Algorithmic Kitchen: Recipes for Disability-Led Health Technology Design

The "Algorithmic Kitchen" project employs participatory co-design to enhance how health technologies serve disabled individuals. The project aims to contribute to enhanced health technology design rooted in the real-world challenges and lived experiences of disabled individuals and their support networks and greater integration of disability-led design within the health technology sector. The project centres on two interconnected co-design experiments, "Friction Fiction" and "Algorithmic Kitchen." "Friction Fiction" employs storytelling to vividly convey accessibility issues with health technologies, reflecting the real-life challenges experienced by disabled individuals. "Algorithmic Kitchen" engages stakeholders in creating 'recipes'—or algorithms—for disability-led health technology design. These experiments convene diverse stakeholders, including disabled individuals, their support networks, tech designers, and health workers, to discuss health tech devices, wearables, social robots, and autonomous systems. In these discussions and debates, stakeholders develop innovative solutions that bridge the gap between narrow evidence-based metrics prevalent in technology design and policy arenas and the complex realities of the lived experience of disability. By challenging conventional design norms and influencing policy debates, these experiments serve as powerful tools for advocacy. The "Algorithmic Kitchen" project drives substantial improvements in health technology design and policy, ensuring that health technologies are truly beneficial, and accessible.