Seventeen Projects Carried Out by Students Designing for and with Disabled Children: Identifying Designers' Difficulties During the Whole Design Process

ABSTRACT

This article aims to identify the difficulties that may arise when designing assistive devices for disabled children. Seventeen design projects involving disabled children, engineering students, and special schools were analysed. A content analysis of the design reports was performed. For this purpose, a coding scheme was built based on a review of the literature. This was then improved through direct observation of the design reports. The coding scheme includes 17 categories, 7 of which stemmed from the direct observation of the reports: these 7 categories cover newly identified difficulties. Three important aspects emerged from the content analysis: (1) Difficulties identified in the literature arose in the context of this study. (2) Among the difficulties related to the practical barriers of involving disabled children, one new difficulty in particular was identified through the study, that is, that of partnering with special schools. (3) While existing literature focuses on the practical barriers, the results of this study show that not all difficulties are related to these barriers. In fact, understanding user needs proves to be especially difficult when the product to be designed targets several different disabled users.

Keywords:

• children
• content analysis
• design
• disability
• user requirement elicitation