Empowering co-researchers with intellectual disability [ID] as coequal contributors in participatory IoT research

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) places obligations on researchers to be more inclusive in their design practices and protect the fundamental rights of people with disabilities in design decisions, relevant to access, consent, control, autonomy, privacy and protection. However, researchers require new knowledge and skillsets to understand the lived experiences of intellectual disability, facilitate their participation in design processes, and effectively integrate the CRPD into IoT solutions. The ‘RED Framework - Cocreating Rights Enabled by Design [RED] for IoT in Intellectual Disability’ project, is a participatory project addressing how the CRPD can be integrated into design practices and embedded into the Internet of Things (IoT), focusing specifically on applications in ID. It is well documented in HCI and participatory design that the functionality of technologies directly effects the social context in which design and innovation occur (Simonsen & Robertson, 2013). To help maximise the project’s potential in co-creating research outputs with co-researchers with lived experience of ID that align with the CRPD principles, the potential power imbalances experienced by co-researchers with lived experience in participatory research must be considered. This poster details key challenges hindering, and enablers promoting, coequal research contributions amongst researchers with lived experience of ID, as reported in current literature.