A non-clinical approach to describing participants with intellectual disability

Despite mounting evidence that standardised tests and diagnoses are often not appropriate to recruit and describe participants with intellectual disability while acknowledging their diversity, designers have few tools to describe their participants when reporting in academic literature. More importantly, most clinical language about intellectual disability is neither owned nor mastered by the people to whom it refers. This paper proposes an approach that integrates the executive function framework, as used and understood by practitioners, with the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL), as experienced and understood by people with intellectual disability, into a set of questions in relation to support. We discuss the applicability of our proposed approach, broadly and through the lens of reflections on a small case study.