Changing the Perceptions of Disability
Untapped Talent in the Workforce
A Human Centered Design (HCD) Team Project
Fall 2019Project Backdrop
Our team utilized the design-thinking principles of Acumen.org & IDEO.org to propose an experiential learning workshop intended to remove stigma around hiring people with disabilities and help improve their career opportunities.
We followed 3 core phases of design thinking: Inspiration, Ideation, and Implementation.
Our Fundamental Question
How Might We:
Reduce Stigma Towards and Increase Employment Opportunities for People Living with Disabilities?
Project Keypoints
Inspiration: Empathetic Research
Our team’s empathy phase was a collective effort of group and individual research. Some team members were able to interview hearing impaired individuals that communicate through sign language, and others did secondary research online for disability laws and statistics.
To help deepen our team's level of understanding for those with disabilities, it required:
- Attending an inspirational talk by Robert Anthony, an American Ninja Warrior, actor, multi-sport athlete on U.S. National teams, father, husband, philanthropist, and amputee.
- Participating in a contextual interview with a legally blind accessibility specialist.
- Conducting an immersive observation session with a legally blind individual utilizing a screen-reader to navigate a website.
Affinity Mapping: Insights & How Might We Statements
After the inspiration phase, our team further unpacked the problem space by deriving opportunities for design from our insights.
We generated deeper How Might We’s, i.e. “How might we promote the talents of individuals with disabilities to employers?”
Brainstorming Session & Vote for Most Successful Idea
Our team conducted a brainstorming session to generate ideas for each of our How Might We’s.
An anonymous vote led us to choosing an Experiential Workshop, targeted at hiring entities (i.e. managers, staffing agencies), as the Idea Most Likely to Succeed.
Idea Creation
Our team sought out inspiration from disability resources and utilized a pre-defined training model for organizational disability awareness hiring.
After constructing a storyboard of what a training session might look like, we determined the activity of each phase by evaluating the important questions they should answer.
Our Big Idea: An Experiential Workshop to Promote Talent
We turned our activity ideas into an experiental workshop proposal that promotes disability talent through educational group activities (i.e. problem solving, role play), keynote speakers, and more.
Idea Validation & Next Steps
We have minimally introduced our workshop for early feedback with plans for advanced refinement by showing our idea to disability and human resource representatives. The hope is that our meetings lead to a pilot opportunity.
Appendix
- Team tools—Slack (team channel), Google Hangout (weekly meetings), Google solutions, Miro (ideation and solution activities).