ACTING AND DESIGN - ACTIVITY THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY INTERACTION

How do we bridge the gap between High Tech and people’s skills to interact with technologies? How do we encounter abilities and disabilities (dis/ability) [1] in people’s lives when addressing them as users of tomorrow’s Information-Communication-Technology (ICT)?

This paper presents a case study: Sharpen your Senses, a co-design workshop-project on assistive mobile ICT that was performed in Berlin/Germany in late 2009. The project, embedding perspectives of multimodality and alternative/augmentative communication was conducted with children and teenagers, and raised insights into how such workshops may be held in the future. One of the observations was that any activity of learning should be woven into creative activities [2].

The starting point has been to develop alternative perspectives which correct or widen the medical/pedagogical approximations to disability. The second step has been to analyse the interplays of dis/abilities, and to understand phenomena of embodied difference as a social, cultural and historical construction.

Confronting the medical model with the social model of disability [3] in a collaborative and participatory approach, allowed a critical reflection on fundamental concepts of order, which become manifested in antipodes like ‘normality and difference’ or ‘health and illness’. Discussing these concepts turned out to be a helpful component in our workshop-sessions, in order to “rethink” dis/ability and to project concepts for mobile assistive ICT that reflect on such different perspectives.

This paper presents a selection of insights and derived concepts for future workshops in similar contexts.

References

[1] Schillmeier, Michael (2009): Behinderung als Erfahrung und Ereignis; pg 79 ff in
Waldschmidt/Schneider (Hg.): Disability Studies, Kultursoziologie und Soziologie der
Behinderung; Transcript Verlag

[2] Müller, Alexander / Bieling, Tom / Hemmert, Fabian / Lindenberg, Jan: Co-Designing with Children: Learning by Making in Participatory Design on the Street; IDC2010, Barcelona

[3] Oliver, Mike (1990): The individual and the social models of disability; Thames Polytechnic, Royal College of Physicians. THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL MODELS OF DISABILITY; THAMES POLYTECHNIC, Royal College of Physicians, London