Design med delaktighet

What this project is asking

Design med delaktighet asks what happens when participation is the starting condition for design, not a stage added near the end. Two of three people in Sweden who need assistive devices pay for them out of pocket. The supply of devices is governed more by what is offered than by what is needed. People who move between municipalities can lose access to devices they have relied on for years. The pattern is gatekeeping.

The project tests whether older adults with mobility and functional impairments can become what we call aktiva kravställare (people who set the requirements, rather than have them set for them) of the assistive devices in their lives. Not just users choosing from what is offered, but participants in shaping the offer itself. Which devices get developed? What do they look like? Do they meet not only functional needs but the soft needs of aesthetics, identity, dignity, the meaning of a device in a life?

The kravställare move refuses the framing that places a person as a passive recipient and waits for them to be supplied. It says: this person is already here, already an authority over their own life. The design system has to start from that authority, not arrive at it as an afterthought.

All three of us on the research team use assistive devices ourselves. The application names this explicitly as part of the team's competence: research by affected parties for affected parties. The funder accepted it.

Method

Three sequential parts:

Del 1 (autumn 2026): A national survey of 150–200 older device users, stratified by urban / rural, device type, and duration of use. Maps current experiences of participation and access. Recruitment and dissemination happen together with three collaborating organisations: Handikapphistoriska föreningen, DHR and RPG, with contacts established through ILI.

Del 2 (spring 2027): Around twenty in-depth interviews, paired with mediating tools (photo elicitation, cultural probes, product representation). Surfaces the soft requirements and the norms around participation.

Del 3 (autumn 2027 – spring 2028): Two co-design workshops in geographically distinct urban and rural locations, 10–15 participants each. The workshops are where the kravställare move is tested in practice.

Conceptual ground: co-design with extreme users (Johansson et al. 2023), soft requirements as first-order requirements, the CRPD and the social model of disability.

Partners

• Mid Sweden University (coordinator)
• Independent Living Institute (ILI)

Co-investigators

• A postdoc (operational lead, 100%). The position is currently advertised
• Emil Erdtman (researcher, civil-society coordination, 40%). PhD 2024, <a href="https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/e4b84003-96c8-41b8-9360-fa578f95b3e9" rel="noopener">Universell utformning i praktiken</a>, on Universal Design in municipal practice. Director of the Independent Living Institute from September 2025

Planned outputs

• A central paper on the kravställare move as the project's conceptual contribution
• A methodology paper on soft requirements as first-order design requirements
• A paper on the urban–rural geography of assistive-device access in Sweden
• Public-facing newsletter and book material on the from-recipient-to-requirer shift