Introduction
“Furniture and tools, kitchen and campuses and city streets – nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be deemed disability, we may never stop to consider – or reconsider – the hidden assumption on which our everyday environment is built.”
Sara Hendren (2020, p. 2)
According to the CDC, approximately one in four adults in the United States live with a disability at some point in their lives that affects major life activities (CDC, 2018). This jarring statistic is measured by six types of disabilities – mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, independent living, and self-care – and represents the commonality of disabilities. Engineers traditionally design and manufacture products with the intent of making the world more functional and more available. However, this often has adverse effects, not only for the general population, but especially for people with disabilities. Engineering students have historically not been trained to put disabilities at the center of their design processes, and rather view accessibility as an afterthought. Throughout the creative process, designs are intended for able-bodied people, leading to further exclusion of those who are disabled. People with disabilities have always had to be the ones to change the world to work better for them, but the responsibility should not be fully theirs. In order to create a society that is better suited for people with disabilities, engineering education curriculum must be changed to raise awareness about disabilities and leave room for the “human factor” in design. Lafayette College currently offers only a few educational opportunities – courses or research – about disability studies; this project is intended to offer options to address this within the engineering department, as well as in general academia at Lafayette.
Changing the engineering education curriculum has many challenges. As of now, Lafayette, along with many other engineering colleges and universities, have minimal to no course offerings regarding disability, whether these courses are technical or social. There are four professors among Lafayette’s eight engineering disciplines (encompassing six majors) that study/teach disabilities. Without professors that are knowledgeable about disabilities, engineering students cannot be properly educated about how to alter their design processes. Integrating disability studies into engineering will also require financial commitments – aside from hiring additional professors, the department may need to purchase equipment and technologies that are specific to disability design. Overcoming these challenges requires the college to prioritize disability studies in the curriculum.
First, our college communities must have an overall increase in awareness of disabilities. While we are putting our focus on engineers, this awareness needs to be widespread among all college disciplines rather than only in engineering. This could present opportunities for engineers to work together with fellow academic divisions such as psychology and sociology in order to create the best designs possible for people with disabilities. Logistically, there can be specific shifts in the curriculum and offerings to provide a just learning experience for students with disabilities. In terms of the curriculum perspective, providing the needed accommodations for disabled students is the main step into making sure that disabled students can access all course offerings. Stepping beyond providing an equal learning space, the curriculum can be more specific in providing courses and co-curriculars to teach future engineers about disabilities. The goal of such a curriculum is to teach all engineers to be receptive to the needs of the disabilities, as well as the rest of the society.
The topic of disability studies aligns with human centered design/humanitarian engineering. It may seem unclear what disability studies has to do with Engineering Studies as a major, since this reform seems so “design-focused.” Design for disability is not as technical as we think – it is not about a group of design engineers coming together to create a specific product that will make life easier for a specific disabled individual (Hendren, p.10, 2020). Rather, this is about engineers – and society in general – learning to view design from a different perspective: to understand and empathize with the disabled community, and recognize that there is no “quick-fix” technology, especially since no two disabilities are exactly the same.
As Engineering Studies students, our focus of this project is to put humans at the center of design, rather than putting technology at the center. In order to accomplish this, we spoke with faculty members from several academic divisions – psychology, neuroscience, and mathematics – rather than just engineering. This reflects the interdisciplinary aspect of Engineering Studies, as well as the notion that engineering is not always technical. Engineers should learn about people with disabilities and their daily struggles that may seem minor to people without disabilities – they should not be skipping straight to the technical portion. Initially, we will provide a framework to showcase the struggles that the disabled community faces in our built environment and how design often neglects their needs. We will then analyze two exemplary programs from model institutions and analyze the context by which they practice design for disability. We will then explore disability studies as a part of an audit of what disability studies programs/research Lafayette has already offered. Finally, we will provide recommendations on how to integrate the practices of our model institutions with the curriculum at Lafayette and specify how we plan for this to be implemented.
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