Innovative ICT Applications for Hearing Impaired Children – a Participatory Design Approach

User-centered design and participatory design (or co-design) are design philosophies placing the end users of a new product or application in the center of the process of designing and developing new (ICT) products and applications. In user-centered ICT design, the users, their tasks and contexts as well as their needs, problems and wishes are the starting point for developing a new application instead of departing from technology (Vredenburg, Isensee & Righi, 2002). The end users are constantly involved in the design and development process from the early beginning of the process onwards. User-centered design projects have a highly iterative character, and prototypes are evaluated with users as often as possible. Participatory design is similar to user-centered design in that sense that end-users are the main focus of attention when designing and developing a new application. In addition, when following a participatory design process, the users become part of the project team and are actively involved in designing (and evaluating) iterative prototypes (Schuler & Namioka, 1993; Sanders & Stappers, 2008).