Hello, my name is Filip and I'll present this paper on behalf of our QUT team. So, today I'm going to
talk about a way of how active support becomes a useful tool to engage and design together
with people with intellectual disabilities. So, what is active support active support?
It is a respectful way of engaging and providing just enough assistance to enable a person with
intellectual disability to successfully take part in a meaningful activity and relationships. And there
are four essential principles to active support, which is graded assistance, little and often
maximizing choice and control, and every moment has potential
Down in the bottom of the page you can find a link to a training model of active support.
And today, I will focus on your one principle of active support which is called graded assistance.
Graded assistance is all about giving just the right amount and type of support,
by breaking down the task, by giving verbal cues, by giving instructions before each step
doing it alongside with people with intellectual disabilities
and providing occasionally physical assistance, which can be hand over hand or hand on the hand.
I will demonstrate graded assistance through a brief example from the paper itself where Chris, a
participant with intellectual disabilities is invited to join in, in making of a talking board
prototype. I will read out the vignette example from the paper, and I will start reading it now. So,
Chris wants to go next. Chris is minimally verbal and has a difficulty with motor coordination
and the ability to hold and manipulate objects with his hands. I am in front of the room and
he nods to say that he wants to join me to cut the squeezy balls. We have to cut the balls in half
and wrap them up in a conductive foil. I'm holding a hand so I quickly gaze towards Nathan
and Jeff for the support workers to see if it is okay if Chris can join the activity.
They confirm with a nod. Then, I ask Chris to stand behind me gently holding my hand.
He accepts the call putting his hand over my hand. IIstart with a gentle push stroke only to show
Chris what to expect next. Chris keeps his hand on my hand while I decide to keep pushing and pulling.
Chris seems excited gently holding my hand.
Soon after, I prompt Chris to take over but still holding my hand okay Chris on my signal you push.
Okay now push and now pull again at this moment my goal is to guide Chris to gently exert pressure
simulating the push stroke by squeezing my hand instead.
There is a brief delay between saying the word push and the execution of the push stroke.
After 30 seconds, Chris for the first time, puts
some pressure pushing my hand gently after the push stroke.
Now, what you can see from this example is that it is difficult to draw a fine line
between doing "for" or doing "with". For example, if we put too much force on Chris`s hand
then we can cross a line and over help or on the other hand if there is too little no support Chris
might never experience the act of cutting. Then, we might even question ourselves if hand under hand
is more appropriate than hand over hand. Here we entangle ourselves with the either/or,
between being pragmatic and acting safely or being respectful. Nonetheless, this helps us to
establish a respectful and trustful relationship with adults with severe intellectual disabilities.
It also provides access point to different environments activities and events. But even
before that it's very important to understand that we do not need to presume competence for the
adults to be able to participate in design. They can participate to the extent they can and they
are able to and this is very important because it can also reveal unique competences of the adults.
And finally I want to say that we only presented one principle which is graded assistance but
there are three other that you can find in the paper. So, I highly encourage you to go and have a
look as combining all these four principles we can actually shape the desired direction and provide
insights for design and create all these different artifacts together with people. And these are
some, that you that you can see in this image that we created together with the people with severe
intellectual disabilities. Thank you for listening so and I'm happy now to take your questions.