Participatory Design with People with Disability in Rural Cambodia: The Creativity Challenge

Abstract

The majority of Cambodians live rurally, with most engaged in farming practices. For people with disabilities in rural Cambodia, such as the estimated 40,000 land mine amputees, inclusion in these practices is currently impossible. It is therefore important to strive towards the design of effective assistive technologies, as well as social empowerment, to allow these individuals better access to Cambodia’s traditional livelihood. This study investigates the use of participatory design, a collaborative design process, for the identification of challenges and design of solutions with a rural community of people with disability. It discusses the implementation of creative capacity building workshops, developed in Uganda, as a tool for improving the effectiveness of designer-community collaboration. Themes such as creativity, contextual insights and inclusion were identified as challenging areas for future development while themes such as convergent thinking, prototyping and motivation were identified as strengths of the collaboration.

Keywords:

• participatory design
• co-design
• disability
• Cambodia
• creativity

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Agile Development Group, Light For The World Cambodia and Engineers Without Borders Australia for their collaboration and continued support for this project. We would also like to acknowledge the funding support provided by the New Zealand Aid Programme, the Asia New Zealand Foundation and the Australian Government, through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Drain

Andrew Drain is a Lecturer in Product Development at Massey University, New Zealand. He has experience leading engineering projects with communities in New Zealand, Cambodia and India and received an international Red Dot design award in 2017.

Aruna Shekar

Nigel Grigg is the Professor of Quality Systems at Massey University in New Zealand, and leads the Industrial Management and Innovation Cluster within the School of Engineering and Advanced Technology.

Nigel Grigg

Aruna Shekar is senior lecturer in Product Development at Massey University, New Zealand. She has taught for 24 years and has led a humanitarian engineering course with Engineers Without Borders, where her students won National awards. Dr Shekar’s experience in different cultures supports an outcome-based, human-centred design approach to problem solving.