Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (360G-Wellcome-214963_B_18_Z)

This project will undertake an interdisciplinary investigation of the imagining of the future relationship between disability and technology. Grounded in the research team's diverse specialisms, but united by three interdisciplinary cross-cutting themes and engagement with disabled participants, the project will explore: cultural and phenomenological narratives of disability, care and embodiment; assistive product design; and the manufacture of prototype companion robots for those with disabilities. We will focus particularly on the ways creative and theoretical imaginings of disability and augmentation inform and are informed by the practicalities of product design and creation, and how these are then experienced by service users and their families in our focus areas of Leeds, Sheffield and Dundee. The project will ask what models of imagined technological augmentation inform contemporary understanding of physical and cognitive disabilities, and how such models produce disability experiences, shape technological design change and production, and resulting predictions of future disability healthcare. Innovative research outputs will bring together academic, lay and design communities concerned with living disability and creating future technologies. We aim to be the first research team to bring these perspectives together to further understand the healthcare nexus they describe and to address the challenges for the future they outline.