Interact 2013 workshop

Involving people with impairments in the design process is very challenging, especially when impairments affect cognitive functions or communication. People with such impairments may have substantial problems with thought processes and communication, including understanding abstractions, sequencing thoughts and actions, understanding symbols, and interpreting social cues.

Many participatory design techniques are based on these processes and are therefore not usable, or need to be adjusted for people with impairments.

This workshop aims to exchange experiences with participatory design techniques that were designed for, or adapted to people with impairments. Since many of these techniques are highly focused on specific target groups, a further aim is to extract general principles and to generate guidelines for involving users with impairments in the design process.

More particularly, this workshop aims to

1. Bring together people who are active in the topic of the workshop to create a community.
2. Exchange ideas about and experiences with tools and techniques for specific groups of users with impairments.
3. Identify general principles and guidelines for doing participatory design with users with impairments.

A similar workshop was organized at the 2012 Participatory Design Conference (PDC), in Roskilde. This workshop will also serve as a validation of the results of this first workshop. After the workshop, a call for papers for a special issue of the journal CoDesign will be launched on participatory design for persons with sensory or cognitive impairments. Participants will be invited to submit papers for this special issue, of which the specific focus will be based on the outcomes of both the PDC and INTERACT workshops.