Building inclusive communities through collaborative platform
Service design for persons with disabilities
Brief:
The 4 month self initiated project focuses on creating a platform that is inclusive in nature and leads to collaboration between persons with disabilities (PwD’s) and non disabled people. The project utilities existing systems to create a service that could be beneficial for PwD’s and non disabled people. The service exploits social circles as a medium to reach out to people.
Who did I design it with?
Enable India is a Non-governmental organization that empowers persons with disabilities to strive for livelihood opportunities.
Concept video
Process
Understanding the space
Spreading the blanket around organisations workings and it’s structure. This phase helped me to understand the services that are provided by Enable India for persons with disabilities and also how
these services can be utilized to create collaborative platform.
Ideating with insiders
Once opportunity areas were identified, experts from each service helped in ideating further to create or envision a collaborative platform.
The Ideas came out by conducting a session where hypothetical user scenarios were created and the
experts had to ideate around these scenarios.
Gaining insights
Moving forward with focusing on two services in hand out of the ten, the basic idea of this phase was to understand how PwDs operate within each service
or to understand how they use each service.This phase assisted the project in gaining opportunity areas that can be used to ideate with insiders.
Building with actors
In this stage the actors (PwD’s) end users of both the services were called upon for a participatory design session to ideate better for the collaborative platform. An improv activity took place where actors
had to have their own stories and troublemakers
will stop at specific points to make sense of the entire story.
Outcomes
A system design was proposed to achieve a collaborative platform. The system has 4 phases that utilizes existing services and networks to ease the feasibility of the platform.
The system leverages two main services available within Enable India -
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Enable Academy:
Online knowledge base platform for persons with disabilities.
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Enable Community:
Inclusion through fun. Event based awareness platform.
Further down the project, a digital service has been proposed for Phase 2.
The idea was to create a website where people could connect to other peer learners and leaders. The service can be utilised by person with disability and Non disabled people.
Below are the sample screens for the website: