User centered design done correctly

AdvanceAbilities
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

I recently attended a conference of the ‘Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology Engineering Society of North America, ‘RESNA’. Their ‘wunderkind’ spoke at the first lunchtime plenary on ‘Disruptive Design’. After explaining what that meant to him, he said ‘we need to move away from what users need today, and…. I don’t agree with that because too many of the assistive devices out there don’t serve the needs of the users. He seems to cover that later and hits on a point that is my pet peeve with the assortment of mechanical assistive devices today, that instead of listening to the needs of the targeted users of a given technology, manufacturers today see an issue like mobility, and the old solution — the walker with tennis balls used as skids on its back legs. Then a group of designers, none of whom needs a mobility device, and build what they think solves the issues with past devices. Sadly, instead of listening and solving problems, they push solutions to their older devices. Nothing really gets accomplished. AdvanceAbilities is going old-school to solve the real issues that plague our aging and less able population.

Most people have called our plan of actually traveling all around our nation to listen to people and learn what it is really like to be an older, disabled person too arduous and a waste of time. I guarantee there will be a regional flavor to what we learn. I don’t see this as anything but a necessity if we want to really create a new generation of assistive devices. There are a host of advances in monitoring technology, and we invite any and all who make that type of technology to join us. Anything that helps us and ‘the powers that be’ know the needs of this community of previously ignored people, and prevents the all too common problem of not reaching people in need, are welcome to join us and buy their seat on the bus. Working with university centered organizations like Sage and Agewell is essential to making this journey as valuable as possible. Making our rounds on an annual basis, will tell us all how spot on and how far off we may be in solving the problems facing our aging and increasingly disabled community. Sure, many older Americans are becoming more and more tech savvy, but there is a huge community who aren’t and many simply because no one has taken the time to educate them. I am a firm believer that no one is too old or too disabled to benefit from personal attention and training— if only for a month or a week or a day. Leaving anyone out because it may not be cost effective, is absolutely inexcusable in my book.

Someone has to do the hard, frequently tedious work of finding people in the dark corners of our nation, and I can’t imagine a better way to learn how people get lost and ignored so that we never do that again. I have lived so much longer than any of my mates with AIDS from the early 80s in San Francisco and D.C., that for a while, I would frequently run into newer friends who simply assumed that I was deceased. With all of the monitoring technology available to us today, there is simply no excuse for losing anyone once we’ve made contact. That is part of what AdvanceAbilities is all about.

We have one overarching need in order to accomplish our mission, that is a bus. It doesn’t need to be brand new, we will take care of getting it rehabilitated to suit our needs. I went into this project with the belief that once our mission and our projects become known, someone with a tour bus that they no longer use or an RV purchased after watching one of the ‘RV’s of the rich and famous’ TV shows, and found not to be something that they really wanted to use would find its way to us. As I am at the very beginning of announcing our needs, I am still certain that we will get our bus. I am open to any and all proposals.

The United States is playing ‘catch-up’ with some other nations as they have mandates for accessibility that the ADA, to date, only suggests. I hope that our series of documentaries will alert enough people to what’s happening all around us and inspire a new wave of energy to enforce our requirements in the best way possible. We need to be teachable and not let competition scare us. I, for one, believe that A.I. and the science of Big Data will allow technology to act predictively in ways that research has already shown works. The thought that one day we will have an opportunity to act proactively to thwart the progression of disability is so exciting to me, I am eager to do our part in collecting the data enabling that to happen.

AdvanceAbilities

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My nonprofit dream to improve lives of disabled seniors & Accessibility4all. We interview,listen,learn & discover challenges. Then collaborate,innovate & solve.