Reframing designer empowerment. A thinking-through-making project led by children with disabilities

Three design approaches—Design for, Design with, and Design by—reflect power dynamics between designers and users, influencing decision-making and inclusivity. Design by or User-led design is the ultimate stage of participatory design, where power shifts to the end-users, while designers assume a supportive role, assisting in the expansion of solutions. However, this approach remains unconventional, despite maturity, due to unclear benefits and diverse practices, often linked with terms like co-design. While design culture struggles with user-led design, the disability community feels underrepresented and undervalued in current design practices. They advocate for new design approaches, collecting alternative data forms only accessible through critical disability experiences. This paper presents a Disability led Design project, which developed assistive devices conceived by children with upper limb agenesis and amputation issues. Two workshops were organized involving a thinking-through-making process, leveraging the experience of disabled children as a design driver for embodied explorations of future prosthetic devices.