Practices in Enabling Technologies (PiET) Lab

This project focuses on the social construction of assistive technologies and seeks to intervene via the development of techniques and platforms that create new and improved paths of inclusion for the creation of ATs using maker methods and personal-scale fabrication. My master's thesis contributed to this research through investigating the available techniques for increasing inclusion in the design process and questioning the status quo of the decision making process in the open-source communities. I introduced a persona technique for increasing inclusion of the people with impairments and their close circle of friends and family members in the design process of OS AT. In addition to the improved persona technique, I propose a model for decision making in the process of the design of OS ATs.

This project focuses on the social construction of assistive technologies and seeks to intervene via the development of techniques and platforms that create new and improved paths of inclusion for the creation of ATs using maker methods and personal-scale fabrication. My master's thesis contributed to this research through investigating the available techniques for increasing inclusion in the design process and questioning the status quo of the decision making process in the open-source communities. I introduced a persona technique for increasing inclusion of the people with impairments and their close circle of friends and family members in the design process of OS AT. In addition to the improved persona technique, I propose a model for decision making in the process of the design of OS ATs.

The Smartphone Accommodation Resource Toolbox (SmART) is an online platform that supports the use of video production and interactive feedback tools for teaching and learning. I worked in a team led by Prof. Melanie Baljko and Prof. Iris Epstein, creating a usability evaluation framework for the SmART Toolbox. The usability testing framework consisted of three main parts of pretest, test, and post-test. In thepretest, we conducted a survey to examine the initial technical knowledge of the students in making and editing videos. After the students got familiar and worked with the toolbox over the course of a semester, we had another round of surveys to evaluate their progress in making and creating videos. By analyzing the data, we found the main trends that led us to creating the main user profiles of students using the system. Representative students were chosen to conduct a usability testing session following the think aloud protocol. This yielded the main struggles and issues the main user profiles had when using the SmART Toolbox.