For our HCI expansion, my team took on accessibility and aging, unpacking four research papers and designing an activity that put the week's biggest idea to the test.
In our HCI course, each group is assigned a week to lead an "expansion", basically, you take the week's readings, synthesize the core ideas, and bring them alive for the class in a way that goes beyond just summarizing slides.
Our week was all about accessibility and aging. The challenge: make four dense academic papers feel relevant, urgent, and engaging, and build an activity that wasn't just filler, but actually reinforced the concepts.
The best expansion doesn't just explain the papers. It makes the room feel why the ideas matter.
, The goal we set ourselvesWe split the papers across our team and each took ownership of presenting one, then worked together to find the connective thread. That thread turned out to be surprisingly sharp: most technology designed for disabled or aging users treats them as problems to solve, not people to collaborate with.
Older adults face real friction, fragmented interfaces, jargon, hidden ports. But the deeper insight is about agency: designing with older adults means recognizing their expertise in their own lives.
People with non-visible disabilities navigate a nuanced choice in VR: disclose, stay private, or selectively share. Avatars can be tools of self-determination, but only if designers make space for that.
Standard participatory design doesn't account for varying cognition. Good co-design here means adapting methods, getting repeated consent, and centering emotional experience, not just function.
HCI research frames aging as decline, market opportunity, or digital deficiency. All three narratives sideline the actual person, and all three lead to patronizing, limited design outcomes.
Presenting these together, we could show the same problem surfacing in different contexts: technology that's built around what a person can't do, rather than who they are.
This was the part we spent the most time designing. We wanted an activity that didn't just illustrate the readings, it should make people feel the tension in them. The setup: groups are each assigned a disability and have 20 minutes to invent assistive technology someone would actually use 50 years from now.
Groups were numbered off and each assigned one condition to design for. The constraint of the future forced creative thinking, and revealed hidden assumptions fast.
Groups numbered off, disability assigned
Design your assistive technology for the 2070s
Present to the class, vote on a winner
The future framing was intentional. By removing the constraints of today's tech, groups couldn't just name an existing product. They had to imagine, and in doing so, their assumptions about disability became visible. Almost every group's first instinct was to "fix" the disability rather than design around the person's whole life.
That's exactly the deficit-based thinking the papers were critiquing. Watching it happen in real time made the argument land in a way that slides alone couldn't.
We closed with a debrief using three prompts designed to surface the tension between the activity experience and the paper arguments. These weren't rhetorical, people had genuinely different answers.
What difficulties came up when designing your product? Most groups found it harder than expected, not because of the technology, but because they weren't sure what the person actually needed day-to-day.
How did the assigned disability shape which features you included or left out? This one surfaced how quickly people defaulted to compensation rather than empowerment, designing for the deficit, not the person.
Who did you actually have in mind when designing? The hardest question. Most people realized they'd imagined a generic, abstract "user", not a specific person with their own context, preferences, and identity.
Designing for someone positions them as a recipient. Designing with them positions them as an expert. Our expansion was really about making that distinction feel real, not just as a philosophical point, but as something you could feel in the 20-minute activity when your instincts kept pulling you the wrong way.
The papers gave us the argument. The activity gave us the evidence. That combination is what made this expansion feel like it actually worked.