Involving People with Disabilities: Lessons from a Designer-Centred Inclusive Design Competition

Involving end-users can make a real difference in producing products and designs that actually meet their needs and wants. This is particularly important when it comes to older and disabled users, who often differ markedly from designers. This paper considers how such participatory design with older and disabled users can be put into practice in an industrial setting, through examining a study of an industrial inclusive design competition. We discuss designers’ different reactions to the involvement of users and different ways in which they drew on the users’ expertise and insight, and we draw out some implications for encouraging the uptake of user involvement in industry.