Design Innovation: Inclusive Approaches (Further Course)

Target Groups and Required Skills

This course is for anyone interested in design and innovation. By design, we mean any type of product or service or system design that is human centric. By innovation, we refer to innovations that are new or novel ways of doing things, that improve a situation and can even have far reaching impacts on mankind.

There are no special skills required other than an ability to use technology to handle online accessible material.

Learning Platform

Open eClass.

Course Duration and Efforts

The course runs over 4 weeks and requires between 3-5 hours of work a week, both to read and watch the materials, and to undertake exercises that are part of the course. The course is self-paced.

Short Description

The purpose of this course is to demonstrate how design innovation can be encouraged by thinking about and including accessibility. Examples will be drawn from innovative areas like smart homes and ‘ambient assisted living’, as well as everyday encounters with ubiquitous self-service kiosks. The course will also cover some foundational tenets of inclusive approaches, such as the social model of disability, legislation and standards, ergonomic and business aspects.

Long Description

In this course you will learn about the relationship between design innovation and inclusive approaches. Week by week, you will be introduced to concepts, methods, tools, application areas and case studies related to inclusive approaches. Concepts, such as the social model of disability, and tools, such as standards and legislation about the accessibility of products and services, will be illustrated in domains of current everyday applications of self-service technologies, or in more futuristic socially assistive robot scenarios. Case studies of innovation practices and implementation of innovation processes in organisations and businesses will demonstrate the power of inclusive approaches to foster innovative products and services that simply ‘make things better for everyone.

Course Team

Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean:

  • Jenny Darzentas
  • John Darzentas
  • Dimitris Zissis
  • Panayiotis Koutsabasis

Course Structure

Week 1: Introduction: Design, Inclusive Innovation, Social Model of Disability

Week 2: Self-service technologies and models – Using Guidelines, Standards, Legislation

Week 3: Robotics for Ageing in place – Involving users in Design and Development

Week 4: Case studies: business and Innovation and inclusion

How to Register

Go to Open eClass.

Select “Announcements” from the menu to find instruction about using Open eClass.

You can find the course content in the Documents tab.

Open Educational Resources

The content from this course is available as a set of open education resources.