CARD collaborative working group
The CARD Collaborative Working Group will meet Thursday, April 11, 2024. The meeting will be hosted by Dr. Deana McDonagh at her (dis)ability Design Studio at Beckman Institute.
The purpose of the Working Group meetings is to foster fellowship among UIUC faculty involved in disability related research, share ideas, support junior faculty, and facilitate the development of research teams.
April 2024 CARD Collaborative Working Group Lab Host
Deana McDonagh, Ph.D.
Dr. Deana McDonagh is Professor (Industrial Design) and founder of the (dis)Ability Design Studio at the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology. She is a Health Innovation Professor at the Carle Illinois School of Medicine and is bringing empathic modelling into the training of medical students to experience disability from a person perspective. As an Empathic Design Research Strategist, she focuses on enhancing quality of life for all through more intuitive and meaningful products, leading to emotional sustainability. She concentrates on the emotional user-product relationships and how empathy can bring the designer closer to users’ authentic needs, ensuring both functional and emotional needs are met by products.
(dis)ability Design Studio
The (dis)Ability Design Studio is based at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. The environment is far removed from a typical research space in order to support different kind of conversations, support brainstorming and enable a higher level of empathic new product development. This facility acknowledges people with disabilities as collaborators and contributors to knowledge. The pedagogy of discomfort enables a range of empathic modeling tools to offer individuals the opportunity to experience other peoples’ experiences, such as restricted mobility, vision impairment. By augmenting one’s body in this way, we personally become more empathic and sensitized to the understanding we may lack. The sister facility is the Human Performance Mobility Maker Lab, founded by Coach Adam Bleakney at DRES.