Design of Assistive Technology

What is Assistive Technology?

Assistive technology (AT) is a device or a program that helps someone function in their daily life. More specifically, people with disabilities use assistive technology to overcome social, technological, or physical barriers in a range of settings. For example, someone might use:

• a motorized wheelchair to get around in public

• screen reader software to hear on-screen content read out loud at the office

• an automatic page turner while studying at school

Assistive technology usually refers to technology in the context of disability, but can refer more broadly to things that help with impairments beyond what are traditionally considered "disability."

What is "co-design" and why do we use it?

When we design solutions for people, end users can have widely varying levels of input during the design process. In this course, we emphasize the use of co-design, in which the end user of the product plays an active role in the process, from requirements development, to testing, feedback, and refinement. The term co-designer not only emphasizes their active participation, but also acknowledges their own domain expertise on how they carry out their own lives. This knowledge is especially important in the context of disability, because different disabilities manifest in different ways, and people have very individual adaptations that they may be used to.

In other contexts, the terms users, clients, or customers might be used. Depending on the situation, clients and customers might be entirely appropriate, but they tend to be more passive (or transactional) than the relationship we are interested in for this class. We will also sometimes refer to co-designers as users when speaking of their relationship to the product in question.

Co-design isn't always practical or possible though, especially when building general products for use by lots of people, or because of the time involved by the user, but the skills learned in the co-design process are very transferable to general product design and engineering.

Assignments (for students)

Running the Class Virtually (for educators, and others who might be curious)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the BWSI AT course was offered virtually in 2021 and is being offered virtually again in 2022. Running a fabrication-heavy co-design course remotely is admittedly not an easy task. One key design decision we made with the virtual class was to keep the requirement that students be able to physically meet and work with their co-designers as much as possible. This choice shifted the class from small teams of students working with one co-designer at a time (as in 2019) to one-on-one co-design experiences for the students. Here's what we did:

Communication

Components of the course that are necessarily synchronous (lectures, many activities) heavily rely on Zoom and Zoom breakout rooms. For virtual BWSI, students are required to keep their cameras on, which we also found to be an important part of student engagement. The cameras-on norm also stood in contrast to the feeling of "teaching into a void" that occurred with many virtual classroom settings during COVID-19 in terms of both classroom interaction and instructor feedback.

Potentially asynchronous components of the course are handled via the messaging application Discord. Discord provides a persistent message history for the class, as well as a way to quickly make announcements and send files. The structure of our Discord usage was recommended by Ryan Soklaski, the lead instructor of BWSI Cog*Works.

We use a handful of public-to-the-class text channels for topics such as student introductions, general announcements, presentation feedback, polls, and the like, in addition to some channels for socializing and social planning.

Every student also has a private channel that only contains the student and the instructional staff. This is a quick way for the student to send private questions, or to work with one or more staff members during a design period to get asynchronous feedback, or to send files.

Finally, we also have a set of staff-only channels for internal communication, with class-specific staff, as well as with BWSI administrators.

Finding Co-Designers

Since students had to each find and work with their own co-designers, this is an important early milestone of the class. Our spring pre-course has students starting to think about this, as they are required to start a co-design process with someone as their pre-course final project, but we know that that project/person may not always be the same as what/who they are working with for the summer. We also acknowledge that students may not personally know anyone who has a "traditional" disability, and disabled or not, connecting with a co-designer over the summer may be challenging.

As such, for the virtual version of this course, we intentionally take a very broad view of assistive technology, and encourage students to build products for people focusing on solving issues associated with activities of daily living, even if they do not involve typical disabilities. Such projects will often pull in parents, grandparents, and neighbors as co-designers, who graciously volunteer their time to help the student with the design process. Alternatively, working with caretakers of individuals with disabilities is also an option.

A word of caution about building for a class of disability rather than for a person: We have had students who have taken this approach (sometimes due to personal connections, other times due to lack of co-located co-designers), and we have found it to be quite difficult to work with the co-design nature of the course. Typically, actual user testing is not possible, or is only done by people without the targeted disability, introducing strong testing biases, particularly due to lack of familiarity with common adaptations made by people who actually have the disability. In general, we do not recommend this approach for the purposes of this class. It is likely better to work with a co-located co-designer for some issue with an activity of daily living, even if that person does not have a typical disability, rather than work with an abstract notion of a class of disability.

Documentation

Documentation is a key part of the design process, and students produce copious amounts of it during the course, mainly in the form of text, pictures, diagrams, video. The Projects page on this site is our main repository for this documentation.

In 2021, we relied heavily on students using Google Forms to submit various parts of their documentation, which worked, but was fairly tedious to compile. We will be exploring alternatives for 2022.

For the BWSI final event, students produced short videos describing their design process, from brainstorming with their co-designer, to prototyping their actual product. These videos were also an effective form of project documentation.

Presentations

Presentations are a key component of this course. We devote some early teaching time to instruction on how to give an effective presentation, and students get several chances to practice this, in the form of multiple design reviews, elevator pitches, and a final project presentation video.

Fabrication Logistics

Fabrication is one of the trickiest parts of the virtual class, particularly when physical products were the bulk of the projects. Students were responsible for assembling their own bill of materials, which was paid for by BWSI up to a (soft) cap, and could be purchased after the student has passed a design review. Components were primarily ordered by BWSI admins from Amazon following a student "wish list," though in some cases, students sourced components locally. Local sourcing was particularly common for materials found in most hardware stores, where physical handling was useful to judge what to buy.

Custom parts were mainly made by 3D printing or laser cutting, with manufacturing being handled by staff or outsourced to local makerspaces, whichever made the most sense for the part in terms of time and cost. More detailed discussion with the student designers is typically required for such parts, to ensure that they are manufactured appropriately. There are typically not too many chances to manufacture such prototypes during the course, and manufacturing time must also be accounted for, particularly with additive manufacturing.

Lectures

Class lectures are concentrated early on in the course, and cover topics such as

• models and types of disability

• types of assistive technology

• user interviewing

• user testing

• design processes

• designing for manufacturability

• fabrication techniques

• public space accessibility and evaluations

• and more.

Since the specific projects and staff expertise that we have vary from year to year, we also arrange ad-hoc lectures later in the term as needed.

Guest lectures are also an important part of the course, and serve as a way to expose students to the world of design and accessibility in "the real world." Our guest lecturers are typically professionals in the accessibility and assistive technology spaces, in hardware, software, other otherwise-focused jobs. Speakers also come from adjacent domains, such as those that would be more strictly classified as medical or rehabilitative areas. Our typical feedback has been that students appreciated seeing professionals in such areas, and for many, it is their first exposure to such professions.

If you would like more information on how this course is run, how to bring components of the course to your educational setting, or access to any of our course materials, please contact bwsi-admin@mit.edu.