STAGING THROUGH PROTOTYPING WITH PARTIALLY BLINDED PEOPLE

Visual impairment can make it difficult for people to perform normal daily activities. Modern information technologies may help some people overcome some of these difficulties, but only if they are designed with the intended users in mind. It can be challenging to reconcile experts’ abstract knowledge with user needs to create software that helps disabled users perform daily activities while maintaining self-sufficiency. In a society in which self-service seems to be a dominant trend it becomes even more important to understand how to design solutions enabling all citizens to stay or become self-sufficient. Studies show that visual impaired persons rarely are involved in designing such technologies, which in many cases causes them to be excluded from everyday activities. We discuss how a design team applied collaborative methods and prototypes as boundary objects in dialogue with visually impaired people aiming including them as user of a self-service technology.The use of material objects from the very start of the design process contributed to a process in which the designers and visually impaired persons co-designed a new user interface that would enable these actors to collect and send parcels through ‘døgnbox’, an self-service, touchscreen-based postal system in Denmark (Nielsen et al. 2015). We describe how the design team used a variety of material objects to interest, enrol and mobilise the visually impaired actors in design processes (Callon 1986). We also discuss how the development of modern smart technologies can have the unintended effect of reducing the self-sufficiency of visually impaired persons.