CITIC of the Universidade da Coruña participates in a transnational European project on inclusive education at the university
Thais Pousada, professor in the area of Occupational Therapy and researcher at the Centro de Investigación en Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (CITIC) of the UDC, participates in the project “Design2Freedom: promoting Person-Centered Design for people with disability in higher education”. The program is led by the Confederación Española de Personas con Discapacidad Física y Orgánica (COCEMFE) and its main objective is to promote the incorporation of “Person-Centered Design” applied to the design of products for people with disabilities in higher education, through experimentation and evaluation of the use of participatory and inclusive methodologies for learning with teachers and students from different fields.
This initiative, funded by the European Commission through the Erasmus+ program, will run until 2026. The consortium includes the Universidade da Coruña (Spain), Vilniaus Kolegija (Lithuania), CREADE (Belgium), and Technicka Univerzita v Kosiciach (Slovakia), which have just met in their first transnational meeting in Lithuania.
During the meeting, held on February 29 and March 1, the key concepts of the project were identified, such as the social model of disability, universal accessibility, assistive technologies, person-centered design, and participatory and inclusive methodologies to be applied. This meeting served as a starting point to unify dates, milestones, results, and project guidelines.
The CITIC team from the UDC participating in this project is composed of Thais Pousada, Betania Groba, Laura Nieto, Mª del Carmen Miranda, and Patricia Concheiro, professors in the area of Occupational Therapy; Manuel Lagos, PhD student and contracted researcher; Javier Pereira, deputy director of CITIC and professor in the area of Physical Medicine; along with the director of CITIC, Manuel González Penedo, professor in the area of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The Inclusive Design Lab will be developed at CITIC next November, involving the entire university community along with the European partners.
