Think-Design-Impact

Ramping up Accessible Design - A report on a new initiative to create a sequence of courses across different colleges at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, with a focus on accessible product design, with pathways to take them beyond the classroom and into the world.

In the summer of 2018, we proposed a cross campus course sequence, which focuses on human centered, empathic solutions for accessible design. This course of learning and events is underway, exploring new ways to learn and bring ideas to life.

With novel ideas and the need to create significant and salient solutions, collaboration is key. The answer does not lie in one domain. Technological tools, corporate spaces and educational environments are being formed to take advantage of the special opportunities inherent only in collaborative work. To this end, a unique course sequence starting with Disability and Relevant Design (School of Art + Design), followed by Digital Making @GIES College of Business - Illinois Makerlab) in partnership with Disability Resources and Educational Services and a proposed summer accelerator, will leverage resources across three parts of campus.

This sequence of courses focuses on:

(1) understanding disability and authentic human behavior resulting in identification of product opportunities

(2) extensive prototyping and user testing to ensure useful solutions

(3) providing entrepreneurial support which may lead to market launch 

The course sequence is being supported by the new Siebel Center for Design and the Office of the Dean at GIES College of Business, whose funding help pays for faculty time and materials and to engage an external consulting firm. This sequence creates a framework for innovation that takes students from problem identification to high fidelity prototyping which requires multiple resources and direct supervision.

Expanding our collaboration, students are engaging with an external social innovation firm, Milestone Studio Labs. Milestone Labs is helping to ensure that students scope challenges effectively and think about improving on existing solutions(if any), rather than reinventing the wheel. They are also helping conduct a Makeathon in Spring 2019, where students from multiple courses come together, with need knowers , mentors and experts in fabrication to finalize their prototypes.

Impact 

People living with disabilities experience more challenges with the material landscape (everything we engage with) than the typical able-bodied person. As a result, their level of problem solving and ingenuity tends to be higher as they complete activities related to daily living. Closer to home, the University of Illinois campus attracts an unprecedented population of highly functioning students that live with physical and cognitive disabilities (approximately 1,300 students registered each academic year, with 100-200 of them being wheelchair users). These are the users that the course sequence aims to center their product opportunities around.

Understanding Disability

Disability + Relative Design at FAA: This course seeks to teach students the skill of human-centered design. The course gives students the opportunity to understand empathetic design research approaches through product development experience that has a special emphasis on people with disabilities. Becoming aware of “the normality of doing things differently to you” is another theme, and students are tasked to considering how the many different facets of an individual’s identities affects how, what, and why they use certain products in their daily living. With a focus on mass production capable products and opportunities to re-engineer existing products, this course has had an emphasis on accessibility this year.

Rapid Prototyping

Digital Making at Gies: This course seeks to create a platform for teaching skills in tinkering, design thinking and entrepreneurship and to learn the extent to which new technologies impact consumers, producers, and economic institutions. The course gives students the opportunity to work in interdisciplinary teams on meaningful projects, all while building soft skills for collaboration, communication, and teamwork. The easy access to 3D printing provides opportunities for students to learn by “Making”. 3D printing resources create the ability to rapidly prototype, build models digitally, and then print them out, which helps students develop design thinking. Most students are apprehensive of their ability to participate in the prototyping process, and we expect that instructional innovations from this course will help students overcome this fear. Students are also trained in other methods of digital fabrication by leveraging other makerspaces and labs on campus. Adapting this course to one that responds to activities of daily living and produces devices (prototypes) that assist in such tasks will not only help the mainstream consumer but open up career opportunities for the student groups. These students may not typically have the opportunity to work with design faculty, conduct empathic design research, manage product design development, and produce working prototypes. It gives students and consumers alike the opportunity to interact with creations which may not have otherwise been actualized.

The Current Status

We believe that our campus provides the right environment to take motivated students and their new ventures further into the real world. There are many paths that connect the classroom directly with commercialization. For example, the Research Park houses an incubator for young entrepreneurs with technology driven ideas and provides proximity to businesses who want to collaborate with faculty and mentor students as potential recruits. The iVenture Academy supports student teams with mentorship, training, and co-working space over summer before they formally go out and pitch for venture capital. The Illinois Innovation Prize honors a student who stands out as a passionate and creative innovator and entrepreneur who is working with world-changing technology and is seen as a role model to others.  

The Alexis Wernsing Innovation Award specifically recognizes people with disabilities who work through challenges to create new products or services to create positive change in the environment across the University and the local community. One of our team members, Adam Bleakney has been recognized with this award in 2019!

UIUC Founders is a student organization on campus that organizes entrepreneurship conferences, such as 54 and Forge. The organization is aimed at creating spaces where students can find team members to work with on various different start up ideas, and compete for funding for their ideas.

It Works  

We have been fortunate to witness one such transformation of an idea to a product. Arielle Rausin took Dr. McDonagh's course and then Dr. Sachdev's, guided purely by personal interest. She followed this with work at labs and spaces such as the Visualization Lab at Beckman Institute and the CU FabLab. The result of her experiences in those courses and her persistence is the creation of cost effective 3D printed wheelchair racing gloves, now used by Paralympians and athletes around the world. 

Current Progress

The current Digital Making class has six teams: 3D Bal, Blueprint, Evinco, Movi, ROTAM, and Solestice.

Team 3D Bal is inspired by Jenna to create an extension for prosthetic legs to increase balance, particularly in yoga

Team Blueprint is inspired by Ryan enabling users with limited hand strength and limited mobility grab something for feeding themselves independently

Team Evinco is inspired by Arielle Rausin to come up with a way to modify the current gloves to improve an athlete’s grip on the wheelchair ring when racing in difficult weather conditions.

Team Movi is inspired by Jenna to find ways to provide protection to expensive prosthetic devices

Team ROTAM is inspired by Ryan to prevent rain from entering into joysticks of power chairs.

Team Solestice is inspired by Jenna to create detachable tread attachments for prosthetic legs that can help with safer travel on a variety of terrains.

In summary, this purpose driven project: 

• is an interdisciplinary initiative involving several colleges and units (FAA, Gies Business, DRES, and AHS) and is supported by the Siebel Center of Design .
• is placing students with disabilities at the heart of the innovation and designing process
• is responding to the emerging needs of the aging population through assistive technologies 
• is providing ground work for an accessibility accelerator here on campus
• is seeking external funding and potential commercialization of solutions

Help Keep It Going...

The final piece of the puzzle is how to prepare students to take these ideas into the world and create a real impact. This is where we need your investment to ensure returns. Our goal is to create a pipeline of students from these courses and direct them into an accessibility accelerator over summer. If you would like to contribute to such a goal in any way, please contact any of the team members listed below.

University of Illinois Team Members

Dr Deana McDonagh - Expert in empathic design solutions and new product development

Dr Vishal Sachdev - Expert in prototyping and business strategy

Coach Adam Bleakney - Expert in disability and innovation

Jim Kendall - 30+ years as design professional including consumer products

Collaborators 

Milestone Studio Labs - Michal Kabatznik and Oded Shorer (New York, USA and Tel Aviv, Israel

Sponsors

Clark-Lindsey as Gold Sponsor for the Makeathon

Ultimaker as a sponsor for prizes for the Makeathon

Article Editing help- AJ Poe