This article follows two posts on how to make disability a focus in the design curriculum: the first discussed my own experiments (and partial failures); the second outlined Cynthia Bennett’s advice for teaching disability design. She is a blind scholar specialist of participatory design with disabled people. Benjamin Gorman asked me if I had thoughts about the coursework and design of a computer sciences unit on Accessibility and Assistive Technologies. This is the curriculum I developed for such a unit for post-graduate students in UX design – but this could arguably be used or adapted to other courses on disability and design, or students of other levels. This is a course that was workshop intensive, and about 30 hours long. In terms of philosophy, I know well that I won’t be able to turn them into accessibility or disability experts. I thus aim at making them aware of the resources available, their moral duty to implement accessibility standards in any work they do and to equip them with the basic design and research skills needed.
Continuer la lecture de « UX + Disability: A Syllabus »Mois : août 2019
The History of Special Education (with a Focus on the United States)
Margret A. Winzer is a scholar specialised in the history of education, with a focus on special education. She has written two landmarks books on this topic: The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration, which begins with a discussion of understandings of disability during Antiquity, and concludes in the XXth century; and
From Integration to Inclusion: A History of Special Education in the 20th Century, which looks more closely at the second half of the XIXth century, and until the new inclusion policies of the XXIst century. The two books overlaps in themes and periods examined, and tie together a history of labor, of ideas, of education, and of disability rights – not directly the material and design history of special education, but it can help shedding light on innovations in this area. I’ve compiled the timelines included in these books in a spreadsheet and started a visual and sortable timeline using time.graphics.
Our Lives and the Design of the Kitchen
Exploring how kitchen design shapes women’s and the family life (and how men strategically avoided to be expected to spend time there).
There are a number of topics I don’t research systematically but that come up regularly during my readings. I am trying a new post category, for now called Bites of Reading. These posts collects quotes or excerpts from different sources about a particular topic.
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