The digital age of the future is ‘not out there to be discovered’, but it needs to be ‘designed’. The design challenge has to address questions about how we want to live, work, and learn (as individuals and as communities) and what we value and appreciate, e.g.: reflecting on quality of life and creating inclusive societies. An overriding design trade-off for the digital age is whether new developments will increase the digital divide or will create more inclusive societies. Sustaining inclusive societies means allowing people of all ages and all abilities to exploit information technologies for personally meaningful activities. Meta-design fosters the design of socio-technical environments that end-user developers can modify and evolve at use time to improve their quality of life and favour their inclusion in the society. This paper describes three case studies in the domain of assistive technologies in which end users themselves cannot act as end-user developers, but someone else (e.g.: a caregiver or a clinician) must accept this role requiring multi-tiered architectures. The design trade-offs and requirements for meta-design identified in the context of the case studies and other researchers’ projects are described to inform the development of future socio-technical environments focused on social inclusion.

Abandonment of assistive technologies (ATs) is a serious problem – rates of abandonment can be high, 78% has been reported for hearing aids. The paper argues for the importance of studying the abandonment of ATs by collecting real-time data about the use and non-use of ATs in the lived experience of their users. In the AART-BC Project, we are studying the use and abandonment of mobility ATs including wheelchairs, walkers and prostheses. We present two apps, ESMMobilityAT and ProbMobilityAT to facilitate the collection of real-time data about mobility AT use and problems encountered with these ATs. ESMMobilityAT is based on the experience sampling method (ESM) and asks mobility AT users to answer a short questionnaire about their AT use seven times a day. ProbMobilityAT allows mobility AT users to report problems with their AT when they occur. The apps have been successfully piloted on Android and IOS smartphones, although a number of problems with deployment have been highlighted. They will now be used in a field study with mobility AT uses and can be adapted for other AT domains.

A significant fraction of persons with cognitive disabilities are potentially able to live more independently with the use of powerful tools embedded in their social environment. The Memory Aiding Prompting System (MAPS) provides an environment in which caregivers can create scripts that can be used by people with cognitive disabilities ("clients") to support them in carrying out tasks that they would not be able to achieve by themselves. To account for the great diversity among clients, MAPS was developed as a meta-design environment, empowering the caregivers to develop personalized prompting systems for the specific needs of individual clients.

Public transportation systems are among the most ubiquitous and complex large-scale systems found in modern society. For those unable to drive such as people with cognitive disabilities, these systems are essential gateways for participation in community activities, socialization, and independence. To understand the magnitude and scope of this national problem, we highlight deficiencies identified in an international study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council and present specific cognitive barriers identified in empirical studies of transportation systems in several U.S. cities.An interdisciplinary team of HCI researchers, urban transportation planners, commercial technologists, and assistive care specialists are now collaborating on the Mobility-for-All project to create architectures and prototypes that support those with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers. We have grounded our research and design efforts using a distributed cognition framework. We have derived requirements for our designs by analyzing “how things are” for individuals with cognitive disabilities who learn and use public transportation systems. We present a socio-technical architecture that has three components: a) a personal travel assistant that uses real-time Global Positioning Systems data from the bus fleet to deliver just-in-time prompts; b) a mobile prompting client and a prompting script configuration tool for caregivers; and c) a monitoring system that collects real-time task status from the mobile client and alerts the support community of potential problems. We then describe a phased community-centered assessment approach that begins at the design stage and continues to be integrated throughout the project.This research has broad implications for designing more human-centered transportation systems that are universally accessible for other disenfranchised communities such as the elderly or nonnative speaker. This project presents an “in-the-world” research opportunity that challenges our understanding about mobile human computer interactions with ubiquitous, context-aware computing architectures in noisy, uncontrolled environments; personalization and user modeling techniques; and the design of universally accessible interfaces for complex systems through participatory design processes.This article provides both a near-term vision and an architecture for transportation systems that are socially inclusive, technologically appealing, and easier for everyone to use.

In this paper we describe a current group configuration that is used to support people with cognitive disabilities (hereinafter referred to as “clients”) in the workplace. A client receiving face-to-face, often one-to-one assistance from a dedicated human job coach is characteristic of this “traditional ” model. We compare this traditional model with other group configurations that are used in cooperative and distributed work practices. In so doing, we highlight requirements that are unique to task support for people with cognitive disabilities. A survey of technologies that have been developed to provide clients with greater levels of independence is then presented. These endeavors often attempt to replace human job coaches with computational cognitive aids. We discuss some limitations of such approaches and then present a model and prototype that extends the computational job coach by incorporating human caregivers in a distributed one-to-many support system.