Immersion as a Strategy to Facilitate Participatory Design Involving People With Intellectual Disabilities and Caretakers as Proxies

This paper reports from the early phase of a Participatory Design (PD) process where the goal is to design technology that involves people with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) and their caretakers as participants. The background of the study is a long-term collaboration with a local activity center for people with ID and 56 participants from this empirical context participated in this study. The presented methodological approach emphasizes immersion as a means of gaining access to and learning about the context to help identify crucial considerations for the facilitation of later PD activities. The paper presents two analyses of contextual data to reflect on how immersion as a strategy provides important insight into contextual considerations that can help shape future PD activities. Three learning outcomes are presented and discussed: involving users with ID and their caretakers as proxies, organizing long-term commitment, and lastly building on already-established forms of mutual learning.