 Images of a wind farm, commercial airliner, computer chips, digital car design, a robot, words appear. Including Universal Design in the Engineering Curriculum. Cynthia, student. By including accessibility in universal design in engineering curriculum, you're making a statement to all the students that you're teaching that the perspectives and the needs of people with disabilities is something that they need to think about whether they're engineering specifically for that group or for any other group. Cheryl Burgstahler, University of Washington. I think it's really important that we train our new engineers to be versed in the area of universal design and accessibility so that when they create products for the companies that they will work for, they'll be accessible and usable by people with disabilities and individuals with all kinds of different characteristics. Annette Caspi. As a creator of a technology, you have the onus and responsibility to address the needs of a variety of end-users. Universal design and related frameworks such as inclusive design, ability-based design and human-centered design encourage engineers to be proactive in considering the abilities of diverse users. Universal design is defined by the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University as the design of products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. Universal design requires engineers to question any assumptions a design makes about its users. Engineering students who understand these concepts enter the workforce prepared to design for a wide variety of users. Kat Steele, Mechanical Engineering Faculty. So just as we teach safety and material properties and dynamics within our engineering curriculum, incorporating universal design can ensure that our future engineers consider those small design tweaks and consider the breadth of the population in their design and future innovation. Terrell Thompson. Asking is this accessible or what are the accessibility implications? Technology accessibility specialist. That is a practice that can follow them throughout their engineering career. Engineer Billy Price used his own life experience as a person with quadriplegia to design a line of shoes. It's an example of universal design. A foot is placed into an open-toe box and the shoe is zipped closed. They don't have the ability to tie laces. Billy Price. And I know when it comes to laces, a common solution out there is to use Elkrow. Mechanical engineer. Even if you overcome the laces, you still have the physical issue of jamming your foot into the shoe. So staring at my feet for 18 years, in other words, like half a lifetime and not being able to put my shoes on, I knew there had to be a better solution. The shoe that we've created, yes, it has adaptive characteristics, but we're not marketing as an adaptive shoe. It's a shoe that's trendy, it's a shoe that everyone's going to want to wear. It's a shoe that will be in all the stores so anyone can buy it. The shoes have a unique zipper that runs along the outside edge of the shoe. It opens like a clamshell. Fast-motion video. A car speeds through store aisles. There are opportunities for universal design in thousands of consumer products and built environments that engineers help to design and build. Addressing these needs can improve the lives of individuals with disabilities and the general population. Engineering educators can help prepare their students to design for diverse abilities by introducing accessibility or universal design topics in a variety of ways. You could do maybe just part of a lecture, or you could just do one lecture on it or several lectures, not a whole course. And then the third option is to develop a whole course on accessibility universal design. In a classroom, when you're having a design challenge, if you think about how could somebody who's older and has arthritis use this thing you're designing? Could a pregnant woman use this thing you've just created? Start asking those questions of could somebody who's colorblind use this? You're actually thinking about a more broad population and it's an easy way to sneak some ideas about universal design and creating a product that's more widely usable into what you're designing. University of Washington's Terrell Thompson created a web design curriculum for high school students that integrates accessibility into design considerations. Kids are learning to code web pages using all the languages that you use to code web pages, HTML, and CSS and JavaScript. And they learn very early on some core design principles, one of which is the need for accessible design. And so they learn how people with disabilities access computers and access the web and what some of the challenges they face are. And then as they're learning new techniques throughout the course, they learn, or they're sort of taught to ask, how does this technique affect accessibility? But there are either ways that faculty can teach about disability, accessibility, and universal design in their courses. I think capstone courses, the purpose of them is to allow students to apply the skills that they've learned in a real world situation and so it can be a great opportunity for students to, you know, first of all, understand that accessibility and universal design can address real world problems, but also to allow the students to put some of the skills that they've learned into practice. I teach our senior design course, which is a common year-long course for engineering students that they take in their final year of their undergraduate. And that really is a natural place for integrating topics of accessibility and universal design. We have students working on projects from designing an electric skateboard to figuring out the next medical product that can prevent collapsed lungs. And in all of these, components of universal design can enter to help them do user testing on a diverse set of users, consider how small changes in their design can increase access or make a device easier to use. Often a design tweak that, for example, might make it easier for an individual with a visual impairment or someone who has limited dexterity will actually make the product easier for everyone to use. And so we inject universal design into our curriculum to encourage them to explore lots of different design spaces and hopefully ultimately have a better design. Nils Hackensang. In my class, I teach a biomechanics class. Biomedical engineering. Faculty. Momentum and linear and angular momentum and I demonstrate how I use momentum to swing my arm to get my hand up onto the joystick of my wheelchair. And so it's kind of trying to incorporate those type of examples in class. Giving students opportunities to meet and interact with people with disabilities is a great way to include it in the curriculum. We found that the students learned so much through just having a space to sit down and talk frankly about issues surrounding accessibility, disability and some of the societal implications. By teaching accessibility and universal design and engineering courses, faculty are producing engineers who can succeed in a competitive job market because they will be equipped to create products that are widely accessible to users with diversibilities. Users can get started by including a panel of individuals with diversibilities, helping students to consider universal design and address disability-related issues in design projects, requiring that students adhere to accessibility guidelines when they create user interfaces or websites. If we want an accessible society with innovation that includes accessibility, then students need to be taught about universal design and accessibility. Words appear. To learn more about how you can incorporate accessibility and universal design in engineering courses, visit the Access Engineering website hosted by the University of Washington. www.edu.co.uk. Access Engineering is supported by National Science Foundation grant number EEC-1-4. 444-961. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this video are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Described by AudioEyes. Copyright 2016. 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