Research Opportunities
Call for Research Participants and Summer Research Opportunities
Seeking Neuro-divergent Monash Students for a Study on Losing Personal Items
This research project aims to better understand the lived experiences of Neuro-divergent Monash University students who regularly lose their personal items so as to build and improve technologies to help reduce personal item loss.
What is Involved
We are seeking Monash University students aged 18 and above who identify or have been diagnosed as neuro-divergent and tend to lose things regularly to have a discussion with us for about 45 to 60 minutes about:
- Personal items that you tend to lose on a regular basis
- Where you tend to lose these items
- Walk us through memories of losing these items and finding them
- Join us in exploring potential technologies that might be able to help with reducing the loss of these personal items
Our goal for this exploratory discussion is to help build better cost-effective solutions to reduce personal item loss with your valuable input.
We are also very happy to discuss how the discussion can be tailored to your unique context, so please let us know!
- Participants will be compensated with a 30-dollar grocery voucher for their time.
Criteria for Participation
- Aged 18 and over
- Students from Monash University
- Identify as/ Diagnosed as Neuro-divergent
- Lose personal items on a regular basis
Contact Information
- For more information and how to participate in this study, please contact benjamin.phua@monash.edu.
Summer Researcher Opportunity
Summer researcher opportunity with Monash Inclusive Technologies Lab at the Faculty of IT (Deadline: Friday, 26 August 2022, 5pm).
- Start date: 21 November 2022 (negotiable) for Eight Weeks
- Scholarship value: $4,000 ($500 x 8 weeks)
We are seeking students to be co-researchers and co-designers of technologies to help neuro-divergent individuals who tend to lose things to not lose things.
We know it can be annoying to lose our keys, wallets and phones but these issues can be a lot more annoying if you are neuro-divergent (if you know you know!) and by reducing the cognitive load needed to manage these tasks we can then use that energy for more useful, interesting, life-giving activities.
The work will entail:
- Performing research and literature review
- Designing, and developing prototypes and
- Potentially being involved in focus group studies (with neuro-divergent individuals who tend to lose things regularly) regarding those prototypes
- Students will also be involved in reflective and reflexive exercises about the above activities.
Ideally you will be studying:
- Design, IT or engineering and have taken FIT3146 – Maker lab
- Happy to consider students from a wide range of backgrounds!
We welcome and encourage students who are disabled and/ or diagnosed/ self-identify as neuro-divergent and also have a propensity for losing things to apply as you are experts-by-personal experience and are thus extremely well suited to co-design and co-develop these solutions.
We also encourage students who are carers of people with disabilities who tend to lose things to apply for similar reasons.
- For more details, please kindly get in touch with: benjamin.phua@monash.edu
To apply:
- Please go to the application page via this link
- For more information about this project please click here!