Exhibition highlights students' design efforts to address disability issues From: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign News Bureau - 05/01/2008 By: Melissa Mitchell When University of Illinois sophomore Stephen Diebold signed up for Deana McDonagh’s industrial design studio course, he figured he might get experience designing a prototype for a lamp or some other common consumer product. But McDonagh, whose specialty is empathic design - that is, designing products with rather than for a specific set of users - had a loftier, more altruistic vision for the projects her students would be charged with designing. The undergraduates and graduate students in her course would be primed for an assignment that had the potential to change lives. The industrial design students were matched with students registered with the U. of I.'s Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) and with members of the campus's Delta Sigma Omicron (DSO) service fraternity. The design students' assignment was to work - one-to-one or two-to-one - with DRES and DSO students to create simple, low-tech product designs and prototypes that could enhance the abilities, independence, and quality of life of students with disabilities. Read the entire story at: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0501disability.html Links: U of I Industrial Design http://www.art.uiuc.edu/content/undergraduate/programs/industrial-design U of I Disability Resources and Educational Services http://www.disability.uiuc.edu/ U of I College of Engineering’s Technology Entrepreneur Center http://www.tec.uiuc.edu/ U. of I Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/ Delta Sigma Omicron http://www.disability.uiuc.edu/services/dso/ ----- Deana McDonagh Associate Professor Industrial Design mcdonagh@uiuc.edu 217/333-1459 128 Art + Design Deana McDonagh Part Time Faculty Human Perception and Performance 4347 Beckman Institute University of Illinois 405 N. Mathews Ave. Urbana, IL 61801 217/265-6114 mcdonagh@uiuc.edu