Seminar: Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures, Dr Ray Holt, University of Leeds
- Date
- Thursday 22 February 2024, 15.00 - 16.00
- Location
- Civil Engineering LT B (3.25)
Speaker Bio:
Raymond Holt is a Lecturer in Product Design in the University of Leeds’ School of Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on haptic perception, prehension and the user-centred design of assistive technology. He has worked on projects involving arm rehabilitation robotics, haptic navigation and inclusive design, the most recent of these prior to itDf being the Horizon 2020-funded SUITCEYES project (http://www.suitceyes.eu).
Abstract:
The future for disabled people is often imagined in terms of technological change: exo-skeletons, prosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, self-driving cars and companion robots that will remove the barriers they face. The reality is often more disappointing: technologies failing to live up to their hype, or high costs and lack of accessibility preventing their use in practice. Thinking about how the relationship between disability and technology will develop in future will mean paying attention to these issues, and working closely with disabled people to understand their needs and aspirations. How, then, can engineers and disabled people imagine future technologies together?
This presentation provides an overview of the multidisciplinary Wellcome-Trust funded Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) project, and with my own work on haptics for people with dual sensory impairments in particular to address this question. The itDf project ((https://itdfproject.org/), brings together engineers, roboticists, designers, phenomenologists and scholars of the humanities along with disabled mentors to investigate the links between disability, culture, design and technology.
The presentation will give a general description of the project, and some of the basic concepts (social and medical models of disability; humanism and posthumanism) and then present our mentor-led approach to design and some of the challenges involved in co-designing new technologies with potential users.