Student' responses to inclusive design

The article looks at how students’ design activities respond to inclusive design (ID) requirements. The background to the students´ brief was the concept of welfare technology. People wish to retain their customary life-style even as ageing brings with it a reduction in physical capability: loss of muscle strength and manual dexterity or the deterioration of eyesight and hearing. At the Aarhus School of Architecture, Platform Design, the teaching content in the Spring 2011 semester addressed the theme “Health” with a focus on the elderly´s home. During this semester the emphasis was on how we interact with our environment and technology. Specifically this involved welfare technology, equipment and tools that can help with daily activities. This technology is designed help to citizens to be 'master of his or her own life' while off-setting capability changes due to declining physical ability. Welfare technology includes smarter working practices or service concepts, which together can free up labor resources. It also covers robotics, telemedicine, IT solutions and intelligent devices. This paper will show the results of students' work with the problem of changed demographics and emerging needs in products and services. In so doing it looks at how the use of inclusive design methods affects students´ work processes. Work diaries provided raw data on how students broke down their project into a variety of tasks: problem solving, data gathering and ideation, among others. The work thus provides insight into how the design problem is resolved into design solutions. The results provide some quantitative insight into how time is allocated during the design process and how the allocation of time changes as the project progresses. Rather than simply conclude that design processes are “messy” and “disordered”, this study visualises it and finds patterns underlying a process which is perceived to be chaotic. It provides a rough measure of the dynamics of a project in the form of the “switch between” ratio: how many changes in activity take place from the start to the finish of a project.
The article was originally written for the DRTS 2012 conference "Articulating Design Thinking" and proposed for inclusion in a special edition of Design Issues.