Students' responses to inclusive design

This paper looks at how the use of inclusive design (ID) methods affects students' work processes in designing welfare technology. Work diaries showed students sub-divided their project: problem solving, data gathering and ideation, among others. This shows how the design problem was resolved into design solutions. The results provide some quantitative insight into time allocation and how this changes as projects progress. The study visualises design activities 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.