GRACE TEO: In terms of choosing our clients
there were a few criteria that we were looking for.
Other then the fact that they had a disability,
you had to have been pretty stable,
so it wasn't going to be fluctuating
too much over the semester.
And that is to make the design constraints a little bit more
simple for the students.
Apart from a stable disability, I
think what we loved about the clients
this semester is their motivation
to educate our students.
Having that intrinsic quality of being an educator
was important for us.
They had to be able to articulate their challenges
really well for the students, and be
able to be patient with the students,
because they're all learning through this process.
And they might not get the design process
right the first time.
But having clients that were adventurous,
willing to try out new things with the students,
that was very important.
The third piece was purely logistical.
So, our students are going to want
to interact with their clients as many times as
possible over the semester, so we made sure that they were all
accessible from MIT, I think within a one hour
radius of MIT.
I think one thing you'll find in a disability community
is that once you talk to one person,
it's such a tight community that word travels really fast.
So we had a little bit of a lucky break
in that we contacted the Cambridge Commission for People
with Disabilities, and Kate Thurman there
helped us to send out an email to the entire community
of people with disabilities.
And then I'm pretty sure we got about 50 emails, if not more,
from people who were interested in being clients.
And so we either tried to talk to them over the phone
or visit them in person to get to know them.
WILLIAM LI: I think, to be very honest though,
in terms of having clients involved in the class--
participating in lectures and some of the labs,
and also certainly being very much a part of the design
process-- to be very honest it's a tricky decision,
and something that we decided to try this year sort of to see
what would happen.
I think a big part of it is really
the user-centered or participatory design
nature of the class that we really
want students to understand the person that they're
working with.
Understand their challenges, and realities, in all the contexts
that they're in, in their home, or when
they're out in Boston, or even at MIT as well.
So I think one big part of it was to really give students
the opportunity to interact more with their clients,
and really get their feedback quickly, and work on the design
process together.
I think the other part is we really
tried to see our clients as collaborators
with the students.
As Grace mentioned, really, I think
clients are most attuned to their own needs,
and their own ideas.
Or their own needs in terms of what assistive technologies
might be useful.
So they really are able to give kind
of the best possible feedback.
So having them [? embedded, ?] or participating in the class,
I think was really important and really a valuable experiment
or experience to try.
GRACE TEO: William is exactly right.
It was an experiment this year.
We had lab assistants in the class this year
who were students last year, and they did not
have clients in their class.
And when we first made a decision
to say OK, clients can be in our class,
and our lab assistants saw how that was going,
they raised quite a few concerns.
By the end of the day we said, you
know what, our students just need
to learn how to negotiate these situations.
It's part of the learning process.
It's an important thing to be able to work around
these kinds of situations.
And that's fine.
The other thing that I don't like
is when we talk about disability,
or we teach students how to talk about disability,
as if people with disabilities are
this outside group that we are kind
of observing from the inside.
I think it's a much more inclusive way of teaching
if we can bring in people with disabilities
to talk about their own experiences with the students.
Instead of us just showing slides and saying,
these are the terms that you should
use when you're talking to people with disabilities.
It means so much more coming from the people
with disabilities themselves.
In terms of how we set up the students and the clients
and coordinated that interaction-- so let
me start right from the beginning.
We meet with the clients.
Once we know we've selected them,
I believe we selected about 15 clients
at the start of the class.
And we told them, there is a potential
that you will get to work with students this semester,
and this is the expectation, that you
are able to give two to three hours each week
to meet with our students from this date to this date.
Then we went to our students and gave them
a whole list of the clients.
And we didn't describe the clients
in too much detail other than some potential challenges
that they had that students might want to work on.
Then we let the students decide for themselves
which clients they were interested in working with.
Based on their skill sets, and based on their interests,
we meshed up students with the clients.
And so at the end of it, we actually
only had 11 student teams and so 11 clients that were matched.
So we had to tell the remaining four clients, I'm sorry,
you were not matched for this semester,
but we really appreciate your availability.
So right after we finished that matching, we basically
sent an email to the clients and the students, introduced them,
told them this is how you can contact each other.
And then for the very first client meeting
for the students, their mentors went along with the students
to just make sure the interaction went well.
Something that Seth, Professor Teller, established
in the class probably from the first year or so,
was the student client contract, where the student will say,
we are going to work with you as well as we can,
these are the expectations that you can hold us to.
And then the clients also have expectations
that the students can hold them to,
and they both sign off for that.
And it's just a way of facilitating
that initial interaction so that both sides are
able to talk about what they will be able to do,
and what they won't be able to do.
And managing those expectations is a huge part
of any kind of relationship.
WILLIAM LI: Yeah, this contract, and really setting
the expectations.
Setting the stage for students to succeed,
and clients to really understand what the process is about
and how they can be most valuable to the students
in terms of giving feedback and sharing their ideas openly,
and really knowing that they're kind
of an equal partner in the team's project is really key.
I think Grace did a lot of great work
this year in terms of the curation part.
We had a chance to talk to a lot of potential clients,
and really figure out what would be
the best match for the expected makeup of students
in our class.
As grace mentioned, clients who are
adventurous, and interested in learning,
and interested in teaching, and open minded,
have some assistive technology idea in mind.
I think this is a big part, the front part of the class that
can be really valuable to help set it up
for success for the semester.