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Short abstract:

The project „Working the way I want“ brings together an interdisciplinary team to develop a tool for people with disabilities to support their participation in labour. For this, participatory and transdisciplinary methods (real-world laboratory, embedded research, participatory design), are used.

Long abstract:

In the project “Working the way I want” (German: “Arbeiten – wie ich es will!”, AWIEW), people with and without disabilities co-create a needs assessment tool, including a technological solution, to support their participation in labour. Thereby, AWIEW brings together an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, social scientists, rehabilitation scientists, social designers and a welfare organisation.

The project design features participatory approaches that are applied to co-create and test the tool and new practices in the welfare organisation under real-world conditions: The real-world laboratory approach is employed to identify needs and hopes of clients, embedded research (meso-level) is used to find hindering and fostering factors for successful transitions into the labour market. At micro-level, we are working with people with disabilities (co-designers) employing participatory design for the co-creation of the tool. In this context, it emerged that transdisciplinary is a presumed, but challenging, prerequisite for success.

This contribution focuses on transdisciplinary working methods and suitable formats for collaboration, transparency and mutual understanding. By answering the following questions, it will provide impetus for discussion about the effects of participatory and transdisciplinary methods:

• Which contexts (social, structural, normative) are relevant to develop a technological solution to support greater participation in work?

• Which participatory methods contribute how and by whom to the development of new solutions and practices in organisations?

• How do we evaluate these methods in comparison to their purposes? Where are gains and shortcomings?

• What could academic research learn from the use of a participatory transdisciplinary methodology?