STUDENTS’ RESPONSES TO INCLUSIVE DESIGN

This paper looks at how students’ design process responds to the requirements of inclusive design.
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 deterioration of eyesight and hearing. They wish to remain in their familiar home and to be able to equip it with such necessary enhancements that help them cope with the minimum of outside support. At the Aarhus School of Architecture, Institute of Design, the teaching content in 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 declining physical ability. Welfare technology includes smarter working practices or service concepts, which frees up labor resources and 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. This is done by the use of work diaries which provided raw data on how students broke down the design problem into a variety of tasks: problem solving, data gathering and ideation among others. The work thus provides insight into how the 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 a structure underlying a process 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 project start to finish.