Design to build bridges – when to use disability simulation

How do you design products when your user’s think and experience the world so differently to you?

In autism there exists the “Double empathy problem” – the idea that autistic people cannot understand us and we cannot understand them. Too often co-design questions are structured in a way that render inaccurate results from interviews. So, how do we bridge these differences in order to work together towards better and more accessible tools?

This talk will be on the ethics of disability simulation as a means of understanding user’s (when it is and isn’t ethical to use) and how to build an adaptive co-design process based on different user’s needs that enables a common shared language which may in most instances be a better approach than disability simulation.

Design without Empathy

Empathy, we are told, is the key to creating accessible products. Many of us as advocates have relied on appeals to emotion to advance accessible practices. But what happens when it doesn’t work? And what happens when “good people” do the wrong things in the name of empathy?