General Card #2367
Making with Purpose: Assistive Technology Makerspace Activities
Summary
Assistive technology projects ensures inclusive engineering design. Technical skill development with client engagement promotes engineering self-efficacy.
Description
This series of cards offers several different hands-on activities to promote technical skill development in the engineering classroom. The central theme of these activities centers around creation of assistive technology to aid people living with disabilities. However, many of the activities can be easily adapted to meet any engineering discipline looking for hands-on workshops for technical skill development.
User-centered design activities will help students build with purpose. The use of the constructionist framework (learn by doing/making) allows students to develop their own engineering self-efficacy through continuous exposure of tools, and technical skill development. The central theme of the cards is to promote technical skill development while students learn to communicate societal benefits and design products that create extraordinary value.
Who:
This should be implemented in the undergraduate design curriculum. It is best served for 1st and 2nd year students to expose them to design thinking and user, or customer-centered design. It also serves those looking for ways to incorporate accessibility and inclusion into the engineering design classroom by incorporating design concepts for people living with disabilities.
Where:
These activities are appropriate for any design class across the engineering curriculum. To promote inclusion and access, all of these activities can be completed using basic low-fidelity prototyping materials. Lab spaces with open desks and design space and access to makerspace facilities is a plus! To finish up CAD modeling with 3D printing, access to 3D printers is a bonus! Please see a list of my supplies kit below for a great resource in getting started with Low-fidelity prototyping.
Curiosity
- Demonstrate constant curiosity about our changing world
By engaging in design work that helps people with disabilities, and working in multi-disciplinary teams in a clinical setting, students develop curiosity about how they can add value to a clinical organization with their design ideas. Students learn how their products can help people succeed in executing activities of daily living.
Connections
- Integrate information from many sources to gain insight
A key to the success of this project is feedback, feedback, feedback! Find clinicians in your environment, end users, parents of end users, people you know, or the students know that may benefit from assistive technology. Helping students make these personal connections is critical for their success implementing the design of their projects. It takes work to help students connect, but I have found that when you ask people to help out with a class project, especially one with such societal benefit, people are thrilled to schedule a phone interview! All you have to do is share a cell phone number, or an email address. When connections are hard, consider using grandparents and force students to set up meetings to talk about their struggles in activities of daily living. This served two-fold during COVID-19 to force young people to communicate with their elderly family members. On the last day of class, students also prepared thank you letters which were mailed to their client, another way to improve the lives in our community through kindness and compassion.
- Assess and manage risk
When considering the design of new technology that will be used by humans, and possibly by people from protected communities it is paramount to work closely with your institutions Institutional Review Board (IRB). To deliver functional prototypes to the disability community requires IRB approval and contracts between the client and the university. Even i projects are not able to be delivered, it is still good practice to help train young engineers on the regulatory procedures of receiving IRB approval for their design.
Remember the three requirements for ethical conduct of research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.
Remember the three requirements for ethical conduct of research involving human subjects: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.
Creating Value
- Identify unexpected opportunities to create extraordinary value
There is tremendous opportunities to create extraordinary value and have deep impact on individual's lives through the design of these projects! It is important to remind students that most prototypes do not work on the first try - and patience in the process is important! Set realistic expectations for all involved and ask them to gain end user feedback at every stage in the design process to incorporate their ideas.
- Persist through and learn from failure
Rapid prototyping and demanding functional mechanism of action forces students to cross a threshold of theoretical to practical. This helps to create chances to experience design failure and to learn from those failures. Maintaining the mindset that a device that has not failed yet just hasn't been tested well enough, helps students realize that failure is a part of any true device development process. Let students build and test early and often so that failure happens regularly! Celebrate these failures and use reflection pieces to document those successful failures. I awarded certificates and $5 gift cards to students who demonstrated the best recovery from failures, or documented failures (videos) in the course I ran.
Log In to View More