Three decades have passed since Greg, Fay, and Karen felt most alive. These days, life can feel like a record on repeat: appointments, errands, chores, appointments, errands, chores. Back then, in the summer of 1986, life was deliciously surprising. The exotic replaced the mundane. McDonald’s floated on water.
Sure, not every day can match a World Fair. But, what might it look like to bring a little more novelty, meaning and purpose into our lives?
For adults like Greg, Fay and Karen the sources of novelty and meaning have been few and far between. Fay grew up in an institution. Greg and Karen grew up in segregated classrooms. The diagnosis of ‘developmental disability’ separated them from others. The words they had to describe themselves matched the words doctors and services used to talk about them. With no alternative story about who they were and who they could become, ‘care’ ‘safety’ and ‘protection’ became the organizing principles of their lives, structuring their interactions and narrowing what they considered possible.
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Greg, Fay and Karen
We got to know Greg, Fay and Karen in the Spring of 2014. They were our neighbours in a social housing complex in Burnaby, British Columbia. We were a crew of six designers, researchers, managers, and frontline workers from social design agency InWithForward and three visionary disability service providers: Burnaby Association for Community Inclusion, Kinsight, and posAbilities. Using a human-centred design approach, our initial brief was to understand the lived experience of social isolation amongst adults with and without developmental disabilities. We recognized that just because adults with disabilities were living in community did not mean they were living as part of the community.
Three months and fifty meals later, we found Greg, Fay, and Karen were neither completely isolated from other people, nor fulfilled by their days. Karen spent her work days separating paper at a recycling plant. Fay engaged with paid workers, dog walkers, and any stranger she came across. Greg talked to his mom several hours a day, to the bank manager, and the sandwich artists at Subway. Yet, they were bored and, often, lonely. There wasn’t a lot of (or really, any) new things to talk about. There wasn’t a lot of (or really, any) new input in their lives. Going out to a restaurant or to the movies was their aspirational ceiling. We wanted to raise the aspirational ceiling and raise society’s expectations about what’s possible.
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Lise
At the same time, we met community members like Lise, owner of a pet shop, who had heaps of connections and passions to offer. They wanted a way to give back that wasn’t so prescriptive. Lots of volunteer opportunities require you to show up at a certain time or place, and to slot into an existing role. As a small business owner, Lise was time poor, but she could imagine offering behind-the-scenes tours of her pet shop, and sharing her knowledge about animals with others.volume_up
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Enter Kudoz!
Enter Kudoz. We came up with the idea for an online catalogue of experiences where Greg, Fay and Karen could always have something new to look forward to—a lot like Expo 86!—and where community members like Lise could supply those experiences, when, where, and how often worked for them. Fast forward five years, and Kudoz has grown from an idea on paper, to a small beta-test, to a platform offering hundreds of novel experiences a year. We’ve worked with over 150 adults with disabilities and 500 community members and counting. We continue to evolve and grow, using human-centred design methods at our core. Join us!
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