fbpx

Enabled by Design-athon 2018

80 people. 48-hours. 8 teams.

1 common purpose: to improve the lives of people with disability

Last week we hosted our fifth Enabled by Design-athon at Telstra CIC. Enabled by Design-athon is our two-day hackathon style event where teams form to solve some of the problems that people with disability find disabling with their world.

Enabled by Design-athon
Enabled by Design-athon

This year, the eight teams tackled different issues such as inclusive education, exercise, supports to go out and employment. 11 corporates, students from 2 universities and staff from Cerebral Palsy Alliance came together to design solutions to these problems.

Enabled By Design-athon is the only event in Australia of this kind that is specially focussed on disability inclusion. It is important for:

  • putting people with disability at the centre of the design process
  • developing new inclusive products, technologies and processes
  • creating champions advocating for diversity who take inclusive principles back to their workplace.

“While a lot of the design-athon is about education on inclusive design, ultimately we want each team to continue their idea on after Enabled by Design-athon – to further test and validate their solution. Remarkable will be running a one-day bootcamp in November for those who are interested to take their prototype to a minimum viable product.” said Pete Horsley, Founder of Remarkable.

Abled Explorers
The winning team – The Abled Explorers

And the winner? …drum roll…The Abled Explorers – an adventure based game that provides a safe and structured approach to facilitating an interactive exercise experience for kids with autism. It combines digital gamification with real world tasks and activities that encourages kids to be active and rewarded for their participation. Now this an idea that we’d like to see come to life!

Enabled By Design-athon doesn’t happen without a lot of help from our sponsors and mentors. Here are some of the organisations and people we’d like to thank (sorry if we missed anyone!)

Thank you to our corporate attendees:

Telstra, Australia Post, Accenture, Cerebral Palsy Alliance, CHE Proximity, IAG, icare, Munich RE, Eclipx, Fjord and Readify.

A big thank you to our mentors who participated over the two days:

Mel Tran, Marco Raab, Judith Geppert, Jack Tyrrell, Renata Zanetti, Sophie Marmont, Johanna Tibbertsma, Bruce Straw, Prof Simon Darcy, Christie Roberts, Janine Owen, Megan Stronach, Liza McLean.

Want more of this type of thing?

Join us at The Inclusivity Experiment which is part of Spark Festival, where you can hear from leading startups, ethicists, and design practitioners to share real life case studies of success stories and challenges for designing inclusive and diverse products and services.