This week’s reading, Design Meets Disability, explores the ways in which assistive technologies and art are being used together to represent disabilities. The author highlights how this type of design works to extend these tools beyond the problem they solve and instead focuses on the user and their experience with them. Whether that be through prioritizing aesthetics or representing these resources as art themselves, this drives a new type of design process, one in which functionality is not the only factor. This proposition, of sorts, is something we have explored countless times with a special mention to Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. The idea that the user experience is just as important as the design and purpose are common theme of these two articles and I am particularly interested in how it is presented in this article.
Not only is this design methodology more effective but in this context, it evidently makes individuals’ lives more accessible and inclusive. Whether it be through re-designing hearing aids to better match the needs and preferences of users or representing diverse bodies with different disabilities in media, this approach not only makes their lives easier but they open up space for conversation on a larger scale about why this type of inclusion is important. We can apply these practices in class when designing and implementing our projects through user-focused design and testing. Although on the design side it is oftentimes difficult to recognize these shortcomings, through field testing and design/usability-centric improvements it is more than possible.