Design Artefacts to Support People with a Disability to Build Personal Infrastructures

A person with a disability has to assemble support services and technologies from different organisations in order to live well, which may require help from family. We call this assembling of services and technologies personal infrastructuring, the process of learning about how to navigate the world, what support is available, and how to obtain and design new support through various organisational infrastructures. Such infrastructures include disability services organisations, the health sector, community organisations, and friend and family networks. Our vision was to explore how a person with a disability might engage in design with volunteer designers to meet their unique needs that were not met by their existing infrastructure of organisations, products and services. Through codesign with two people and their families, we developed design artefacts such as user profiles and video stories to support communication, mutual learning, need finding and need expression. We discovered that these design artefacts were used beyond their immediate purposes of design to further support their personal infrastructuring. In this paper, we discuss how understandings of infrastructure and infrastructuring from Science and Technology Studies and Information Systems translate into familial contexts and the concept of personal infrastructuring.

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