Inclusive Design: How can makerspaces become more accessible?
When is a makerspace truly accessible? In this workshop, participants first deliberately create a space full of physical and communication barriers. By experiencing these barriers for themselves and exploring them together, concrete ideas emerge for more accessible and inclusive makerspaces. We’ll focus on accessibility for people with disabilities and specific accessibility needs, without losing sight of the broader narrative of inclusivity.
When is a makerspace truly accessible? And what stands in the way of this? In this hands-on workshop, people with disabilities or specific accessibility needs will work alongside makers and makerspace staff to find answers. We are deliberately focusing on accessibility for people with disabilities and specific accessibility needs. At the same time, we recognise that inclusivity is a much broader concept, shaped by a wide range of social, cultural and personal factors. By deliberately adopting a narrower focus in this workshop, we can examine specific barriers and work together to devise practical solutions. We deliberately begin with a counter-intuitive exercise: we work together to build a highly exclusive space. By creating physical and communicative barriers ourselves, we make exclusion visible and tangible. Through various interactive building and reflection stations, participants explore where barriers arise, share their experiences and experiment with different ways of communicating and creating. Together, we translate these obstacles into concrete ideas and solutions for more accessible and inclusive makerspaces. Existing inclusive solutions serve as inspiration in this process. The workshop is a space for testing, questioning, creating and sharing experiences — with the aim of discovering together what is needed to make a makerspace more accessible. For: makers, makerspace teams, facilitators, teachers and people with disabilities or specific accessibility needs.
Translated from Dutch