Engineering to enhance human mobility, play, and exploration
UW Today featured our recent guidelines for accessible makerspaces:
How makerspaces can be accessible to people with disabilities
Also see the note from NSF.
Thanks to all the students, staff, and AccessEngineering partners who helped create these guidelines and provide feedback!
AccessEngineering presented a webinar with Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI) on:
Incorporating universal design topics into postsecondary computer science and engineering courses
Speakers included Kat Steele from Mechanical Engineering, Maya Cakmak and Richard Ladner from Computer Science & Engineering, and Sheryl Burgstahler from UW’s DO-IT program. You can still watch the webinar and learn some techniques for integrating universal design and accessibility into your lectures, courses, or labs here.
This week a team of our faculty and undergraduate students (3 research students from the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and 6 scholars from the UW DO-IT program for teens with disabilities) took on the challenge to help make makerspaces more accessible.
Many engineering departments, libraries, and universities are launching new initiatives to create makerspaces, physical spaces where students, faculty, and the broader community can gather and share resources and knowledge, work on projects, network, and build. In creating these innovative spaces we should consider principles of universal design to ensure the spaces, tools, and community are accessible to as many individuals as possible.
As one of our participants told us, accessibility of makerspaces is especially important because:
Makerspaces are often used to help build new assistive technology and increase accessibility; however, many of these spaces and tools remain inaccessible. We need to make sure disabled people can access these spaces and create the products and designs that they actually want.
The students toured the UW’s CoMotion Makerspace before completing a prototyping challenge to design the ideal wallet. Students worked in teams of two and dove into our challenge which focused upon both teaching need-based, human-centered design while also giving students the chance to get messy, test out tools, and create. The groups came up with some great insights into how wallets could be improved and prototyped some creative designs. Through this activity we also learned about some of the challenges in the space, tools, and design activity:
We’ll be taking the feedback from these students and integrating with feedback from faculty, staff, and other community members to help create guidelines and best practices for accessible makerspaces. Stay tuned!