This week, we hope to get you thinking about assistive technology and disability in ways that will be useful as an engineer and designer. Just as there is no universal experience of disability, there is no universal list of solutions for problems in people's daily lives. As an engineer/designer, you need to be prepared to work on solutions for clients in situations you may not be used to. As such, your job will not be to step in and tell people how to solve their problems.
In this class you will learn how to work with a client with a disability as a co-designer. Though clients will typically take an active role in the design process, it is especially important to work with people with disabilities to solve accessibility related issues. Designing with people with disabilities instead of for people with disabilities helps make sure the resulting products don't cause more problems than they solve.
Further, we use the term co-designer to emphasize the role of people with disabilities as active partners in the design process. Co-designers set design specifications and make sure the resulting product actually makes sense as a tool that someone can use to overcome a barrier in daily life.
In this class we will also talk about "product specifications" as the set of requirements or needs that an engineering design product must meet. In the context of assistive technology, this explicitly includes the accessibility needs of co-designers. Although accessibility should always be a concern in design/engineering projects, our product specifications in this course will relate to specific accessibility barriers. Thus the product must help someone overcome those barriers and not cause any new ones in order to be considered a success.