EXPERIENCE 1

What if you still needed help tying your shoes? How drastically would your morning routine be changed if you couldn't use your thumbs? This summer, I clocked in over 200 hours as a nursing aide at the Apostolic Christian Home for the Handicapped: Oakwood Estate facility (ACOE). Each day, I was an integral part of the lives of 3 or 4 residents – not just in medical terms, but on a genuine personal level. Throughout my employment at ACOE, I gained a greater sympathetic understanding of what it means to contend with both a mental and physical disability on a task by task basis.

 

As a result of this experience, I’ve acquired a great deal of insight into an important area of consumer product design that is too often overlooked in my field: the concept of universal design. Not only do my handicapped friends face the mental and discriminatory barriers between them and regular society (which we typically consider when we think of the plights of those with a disability), but they also struggle with the prejudiced design of consumer products. I believe that industrial designers have a lot of work to do in this area of social justice. In the future, I would like to be an advocate for the handicapped community as designs are being generated in my field.