Watching Crip Camp and the excerpt fom Examined Life has given me such a great insight on how the disabled are perceived by society (ableist mindset sees people with disabilities, and how this perception in turn affects the disabled. For example, in Examined Life, Sunaura Taylor talks about how people are usually uncomfortable when she picks up her coffee mug with her mouth. This is something she can do to adapt, to get about in her daily life, yet has to muster courage or is still very hesitant to get a cup of coffee.

In her conversation with Judith Butler, she also talks about how she refers to moving around the city as ‘walking’. One can constantly question what this verb means. Does it only imply the usage of legs for locomotion, or in this case its the movement the body. She also mentions her move from Brooklyn to a more accessible city, San Francisco. Again, not everyone can afford to move cities and homes in search of better accessibility. Our goal as both designers and responsible citizens of the planet is to make more accessible and inclusive products. We must ensure that it can be used universally, by everyone.

While working with other students to research critical disability for CC Lecture, we came across DOTS, a gesture-recognition product that is both universal and can be individually customised. Gesture recognition has primarily involved he movement of fingers in particular directions or patterns, each with a different meaning (like sign language). This is not very inclusive. Dots allows users to select how they want to interact with the product based on their body or condition. The product can be customised to people’s unique disabilities. Using two dots, each with its own sensor to detect relative motion between the two, can help  with selecting, moving, rotating, scaling. The team behind this worked closely with the disabled community through several prototypes, testing and user trials.

Co-design and participatory design is an essential step while catering to a particular design. To work towards more accessible, functional products, we must involve all stakeholders from the get go and ‘design with’ the users, not just for them.