategies such as communal orientation, expansive dreaming, backcasting, and revoicing to promote productive collaboration. Three main goals emerged: maximize opportunities for user agency, center design around goal setting, and integrate the tool into the existing workflow. Any adaptation of an AI tool would benefit from this approach.more » « less
-
Clarke_Midura, J; Kollar, I; Gu, X; D’Angelo, C (Ed.)TalkMoves is an AI assistive tool that provides automated feedback to educators to support their daily teaching practices. While originally designed for classroom math teachers, this tool can be useful in a broader context. The University of Colorado Boulder and Saga Education formed a co-design team tasked with re-contextualizing TalkMoves for coaches of novice math tutors to use in their ongoing professional development. To effectively adapt an existing technology to a new problem space, the co-design team iteratively exchanged ideas of what exactly TalkMoves could achieve, as well as the specific needs of the coaches. Facilitators used strategies such as communal orientation, expansive dreaming, backcasting, and revoicing to promote productive collaboration. Three main goals emerged: maximize opportunities for user agency, center design around goal setting, and integrate the tool into the existing workflow. Any adaptation of an AI tool would benefit from this approach.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)With increasing challenges to health care in the foreseeable future, novel technology solutions are increasingly needed. Meanwhile, biomedical engineers are increasingly asked to develop user-centered solutions (i.e., desired by the end users). Nevertheless, the importance of user-centeredness is often neglected in the innovation process. It remains unclear about the interplay between thinking of solution novelty and desirability in addition to feasibility, and thus it is challenging for biomedical engineering educators to balance the teaching of the above two aspects in a BME design curriculum. This study aims to develop a preliminary version of a user-centered innovation potential assessment instrument applicable to diverse biomedical engineering design projects. The assessment instrument was adapted from File and Purzer (2014)’s definition of innovation potential (1) feasibility (2) viability (3) desirability and (4) novelty. Among these aspects, we focused on assessing feasibility, desirability and novelty, which can be quantified and assigned to each design idea proposed by the students. As the first attempt, we targeted students’ innovation potential in the design prototyping phase. To validate our preliminary development, we gave an in-class design task for smart pill dispenser to 30+ pairs of senior students enrolled in the BME capstone design course. To assess the design ideas, the instructor and his teaching assistant (two of the authors on the paper) applied a thematic analysis. We first identified patterns from the submitted design ideas by extracting key attributes including dispenser’s portability, tracking/reminding capability, safety, and easy to use. We then estimated the frequency and novelty of these key attributes appearing in each design idea and converted each of them to a 5-point scale. Finally, we calculated a composite score for user-centered innovation potential by multiplying the scales on feasibility, desirability and novelty. We believe this study has added value to improving our understanding of user-centered innovation potential in an undergraduate biomedical engineering curriculum. With further development and scaled-up validation, we may be able to use the instrument to provide insights into developing teaching interventions for stimulating user-centered innovative potentials among biomedical engineers.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2023.2275868
