EXCEL Students Design Customized Technologies Through HCI-centered Course

Georgia Tech students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are designing technologies tailored to them while teaching faculty and researchers about their needs in the process.

Rachel Lowy, a Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing, piloted a new human-computer interaction design course for IDD students in Georgia Tech’s EXCEL program. EXCEL is an Inclusive Postsecondary Education (IPSE) program that offers a four-year track for IDD students to earn two separate certificates.

Lowy said the course differs from typical technology courses taught to IDD students. It provides autonomy and encourages students to contribute input on how the course is designed and which technology projects they want to create. They reflect critically on the role of technology in the world and use that reflection to design technology for themselves.

The course is also unique because it involves a mix of professional educators and technology researchers working together. Lowy taught the class alongside her advisor, Assistant Professor Jennifer Kim, her lab colleague, Kaely Hall, master’s students in the Georgia Tech MS-HCI program, computer science undergraduates, and EXCEL educators.

“We have a few models of students designing next to designers in classrooms, but they tend to be only taught by professionals in K-12 education, not necessarily HCI researchers in higher education. They rarely include students with IDD,” she said. 

“In higher education, HCI projects may not go further than the classroom space. This course was special because we can teach these students with IDD high-level concepts about HCI and adopt their ideas into ongoing projects. We can keep working on them after the class has finished.”

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Lowy said she designed the course based on previous work on accessible co-design and consulted with Assistant Professor Jessica Roberts, an educational technology researcher in the School of IC, to develop course materials. She refined the course with her co-teachers as she taught it, responding to observations and reflections from students. 

If the students had not been allowed to provide their input, Lowy and her team would never have learned how IDD students prefer to use different technologies. Lowy said they took that feedback to implement strength-based activities. 

“So much technology design for people with disabilities focuses on what they cannot do,” she said. “Our lab likes to focus on what they can do and their strengths.”

During one class, the researchers brought a robot dog into the classroom to determine whether it could supply emotional support to the students. The feedback they received showed the students were more interested in how the robot dog could be a companion in day-to-day activities.

“We came in with an idea of how the participants might want to use the technology,” Lowy said. “The students had a much broader view of what they might like to use this technology for. They reflected on their lives, and that’s exactly what we want good design to do.”

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Lowy said she hopes the course serves as a blueprint for inclusive advanced technology courses at the university level.

“Most of their technology courses focus on workplace education like how to use Microsoft Suite, Google Calendar, or Outlook,” she said. “We’re working on more of a foundational level about how those technologies are designed and whether they work for them.”

She also said the course could be a step toward more inclusiveness in university classroom environments with traditional students and students with IDD learning together.

“Something that IPSE students have told me is that it’s hard to keep up with lectures, and they sometimes struggle to keep up in class,” she said. “It’d be great if they take a class specifically targeted to them at their own pace with a hands-on element to it, and they got to learn through experiential activities. Then they take the knowledge they’ve gleaned into an inclusive class where they work with their peers.”

She also suggested other models universities might offer, like an Intro to HCI course for IDD students that allows them to work on projects with students enrolled in the traditional Intro to HCI course.

“Any university with an IPSE program and an HCI program on campus can do this,” she said.

Lowy published the findings of her research in a paper that was accepted to the 2024 Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, which is being held this week in Costa Rica.