Mission Statement

Mission

What is D.I.S.C.O?

Not only does it get at the goal of the design jam, it also gets at the vibe. These workshops are meant to be an exciting, creative, and (responsibly) playful introduction to accessible and inclusive design – to counter the narratives that accessibility makes designs inherently “boring” or that accessibility is daunting to start learning.

DISCO designers get to play with all kinds of fun multimedia. We invite you to ask “what if?” rather than say “but it’s always been this way!”

At the DISCO, we imagine futures that invite everyone to join the party.

The D.I.S.C.O. is an acronym referencing the purpose of the design jam our toolkit aims to help people experience. D.I.S.C.O. stands for:

Design an
Inclusive
Spaceship
Collaborative
Operation

About the Project

The “Design a Spaceship” workshop, run annually since 2023, is a speculative and inclusive design project that our team has been working to expand into an Open Education Resource design toolkit starting in 2025.

The workshop was originally inspired by the "Design a Spaceship" essay from Uncanny Magazine. It is a project co-created by Dr. Jessica FitzPatrick and DNID alum Lynn Priestley and backed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital Narrative and Interactive Design program and Digital Media Lab.

This project introduces attendees to both speculative fiction and speculative design as pathways to imagining more inclusive futures (and how we can apply that imagining to our present-day designs).

The toolkit hosted on this site is designed to assist folks in leading their own iterations of the workshop. Workshop leads will be able to prepare design jam prompts from the DISCO toolkit (composed of card decks, guiding pamphlets, and dice galore), providing participants with ship prompts and interstellar crew personas with various access needs.

By designing a ship to custom fit their crew’s blend of needs, workshop participants explore how to make their spaceship components multisensory and controls multi-operational for positive redundancy. The toolkit’s guide will help participants reflect on Universal Design and Inclusive Design as methodologies, thinking about where each methodology can be useful in the everyday practice of design.

A page of design notes for a boarding corridor. The drawing features a telescoping boarding corridor puncturing an enemy ship, the page is covered in notes outlining plans for an RFID ID system for blocking or allowing entrance.
A whiteboard drawing of Surrustation being abducted by the disco Logo, a cut in on the top right shows a mischievous Byte is behind the controls of the UFO

Future Scaling

The practice of access and inclusion is iterative, imperfect, and never truly done. Therefore, this project is ongoing.

This first toolkit version is a “high fidelity prototype,” to get at the feel of the toolkitusing a DISCO kit. With it, we plan to do more playtesting of thetoolkit mechanics and eventually move away from our current print/accessible Google doc division to create accessible PDF cards through InDesign once we’ve honed in our designs.

We also plan to improve our persona decks with further co-design sessions to add crew personas with increasingly intersectional identities, especially around cultural practices interacting with disability/access needs. It is our hope to work with a wide variety of communities over time to reflect the layered identities we live on Earth. These sessions take time and resources to do ethically, so this project is one that needs to go slow and steady.

Additionally, we want to improve toolkit support for remote workshop facilitation and leaders running mini jams, with feedback from further playtesting.

As we work towards future iterations, we welcome feedback on this initial version! If you use this toolkit to run a DISCO design jam, we want to hear all about how your experience went. Where are things working? Where do we have room for improvement? Please let us know with our feedback form.

And lastly, we want to take the DISCO on tour! Want to host us? Email jlf115[at]pitt[dot]edu with the subject line: "DISCO" Tour!

A page of notes on uniforms taken from a disco session. Red markers on a large white sheet of paper outline ideas for 3d printed haptic uniforms for Surrustation and Garrick.
A page of pirate uniform designs from a disco session. Beebul is wearing a skull mask that its pink tendrils lazily drift out from, Terra wears a pink bandanna and grey vest, one of her Bytes is drawn wearing a pirate hat with a stylized logo of Beebul’s mask.
Jump To Top