Includ-ed, red europea de educación inclusiva

The 14th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs will take place on July 09-11, 2014 (Pre-Conference July 07-08, 2014) at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis.

CDI - Creative Design for Inclusion

The application of creative thinking to inclusive design is emerging as a key challenge within the context of European and national innovation policies. In the context of social innovation, the urgency of the task is illustrated by our rapidly aging society and the economic consequences of a diminishing workforce.

There exists a clear understanding from industry that catering to the needs of everyone can help to grow existing markets substantially and open new market segments. And an equally clear understanding that creativity and design can help in unlocking innovative solutions. Such solutions would seek to re-design care, education and personal development in order to improve quality of life and reduce costs.

In many ways the Design-For-All approach has had only limited success. Fortunately, however, a great deal of work has already been done on establishing requirements and preferences for different target groups. Much of this work has been brought together in a number of key international standards, which also address personalisation issues, although the translation of these requirements into cloud-based architectures and mainstream content and media processing is only now beginning to emerge in the marketplace (see for example ePUB3).

Many ICT-based solutions are poorly designed, poorly constructed and use hopelessly outdated notions of “the user”. Most of these problems stem from poor communication, a situation which arises because technologists and system users often seem to use different languages while essentially working towards common goals. Nevertheless a common language actually does exist, as the common elements in the analysis of computer programming and creative thinking are those of structure and form. At this point interfaces provide connection points for enhancing levels of communication. This involves paying greater attention to each part of the information processing chain (from creation or composition, through processing or transformation to presentation and delivery). It also requires us to consider in more depth key aspects of information granularity and addressability.
 
The challenge now lies in:

• - bringing together disparate and diverse approaches, platforms and solutions under the banner of more creative approaches to Inclusive Design
• - redefining our understanding of interaction to stimulate the adoption of coherent applied research
• - encouraging a greater focus not only on human needs but also human capabilities
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Topics

Let us know about the ways in which you have used creative approaches for inclusion. Papers are welcomed on the following topics but please feel free to make other suggestions and contact the STS Chair if you have any questions.

• - Approaches to human‐centered innovation
• - Creative approaches to providing accessible information
• - Encouraging Inclusive Design Processes
• - Mainstreaming creative and inclusive solutions
• - Creative partnerships between key stakeholders
• - Shaping inclusion policy and framework conditions
• - Establishing communities and centres of interest
• - Motivating institutions to demand specific solutions (creative pull)
• - Teaching students to start thinking from use cases to technological solutions
• - Helping institutions to combine both creative and technological educational  cultures (such as science & interactive design or applied art & computing)