Designing Inclusive User Experience for Impaired People. An RtD Driven Proposal for Albanian Urban Spaces

A significant percentage of the studies regarding the user experience of urban spaces does not take into account a segment of the population characterized by people with physical and communication impairment. Even though HCI is a current major field of interest in design, disability - and consequently accessibility - is still a localized and understudied field of opportunity for contemporary research. Most of the solution proposed by architects - and designers - tend to refer to a generic type of user and, even though claiming to be inclusive, they primarily engage able-bodied people. In the last decades, design and HCI have moved beyond the workplace and have begun to tackle increasingly wicked and particular problems affecting the everyday lives of people. The result of this significant shift materialized into a playful, bottom-up and human-centered way to design the urban space. The research for this contribution is rooted in a Research Through Design (RtD) approach (Zimmerman et al. 2007, 2010), where design is used to raise awareness and to generate design knowledge on disability and accessibility issues. This paper aims for proposing catalytic interventions for public space where interactive technologies are used to create a bridge between different typologies of users. Moreover, this paper is speculative also for the authors themselves. The identified operative categories will set the sparkle for the deployment of a design cell where to gather quantitative/qualitative data to understand better the spatial needs of impaired people, and to offer them a better and more inclusive design experience.