Curiko is a new experience platform designed for community members with and without disabilities to spark connections that challenge our perspectives and imagine a more inclusive world together. It is a partnership between InWithForward and three organizations in the disability sector (BACI, posAbilities and Kinsight).
Design Opportunity
Design a digital experience for users to spark new connections, interests, and practice being in equal relationships and meaningful steps toward community inclusion.
My Roles
Experience Design
UX Research
Action Research
Community Engagement
Design Challenge
In 2020 “Social Isolation” became an inescapable reality worldwide and for the first time, people around the globe felt the pervasive isolation many people with developmental disabilities have lived for much of their lives.
Ableism perpetuates a negative view of disability. It frames being nondisabled as the ideal and disability as a flaw or abnormality. It is a form of systemic oppression that affects people who identify as disabled, as well as anyone who others perceive to be disabled.
Like other forms of oppression, people do not always know they are thinking or behaving in an ableist way. This is because people learn ableism from others, consciously or unconsciously. Bias that a person is unaware they have is known as implicit bias. Explicitly and implicitly many people with disabilities are segregated, in schools, in public spaces, in our homes and in neighbourhoods.
According to researchers like Charlesworth, Ph.D. ’21, who works in the lab of Mahzarin Banaji, these hidden prejudices have hardly changed over a 14-year period and could take more than 200 years to reach neutrality or zero bias.
Approach - When we deny others their humanity, we inexplicably deny ourselves of our own humanity. Imagining liberating connections that re-write the story of human belonging, over the course of two years, I worked with a small team to design a digital experience that brings into one place different offerings hosted by and for community members with and without disabilities to bust stigmas and foster more compassion, curiosity and interest in disability justice and allyship.
The project was organized to develop and deliver MVP app and platform features on a sprint basis. To keep up with the fast-paced development environment the research and design actions informed the process with the aim of integrating users’ perspectives every step of the way.
Community Driven Research & Analysis
Working with Social Scientists, Chief storytellers, service designers and developers we used a framework developed by Susan Mitchie and adapted by InWithForward to analyze our research. We looked at people’s capacity, motivation and opportunity to create relationships as well, as what were potential barriers and enablers (power, routines, systems & processes, roles & identities, values & beliefs).
Throughout the project, I ran community branding workshops and supported sounding boards to define project goals, conducted user and prospect user interviews to identify the most pressing needs and usability testing sessions with interactive prototypes. In the design phase, with two other designers, I sketched user flows for each app feature and supported the design of screens and digital elements with feedback from the lead UX designer and development.
Co-design, Ideation & prototype
Over the pandemic, we worked through 54 user studies looking for usability, accessibility insights and unique opportunities to fill spaces where traditionally accessibility needs may compete or there are opposing ideologies around cognitive disability justice or what being equitable looks like in a multiverse of experiences? To design screens, communicate my observations with users, and work collaboratively on user flows, I regularly used Github, Figma, Miro, and Mural for documentation and synthesis.
In addition to digital components, I also developed videos, physical touchpoints and materials to support the experiences. For example, here are a series of reflections I designs to be physical and digital users would receive, to challenge memory recall and build connections between the activities and further social actions. Other physical materials I developed were to directly support experiences offered on the platform, for example, here you can see a kit developed for testing with a blind user who was interested in exploring touch and art therapy.
Ongoing development
After months of intense work, Curiko launched at the beginning of 2022 to test with the community. In the next phase April-July 2022, I will be running user feedback sessions to detect relevant feature improvements. We are continuing to work with our community members and new partners to understand what Curiko could do for them. See Curiko in action here.