DREEM: Moving from Empathy to Enculturation in Disability Related Human-Centered Design
Leya Breanna Baltaxe-Admony, Jared Duval, Kathryn E. Ringland · 2024 · Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '24) · doi:10.1145/3663548.3675642
Summary
This paper introduces DREEM (Disability-Related Empathy from Existing Media), a four-step method that replaces traditional empathy-building exercises in human-centred design with an enculturation approach grounded in disability culture. The authors argue that conventional empathy methods — such as simulation exercises where non-disabled designers wear blindfolds or use wheelchairs — are deeply problematic because they reduce disability to a temporary inconvenience, reinforce deficit-based thinking, and often increase negative attitudes toward disabled people rather than improving understanding. Instead of asking designers to imagine what it feels like to be disabled, DREEM asks them to engage with media created by disabled people themselves: blogs, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and other cultural artefacts that express authentic lived experience. The method has four steps: (1) discovering relevant disability-created media, (2) close reading of the content with attention to cultural context, (3) reflective journaling to process what was learned and challenge assumptions, and (4) aggregation of insights across multiple sources to identify patterns and design implications. The authors developed DREEM through research-through-design across multiple contexts, including university design classrooms and an industry research project with a major technology company designing for blind and low-vision users. The theoretical grounding draws on Disability Studies, crip theory, and critical design scholarship, positioning disability not as a medical condition to be fixed but as a cultural identity with its own knowledge systems, values, and creative practices.
Key findings
The paper demonstrates that DREEM successfully shifts designers from a deficit-based understanding of disability toward a culturally informed perspective. In classroom deployments, students who used DREEM moved away from what the authors call "design saviorism" — the impulse to rescue disabled people with technology — and toward recognising disabled people as experts in their own experience. Students reported discovering concepts like access labour (the additional work disabled people must do to navigate inaccessible environments), technosolutionism (the assumption that technology can fix disability), and disability pride that they had never previously encountered. In the industry context, DREEM helped researchers identify authentic pain points and design opportunities that traditional user research had missed, because the disability-created media revealed tacit knowledge and workarounds that participants might not articulate in a formal interview. A critical finding is that DREEM works best as a precursor to direct engagement with disabled communities — it prepares designers to be better collaborators by reducing the burden on disabled participants to educate non-disabled researchers about basic cultural concepts. The method also surfaced how ableist assumptions are embedded in standard design processes, including in how design briefs are framed and success metrics are defined.
Relevance
DREEM addresses a significant gap in accessibility design practice. Many organisations now recognise the importance of including disabled users in design processes, but designers often enter those engagements with unchecked ableist assumptions that undermine the quality of collaboration. This paper provides a concrete, actionable method that any design team can adopt to build cultural competence before engaging with disability communities. The emphasis on existing media is particularly practical — it requires no participant recruitment, no ethics approval, and no access labour from disabled people, making it an accessible entry point for teams new to inclusive design. For accessibility professionals, the paper also offers a sharp critique of simulation exercises that remain widespread in corporate diversity training. Its limitations include relatively small sample sizes in the classroom studies and limited longitudinal data on whether the attitudinal shifts persist, but the method itself is well-documented and immediately applicable.
Tags: design methods · disability culture · empathy · human-centred design · ableism · enculturation · qualitative methods