We here start a review of interesting initiatives from around the world, to give an idea of what kind of applications we look for.

The first is EnabledByDesign . It aims at removing the stigmatizing image of assistive equipment and encouraging designers to adopt the concept of inclusive design. As the website puts it, its users “challenge the one size fits all approach to assistive equipment through the use of clever modern design”. There is a nice article on the Guardian.

Denise Stephens, the founder, was fed up with having to deal with assistive technology which was ugly and not designed to fit her needs. It appears the needs of the disabled users, and the importance of design, are not taken into due account when building assistive technologies.

So she teamed up with Dominic Campbell to promote a project where people could come together to share ideas, product reviews, likes and dislikes, in order to make assistive technologies more aesthetically pleasing, funky and useful. She says in the Guardian:

“I get the impression that people miss out on the opportunity to use things, purely because they look a certain way. For example, someone who uses a hearing aid may think, ‘I don’t want to wear that’, because they don’t like the look of it.”

They submitted the proposal to the “Social Innovation Camp“, an event dedicated to bringing together people with new ideas on solving social problems, with web developers, in order to develop innovative applications that are socially useful (yes, Sicamp is a big inspiration for the INCA award). They won the Sicamp award, and went on launching the project.

The website has just been launched and features a “Loves and Hates” section (a  taste-sharing forum) and a “Product reviews” section ( which helps people choosing between different products and discovering new solutions).

Finally, the most ambitious is the “Idea Factory”, which aims at collecting ideas for new products which will then be matched with interested designers and companies. The goal is to raise awareness and provide real insight for designers in the needs of users, so that better products could be made available on the market.

A video interview with Denise is available here.