Designing for Special Education Schools: Involving Children with Intellectual Disabilities in the Design Process

Other conference contribution, 2013

In this paper, an approach to designing technology for children with intellectual disabilities is presented. The paper introduces a recently initiated interdisciplinary research project, and discuss related work that can be utilized as a foundation for the approach being developed. Based on experiences from the project, the paper suggests a design program to be established in order to adapt existing models and frameworks for designing new technology for children with intellectual disabilities. The program is founded on two main key findings, namely the importance of involving both children and adults with intellectual disabilities in order to better understand the needs, and to involve a number of different technologies and stakeholders in the design process to design a range of different types of prototypes and systems.