hello everybody um welcome to today's session um thank you so much for joining um today we are having the book launch of uh disability interactions um this is a fantastic opportunity to hear from the authors and just find out a little bit more about the publication and uh and i guess what's inside um so just a little bit on accessibility um for today's session um closed captioning is available um so you'll be seeing that um on your screen um and um if you haven't currently got access um you should be able to push your closed caption button um once normally um located at the bottom of your screen um we do really welcome any questions you've got throughout the session um so if there's anything particular you want to ask the authors or find out a little bit more about um please do put that into the q a box um the chat function will be available if you want to communicate directly to any of the panelists but we do ask the questions to come through the q a box um so we limit the chat um via the chat box just to make sure that the screen readers um on interrupting anything on the session today um questions um i said through the q a box um and this session will also be recorded um and shared afterwards um so you'll be able to follow up uh or join or catch up at another point should you be joining from another country um so coming up today uh we're going to be hearing um from the authors of the session um i'm finding out a little bit more about uh why the book was put together and uh what is the framework around disability interactions and also how this book and this approach should be really useful for you and and the work that you might be doing and also a little bit more information about how you can find out more um and then we'll finish up with those q a sessions that q and a's as well that might be coming on from you in from you as we go through the session um so we were going to begin uh with hearing from yvonne who i think is on the line now hi vaughn um so i'll hand it across to you um to introduce yourselves and maybe just give a little bit of an introduction um hi there yeah sorry this is trouble with the zoom and calendars i clicked on the link in the calendar and it took me when there was no one there and then my louise kindly sent me an email to say you're in the wrong room so hopefully in the future we'll be able to do these kinds of book launches in person again i just want to say i think it's fantastic that kathy and julia have managed to write this during lockdown most of us were just simply exhausted the idea of writing a book was far too too much uh and it's uh it's a joy to have seen uh this work is developed from you know early ideas particularly a few years ago i had many conversations with with kathy about her wanting to write a manifesto so a giraffe went back and forth between us uh to it got to a point where i said i think it's ready now so it was sent to the acm interactions magazine which was accepted and i think that was one of the seeds for this book and this idea of disability interactions or dicks for sure is it's a really great manifesto and way of capturing what it is that makes them stand apart from all the many other approaches uh which have been you know thinking about how you design assistive technology for uh disabled people and i think this is a real shift in in how you think about disability and also technology and also thinking about how you engage with people with various kinds of disabilities so that they can become co-designers co-creators and so i think what they've done in this book is take that manifesto and really grow it and illustrate it with lots of really good case studies of how you can do this type of design and approach and i i was flicking through it this morning um and i really like the way in which you've included a number of case studies from people working in this area at the leading edge and getting them to write it so you hear their voices as well as all of the stuff that you've been writing as well so that's really nice and i love the illustrations when i wrote a book for for this particular publisher we weren't allowed to have uh colorful illustrations let alone a color pay um cover so it's only in the last few years and that that brings me on to think about the cover which is absolutely fantastic and i think it was one of your participants who came up with that with five wheels at the front of the wheelchair and so colorful to think about all of the things that are possible and imaginable so i think that's a real eye catcher so that you must be congratulated on that wonderful cover and and that choice of it um so just a a bit more about my involvement in this book was i was given a chapter chapter two or three to read um when it was bubbling up and being formed and i had a big discussion about whether or not this this type of work should be framed in uh you know a bigger context of not just designing technology but to think about you know the grand challenges if you like and kathy was very adamant that she should you know put this into the context of wicked problems and i we went back and forth i said i don't know whether you should be doing this because wicked problems is something about big software systems but i notice it's still in there and it has its place but also that to think about dicks um in relation to hci and what the relationship is between those and it may be that one day it takes over the whole of hci but who knows but i think at the end it's it's a very nice uh way of moving the field forward it's very sensitive to you know people's needs and also their involvement and also to be thinking about designing for accessibility and uh at the end i was surprised it says let's look ahead for the next 60 years so i'm gonna finish on that point and say why just 60 years what happens in 60 years that will be 2082. so uh um i shall stop there and say uh well done congratulations and everyone should have a copy of this thank you so much a fantastic question there just to finish up um so that was uh brilliant and um and i will most definitely not be answering that question myself but in fact i will um hand across um to cathy first of all just to introduce herself and then we'll have a quick instruction from julia um and then maybe we can come back to that question a little bit later on as well um unless there's a quick answer cathy but i think that might be somewhat challenging but i shall handle i know i do love yvonne's easy questions uh but no there's a bit of a longer a longer answer to that um so i'm kathy holloway i'm a co-founder and the academic director of the global disability innovation hub and a professor at ucl's interaction center in interaction design and innovation where i i have great fun talking to yvonne and other colleagues about how we advance the sector of design and technology and gdi hub i have great adventures in the world of global assistive technology provision and disability theory and development theory so these hopefully have come together a little bit in this book and i'll hand over to julia to introduce herself hi everyone thank you so much uh for being here thank you so much for uh your introduction yvonne it's one of the like most humbling thing i've i've heard in quite a while um i'll give you a quick and cheeky answer to your question about why 60 year we picked that date because it was going to be kathy's hundredth birthday um so that seemed like a a fitting deadline for it i couldn't remember what exactly it was i knew it was something like that but i couldn't remember exactly first look into the future uh my name is uh julia barbareski i'm a jsps research fellow at the ko graduate school of media design in yokohama in japan but i'm also a honorary lecturer in disability innovation at gdi hub and euclid and that's actually where sort of um most of the of the writing for for was um was done and uh so one of the things i have the um privilege to start is to tell you a little bit about why we wrote this book in in the first place and uh and evan it's right the book was published a few weeks ago but it was uh written throughout 2021 and i can assure you that uh in the evenings and and weekend that kathy and i spend sort of like discussing chapters and and trying to write sections of the book we did ask ourselves many times while we were doing this um the reality is that this has probably been in the making since we started working together and i believe was 2014 um but but possibly even before that um kathy and i come from to a very different field i have a medical background she has an engineering one and we've both worked across so many different fields and disciplines between hci assistive technologies rehabilitation disability transport and one of the things that happens when when you do this type of work across so many different fields it's that you spend a preposterous amount of time discussing and explaining the importance of other disciplines [Music] and yeah go keep going and the reality is that that sometimes it seems like we're speaking different languages but but the goals we have are are very much the same um and in a very different way it's an incredibly enriching experience um and we really wanted to emphasize what we can learn from each other when when coming and integrating different disciplines and and trying to move from the focus on the interactions between an individual and the technologies and other individuals around but also bring in this broader systems uh this wicked problems that that were mentioned earlier in which these um technologies are are deployed and that's what we tried to do when when writing the um vix framework that kathy is going to tell you a bit more about thanks julia and you'll see the um wicked problems are there move on right at the bottom in the center and i'm going to start with this idea of wicked problems because there was a big discussion between ivan and i and ivan was saying things like well if you're talking about poverty then and then how is technology meant to solve poverty and i was saying things like well if we're going to mediate so much of life through technology then it has to tackle these big problems of sustainability poverty and equality otherwise inherent in our design we we amplify those those biases and those inequalities so it but i take yvonne's point that it's incredibly difficult thing to do and so i don't want we didn't want to overwhelm people think well actually it's just such a big problem it's got nothing to do with us i'll go back to my old way of working so we sort of frame everything around the idea that there is this wicked problem there are loads of wicked problems there's lots of very difficult challenges facing society at the moment but if we if we understand that and in particular the one with poverty so if you're a disabled person or a person with a disability um you are more likely to be poor and and if you're poor you're more likely to have a disability and that's quite a shocking statistic because it happens everywhere it doesn't matter if you're in london or cabera in in kenya it's the same um and so we need to know that when we're designing technologies because it can influence how they are able to scale and and how we were able to get them to people um and so it also that leads me if we go around the circle to look at value and usefulness so oftentimes within healthcare systems or in education systems where a lot of assistive products or technologies that aid people with disabilities to interact with their daily lives they're actually purchased not by individuals they're purchased by big systems they're purchased sometimes by un organizations sometimes by national government sometimes by the national health service and if you don't understand those systems then you might have a brilliant bit of kit but never goes anywhere or you know you manage to get a startup for a couple of years but then it folds and all of our research junior and i and some of the others people have joined the course so thank you for joining but you know we've been working the space for a number of years now and it's it's you know categorical proof everywhere you go that if you're trying to scale an assistive technology or an accessible solution it is harder than than say a standard healthcare technology and there's lots of reasons for that and a lot of in the book um so we want to begin to think about this open and scalable idea how do we bed that in from the start and we think that building on schneiderman's work of applied and basic research that's that's a fundamental part so if you're out doing research uh in the wild as one of yvonne's books was about um and you're out in the field so for those of you not computer sciences in the world just means leaving the lab speaking to the outside world if people are not computer scientists and you know you engage in communities and you run research where technology is being used you run the research then fundamentally as you're doing that you will find new applied problems and we found that as an example some one of my phd students pig manchus work on his new product to cilia going out to schools of india understanding the challenges of blind and partially sighted children trying to learn to read made us look fundamentally a material science problem how do we then use this new material science which is which is a basic piece of research to then deliver a new applied solution and you go around that route and as iran has mentioned you know we care about co-creation and co-creation i always say comes at lots of levels before we came along and we wrote this book there's loads of people who've done stuff on participatory design and co-design um it doesn't matter if you're in the medical field or if you're in the hci field you've got ability-based design we've got great frameworks when we say co-created we don't just mean with people with disabilities we mean a level above that we mean all the systems people as well so that everybody's in there together so you're working with the manufacturer of advice whilst you're developing it so you know you're going to be able to scale it for example or you're working with the education industry so so that you can scale it and so that also brings in some of the development work that's been happening in hci so really in the stuff that we've written about in co-creative solutions it's not so much i think new it's more bringing in two or three different fields and just presenting them together possibly for the first time so we hope that all of that will lead to some radically different interactions uh julia had a different but i've said this just before the call was talking about holograms or wheelchairs like would we like to have those things so beginning to really think about artistic representations of things and how we'd move forward and then this inner circle these uh this inner circle becomes the sort of dimensions that we begin to measure things by so louise if you don't go to the next slide please we we put two of them together power and participation but when we had the framework initially in one draft of the book we began to realize that's fine but how the hell would you know if you've actually made any progress especially against the wicked problem or open and scalable or even the abc the applied and basic science you know agenda research agenda so then we started thinking about what are these the dimensions that we can pull out of each project that we've seen already emerging in hci across different areas that we could maybe bring together and so one of them was around we call it overly simple simple problems and then impactful problems but basically i don't think anybody's really tackling overly simple problems anymore but we're still not tackling hugely impactful problems so how do we begin to shift the needle along along that and again in well-being moving from deficit-based design where we look at people's um you know things they can't do rather than looking at where we currently sit with hci research which is warbucks ability-based design building on that also maybe work with say calvo's positive computing bit to bring in the mental health side and begin to look at an overarching look at wellness and how we strengthen our wellness and power and participation looks not looks at two dimensions really one is of of a disabled person and themselves making sure that that person or group of people are fully included in how we design studies implement studies a part of the analysis process have power in that analysis and in the messaging that comes out of a project but also that if we go back to that initial link between poverty and power and disability that we begin to shift the power to the global south that we begin to look at how we begin to develop products and solutions that are there and then finally we have this innovation um dimension where closed innovation and open innovation open innovation doesn't mean open source innovation it doesn't mean give things away for free it means how do you collaborate more easily not for example i used to work in a big med tech company and i remember a product of mine that helped design but lots of other people didn't go to market because and the competitor didn't put something out but none of we didn't file patents we didn't do anything we just hid the ip we just hit it internally like nobody will ever know that that that exists because we just nobody wanted they just didn't want it out there and for the disability space we don't want that we want you know if you can't commercialize something that's okay but let's let's see somebody else might be able to so we're beginning to to build that dimension and i would argue that final dimension is probably the maybe the newest one into this space within hci at least me so yeah finally uh like the million dollar question like why would this book be of any use to you um well one of the things as as kathy was touching upon if you learn like if you're interested in learning more about disability inclusive hci research um we do touch throughout the book at some of the latest and earliest more impactful development in the fields if you're coming more from a tech or an hci space and what you're trying to do is um understand that the complexity of the 80 system in which assistive technologies but also mainstream accessible technologies are deployed and operate um we try to do that and and we explore this concept of disability interactions both at a personal and broader level across different domains we look at education from how an individual student learn to how sort of curriculums are designed and how things buy or might not be adopted within sort of schools or national education systems um we do similar things in health and and look at the broader system of employment and and we also look at different geographies of how this systems take completely different shapes depending on their cultural um economic and geographical context and finally yeah um we've been incredibly lucky and to have so many different contributors from academia to industry to practitioners that work in in different areas of the world across different domains that are of interest to disability tech and inclusions and they bring their examples and and you can hear their voice and and see what the most impactful disability interactions around at the moment are and and why they're successful finally like we were so lucky to have our very good friend and amazing artist uh jason wilshere mill doing uh the cover of the illustration of the cover of our book um so it actually you know looks pretty impressive on on any bookcase which is definitely like an added value they say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but in this case i would say you can excellent thank you so much for that um julia and kathy really interesting just to hear a little bit more in depth around um i guess the approach disability interactions approach and why it's so nuanced and i guess how it's bringing together lots of different thinking across many different um kind of sectors and a multidisciplinary approach to the to this space um i think it's really particularly interesting hearing a little bit around that kind of i guess i guess maybe the magic in the middle and that's that's really cool to me what the the gdi harb working alongside ucl and euclid are really looking to deliver is that where we can push things in in new directions um and really kind of delve in a bit more more deeply into these quite complex areas um that we've outlined um so that brings us quite nicely on to the dissemination of this uh of this um publication so um obviously the book is available um and it's available um to view and look for all those um uh kind of joining um and to and that's uh there's a link available that you can purchase the book um but what we're also going to do is do a series um of interviews um as julia picked up on there was a lot of different contributors um to this book and also covers a really vast array of different um topics and subjects um so it gives us the opportunity to look in a little bit more detail around some of those elements that are discussed throughout the book and those will be coming out in the kind of coming months um so we'll keep everybody updated on those um for how you can join um there'll be a set of kind of interviews um that will be able to be viewed digitally or the podcast um and they will just give you that little bit more of an oversight of some of the case studies and the specific themes that are running for running through the book as well um so we're about coming towards the end of our session um but what we wanted to do is just give it a bit of an opportunity for a couple of q a's um so if you're joining today and you've got any particular questions potentially around how disability interactions might um sit within your area of work um or your area of study um please do put them in the q a box um but just to start us off um i think it's been really interesting just to hear about how this approach came about um where where it i guess kind of came from and and how the thinking has evolved and sounds like it will also continue to evolve in this space so i guess my question and i think i'll come to kathy um on this one is um is why has this not been done before um and what where do you see this kind of progressing from from this point here um i think i think it's a certain point in time i think if you go back um to the first global disability summit for example in 2018 that there was a sort of a global um sort of flag in the ground if you like that we're going to now focus really on on helping to achieve sustainable development goals around disability and i think before that the efforts have been quite fragmented so on the one hand the global disability space has moved and people are beginning to focus more on this area secondly i think there's been you know we're getting older people are living longer and then thirdly we've got the unique opportunity of coverts so there's been a couple of great papers that emma i think has a participant recently uh and people wrote a paper about 18 covered for example and use and then our main youth kind of wrote another paper about the social impact of covid on on assistive technology users and really looking at that idea that social we have had an in we've had an insight every single person on the planet has an insight into the challenges and inconveniences and difficulties when systems don't work and when you when you're impeded by you know an inaccessible environment in this case the inaccessible environment happened to be a virus which then ended up meaning like lots of lockdown problems and other issues but it's also an opportunity there i also think hci has emerged and matured to a great extent i think we use us user-based studies in human computer interaction around disability are very mature now how to do co-design is very mature as at a at a relatively small level at an individual level where we're developing technologies for you know a group of people a small group i think we're very mature um and so i think it's yeah things have just come together at a nice time for this um and i think maybe just personally it was also a good moment with julia and i had sort of done quite a lot of work together and felt like there was enough there that there was something we weren't quite sure what it was but there was something that maybe could contribute to moving the argument forward and hopefully we've managed to do that a little bit but i suspect it's just the start and all these things are and i hope that answers your question really think so excellent yeah thank you so much that kathy and we've just had a question come in on the q a box um and it's asking around how the approach um places itself in relation to universal design approach so that's the idea that the design should be designed in a way that both people disabilities and people doesn't have specific disabilities can use in the same way um so julia will maybe come to you on that it'd be really interesting just to hear through that context um how that yeah like i i actually love that question because because we do it it's interesting we do touch upon that um in in one of the chapters of the book very specifically um because um universal design inclusive design uh so the embedding of accessibility into mainstream products have placed a huge um shift into what sort of like design around disability and an assistive technology is and the reality is that the disability interactions coexist with all these approaches and and try to bring them together because um inclusive design universal design have revolutionized um the space but they will always coexist with assistive technology as well there will always be the need for some form of um dedicated uh technologies and you also have newer um frameworks like the ability based design that talks about sort of flexible interfaces that change depending on what the person can do and adapt um sort of to their needs and those also come in and and what they do it's a lot of these system focus on the personal interaction with the technologies but at the same time they also change the system level of how things are delivered and work because if we think about traditional pass me the term assistive technologies like wheelchair versus more inclusive technology like mobile phones they work on two different types of uh larger city of technology systems that sort of coexist in and have to live together and and that's how sort of we try to merge them and and find ways in which things can slot together a little bit more easily excellent um thank you so much julia it's really interesting just to hear that kind of context of how it relates to those different spaces as well um so we're coming towards the end of the session and i can see we've had a couple more questions come in um run specifically around um interest from policymakers um in disability interactions um and one around looking at um how it might apply to disability recreation and sports participation um so it will be really interesting just to touch on some of those things um as we kind of move forward in in kind of sharing a little bit more information about this topic there's a quite big big way to question so i'm not sure we're going to have quite the space to come to right now um but please do pop anything in the question and answer box or come to us um directly i'm following this session if there's anything particularly you think would be really interesting that we can touch on as we um start to do the kind of recorded interviews and podcasts that we make available um after the session and in the coming kind of months ahead as well um so those are all more things that we can touch on in a little bit more more detail is we go into a little bit more depth around this area um so just to finish up really i just wanted to say big thank you to um to cathy and julia and congratulations on the publication um and a huge thank you to everyone for joining us and also um morgan and clay for the publishers um we'll just come to you kathy really just for any final words um before we wrap up but i also just noticed um there's someone asking a bit of a question around kind of msc research and it might be a good point just to mention if you're um just joining or just starting out in this field or interested in finding out a little bit more um the global disability innovation hub run an msc program on disability design and innovation um that's run um from ucl um but is also collaboratively alongside um the uh loughborough university london and the london college of fashion so it's a really fascinating multi-disciplinary course that touches on a huge amount of what's been mentioned today and and those different elements that fit into disability interactions so that might also be one to consider um if you're a student joining today who's looking um how you might further your expertise or studies within this field as well so um cathy i'll just hand it across to you for any final words before we wrap up and we'll be following up with you all joining us today about a little bit more information um on this in the future um so i would just say thank you to everybody and we couldn't bring it about people and everyone in gdi have some support there and also the case studies you know the people in the case studies they really helped evolve our thinking with each chapter as well it wasn't just the case study it you know it really did help there were also two reviewers of the book that gave some really insightful um comments and feedback and and definitely improved a couple of sections in particular that i think are now much longer i read so that i genuinely didn't know about when one of them pointed some out and so yeah we keep learning um so i i just want to say thank you i really do hope it's the start of a conversation um and we can see how we can begin to do what some of the questions have said doesn't influence policymakers into the technology design but also make sure that disabled people are leading and this so thank you everybody and thank you everyone for taking the time to to come and say a few words today and julia it's good to see you everyone that's it for today um and we'll hopefully uh hear from you all soon take care bye thanks all right thank you jason for the artwork bye thank you
2022-02-05