F. Verhoeven

Empowering people with impairments: how participatory methods can inform the design of empowering artifacts

Participatory Design has developed methods that empower people with impairments to actively take part in the design process. Many designed artifacts for this target group likewise aim to empower their users in daily life. In this workshop, we share and relate best practices of both empowering methods and empowering designs. Participants are therefore invited to bring along cases of designing for- and with people with sensory-, cognitive- or social impairments. Our workshop consists of three parts: (1) Foregrounding empowering elements in PD methods using method stories, containing the backstory of a method put into practice; (2) Reflecting on technological artifacts, exploring the empowering qualities of person-artifact-context interaction; (3) constructing a critical synopsis of the various relationships between empowering products and - methods.