Accessible Design, the Forefront of Innovation

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By Mariana Seda

From safety labels to search bars, prescriptions to prosthetics, the blueprint for design has long mirrored a single figure: white, adult, male, and fully mobile. But when we design for everybody—all shapes, needs, and abilities—our world improves. Take the curb cut, born here at the University of Illinois for wheelchair users, now a global revolution for strollers, walkers, and all kinds of movers.

At the School of Art and Design, the Industrial Design program is home to thinkers and makers reimagining access. Faculty and students alike are forging new paths in accessible design, shaping objects, environments, and systems where inclusion is built in from the beginning.

Human-Centered Design in Motion

To say that Industrial Design students Shuoning (Stone) Shi and Yuheng (Leo) Wang have had a banner year would be an understatement. The two first teamed up in 2024 during the Illinois Design Challenge (IDC), a three-day engineering and design hackathon where students were asked to design a transportation device with social impact.

Their resulting design ElectroGlide was born from Stone’s friendship with a wheelchair athlete who valued the strength and independence of a manual chair but occasionally needed a boost while healing or navigating tough terrain. Their solution: a motorized attachment equipped with speed, gravity, and near-infrared sensors that detect when a push falls below a set threshold, then quietly lends a hand.

“I’m grateful to my friend Philip, who is a wheelchair athlete,” said Stone. “Spending time with him made me realize that there are many needs in this area requiring more human-centered designs. We need to move beyond preconceived notions and genuinely consider the experiences of others.”

After winning first place at IDC 2024, the team refined the idea, creating multiple prototypes with improvements, and tested it extensively with wheelchair users to ensure compatibility with a wide range of wheelchair models. Ultimately, ElectroGlide received several highly competitive international awards including the 2025 iF Design Award, Red Dot Design Award, and the International Design Excellence Award (IDEA).

Healing By Design

As the director of the (dis)Ability Design Studio at the Beckman Institute, Industrial Design Professor Deana McDonagh collaborates with clinicians, scientists, and people with disabilities in a think tank environment that helps bring to life tools, mainstream products, and spaces designed to solve everyday challenges with function and dignity guiding the way.

Working with cross-campus collaborators, the studio has developed a range of innovations, including a sleek, hands-free, omni-directional chair, designed to be more transportable than a wheelchair and less visually stigmatizing. “If we design for the extreme users in our community, like wheelchair users and the aging population,” explained McDonagh, “then we build in design integrity, and the wider population can benefit.

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She’s also designing a fully accessible aging-in-place home that fuses architecture, sensory design, and independence. “So many aging-in-place solutions are ugly,” she said. “They scream, ‘You’re declining.’ I want to design things that whisper, ‘You still belong here.’” The home will be both a testbed and sanctuary—a space that makes its residents feel seen, not managed.

That same philosophy carries into a surgical tool she’s codeveloping with a surgeon and a student. It’s designed not just for accuracy, but to respond to the way it feels in the hand under pressure. “We’re not just thinking about function,” she emphasized. “We’re thinking about how it behaves under stress.”

For McDonagh, this highlights the unique work of human-centered, empathic design. “It’s so rare that a surgeon, a student, and a designer sit at the same table. But that’s where the magic happens—when expertise meets curiosity meets empathy.”

Listening Beyond Words

Professor Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan would like us to take a moment and listen to the world around us, replete with birdsong, traffic, notification alerts, and the unheard calls of other species. “There’s an ableist history that has led to the proliferation of human speech-based technologies, involving thousands of hearing tests on individuals under the pretext of ‘curing’ deafness,” he explained. “While these technologies may be useful, people have varying sensory capacities and there is this world of environmental sound perception that has been ignored.” 

“Problems created by innovation within disciplinary silos can only be solved by an intentionally transdisciplinary counter approach—in my case, the confluence of expertise in artistic design and technology, hearing science and legal regulation surrounding augmented listening,” said Ramakrishnan, whose doctoral research concerning augmented sound design for cochlear implants and hearing aids was recognized through inclusion in a National Academy of Sciences Sackler symposium. 

That exploration naturally led him to wonder how other animals, insects, and organisms—unbound by human ideas of speech—perceive and use sound, sometimes outside the range of human hearing. In a recent study, he recorded the emergence of periodical cicadas along the Illinois Sangamon River, analyzing their unique temporal sound signatures. He hopes these patterns inspire designers to develop new auditory icons and non-visual cues to indicate objects or actions in challenging environments. 

Lately, Ramakrishnan has been studying the language of bat echolocation. “I was drawn to ultrasonic bat detectors, because they’re like a radio receiver,” he said. “But what interested me most is that these ultrasonic hearing aids allow aided and unaided listeners to access sounds beyond the range of human hearing. This all came full circle when I learned that the inventor of a leading scientific bat detector was a cochlear implant listener himself.” 

By investigating design through the lens of bioacoustics and in collaborations led by aided and unaided listeners, technologists, and scientists worldwide, Ramakrishnan’s Perceptual Futures Laboratory in Illinois hopes to inspire a reimagining of augmented listening—not as tools designed for speech recovery, but as participatory platforms that expand how we listen to and connect with our bio-acoustic world.