Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 12, numbers 3 and 4, 2019 // View article

Enabling People With Intellectual Disabilities to Participate in Design - An Immersive Strategy to Facilitate Long-term Participatory Design Using Social Workers as Proxies

Authors:
Åsmund Dæhlen
Suhas Govind Joshi

Keywords: participatory design, intellectual disabilities, immersion, proxy designer, cognitive impairment

Abstract:
People with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) are often neglected in decision-making, and this paper introduces an immersive strategy for the inclusion of people with ID in Participatory Design (PD) processes by using the social workers as proxies. We present immersion as a methodological strategy on how social workers could use their knowledge of the end-users’ capabilities to enable their participation in the design of technology. We draw on empirical data gathered through 180 workhours of voluntary fieldwork at an activity center in Norway for five months. Through immersion, we appropriated tools and techniques to the contextual concerns, and the results describe how the participation of people with ID enabled the social workers to co-explore concerns and ideas. This paper argues that the participation of people with ID can enable the social workers to explore their concerns through each user’s means of communication, effectively giving people with ID a voice in the decision-making processes of technology design.

Pages: 229 to 245

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2019. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2019

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679