EPS3554 Designing for Accessibility Through Disability Technology Entrepreneurship
4 Advanced Elective Credits
This course equips students with an interdisciplinary set of tools to design, build, and critique technologies that mediate access to physical and digital worlds. Additionally, students will learn how to work alongside people with disabilities to discover and investigate opportunities in the space of disability tech entrepreneurship.
We will use disability as a lens to examine the ways in which technology (e.g., assistive, medical, consumer) can both enhance and diminish access to economic, social, and informational resources. Students will examine the history of such technologies and analyze modern trends. Building from this perspective, students will learn about design processes and implementation strategies for maximizing the accessibility of the technologies they build.
During the course, student teams will work towards the creation of a business model and technological prototype by employing lean entrepreneurship methods including customer discovery and validation, human-centered design, and rapid prototyping. Students will have the opportunity to leverage generative AI tools to accelerate customer discovery, prototype development, and market validation processes, and discuss the importance of critically evaluating the quality and appropriateness of AI-generated outputs. By the end of the semester, students are expected to have a proof-of-concept implementation of their system, a product concept pitch, and a business model with a go-to-market strategy.
Prerequisites: FME1000 or EPS1000