Building “Design Empathy” for People with Disabilities: an Unsolved Challenge in HCI Education

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Abstract
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education research strives to integrate inclusion and diversity in classroom teaching. We focus on a key demographic that has been historically underrepresented in design: people with multiple disabilities and/or severe motor disabilities. Since engaging directly with these populations is rarely feasible, we need other ways of teaching students how to consider the challenges, emotions, and lived experiences of these target users. While current approaches in HCI education do engage students in thinking about accessibility through curated disabled experiences (e.g., simulation or personas), these methods do not fully reflect the holistic experience of people with disabilities. We propose a new way of teaching design empathy: immersing students in the real-world experiences of people with disabilities through a curated set of their public social media posts.

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