Co-designing for Disability: A Self Determination Framework

At the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) in Athens, we formed part of the We and AI presence. This was a workshop to AI developers on how sensory boxes and objects could be used to educate AI literacy for all people, for example, learning disabled/intellectually disabled people. As part of this, we shared a handout on some pointers for the AI community for including all people in their work.

Technology promises us a huge amount. Better accessibility, greater participation, and fewer disabling barriers. Yet, many products fail to live up to this. Uninformed by lived experience, they fail to understand the real problem. At best, they are a distraction, and at worst they can be actively harmful.

Motivation, engagement, and well-being must be increased in order for tech to be helpful and serve a purpose. Self-determination posits that the fulfilment of competence, autonomy, and relatedness will motivate the self to seek optimal function and growth.

We need to link our tech usage to self-determination as a way to bring our needs front and centre. It positions psychological needs as basic motives rather than mere experiential requirements.

What do we mean by self-determination?

Autonomy Achievement of self-sufficiency and control over decisions and aspects we can control over our life. Autonomy describes “people’s universal urge to act in accord with their integrated interest and values”.
Why? This represents a strong tendency in reaction to a life of learned helplessness and constant challenges that make you feel a lack of control. Motivations may be skewed to the intrinsic-led, driven by personal enjoyment, but also tempered by extrinsic, influenced by external factors and producing demand avoidance.

Relatedness A feeling that there exist others with at least a significant extent of shared experience, which lends credibility and strength rather than always feeling different to the majority. The importance of relatedness is in forming secure emotional connections and feeling integrated into groups. Relatedness describes “the propensity to experience the sense of belongingness and connectedness to others”.
Why? It becomes essential to have access to alternatives who share common experiences when you are most regularly familiar with those who do not understand you and to whom you must always make efforts to explain or respond to mistaken assumptions.

Competence A sense of being in control and a mastery of using your skills and finding new things intuitive. The tools should land in a comfort zone that allows you to stretch yourself regularly and within reason for growth and progression, while not making you feel unable and incompetent and therefore less likely to thrive. Competence describes “people’s inherent desire to be effective in dealing with the surrounding environment”, which is the desire of feeling capable and effective.
Why? How the feeling of being a deficit because of comparing you to what the normal world expects.

Co-designing for Disability: A Self Determination Framework

What do we mean by self-determination?

Design Patterns

Resources

Standards:

What you can do, find out more, how you can get involved, if interested, engage with us:

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Where has this come from?

Have you ever tried not being you?