Applying Ability-Based Design Principles to Adaptive Outdoor Activities

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Ahmad Alsaleem, Ross Imburgia, Andrew Merryweather, Jeffrey Rosenbluth, Stephen K Trapp, Jason Wiese
Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2020

DOI: 10.1145/3357236.3395508

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APA Click to copy
Alsaleem, A., Imburgia, R., Merryweather, A., Rosenbluth, J., Trapp, S. K., & Wiese, J. (2020). Applying Ability-Based Design Principles to Adaptive Outdoor Activities. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395508

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Alsaleem, Ahmad, Ross Imburgia, Andrew Merryweather, Jeffrey Rosenbluth, Stephen K Trapp, and Jason Wiese. “Applying Ability-Based Design Principles to Adaptive Outdoor Activities.” Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2020.

MLA Click to copy
Alsaleem, Ahmad, et al. Applying Ability-Based Design Principles to Adaptive Outdoor Activities. Association for Computing Machinery, 2020, doi:10.1145/3357236.3395508.

BibTeX Click to copy

@conference{ahmad2020a,
  title = {Applying Ability-Based Design Principles to Adaptive Outdoor Activities},
  year = {2020},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  organization = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  series = {Proceedings of the 2020 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20)},
  doi = {10.1145/3357236.3395508},
  author = {Alsaleem, Ahmad and Imburgia, Ross and Merryweather, Andrew and Rosenbluth, Jeffrey and Trapp, Stephen K and Wiese, Jason}
}

🏆 Best Paper Award Winner!

Effective design is essential to creating adaptive outdoor activities. Ability-Based Design (ABD) is an approach to accessible design in the HCI literature that we found to be most appealing for this endeavor. ABD focuses on making systems adaptable to users' needs and abilities rather than making the user conform to system requirements. We explore principles of ABD in the context of two adaptive outdoor experiences: Tetra-Ski and Tetra-Sail. We found that while the general approach of ABD is useful in this context, some of the basic tenants of ABD can be confounded by: (1) activity risk, (2) dynamic sport environments, and (3) the role of psychological flow during the activity. To accommodate these restrictions on ABD principles and provide a usable experience we developed Shared-Control as a collaborative approach to implementation. This paper explores using Shared-Control and ABD principles in the context of these two adaptive recreation systems for individuals with acquired tetraplegia. This perspective reveals tensions between ABD guidelines and designing for adaptive outdoor activities. We reflect on these tensions, potential additions to ABD, and our own usage of Shared-Control as a mechanism for adhering to ABD principles in this context.