Overcoming the Fragmentation: A Proposal of Model Ontology, Architecture System and Web-Based Implementation for Planning the Persons with Disability’s Life Project

In recent decades important changes in the disability area occurred, both at regulatory-political and socio-cultural level, urging to rethink the Life Project of persons with disabilities (PwD) from a lifelong and life wide perspective. From the Nineties, in Italy this change has been introduced by a policy agenda introducing the construct of individual Life Project as a crucial mean to guarantee rights and quality of life aimed at fully implementing the principle of social inclusion. However, this evolution continues to clash with standard and fragmented solutions that does not respond to the need of an individualized, emancipatory, rights-based planning. The paper presents a model of PwD’ Life Project developed by the researchers in Special Education of University of Bergamo (UNIBG) as a result of the “Training Program on Life Project related to the Dopo di Noi” promoted in collaboration with Agenzia Tutela Salute (ATS) of Bergamo. Adopting a participatory design approach, UNIBG researchers follow a three steps model: 1) defining the conceptual framework (ontology) with respect to disability, the rights of the PwD and the load-bearing features and steps characterizing the individual Life Project planning; 2) organizing the overall architecture of the system; 3) designing a low-fidelity prototype. The current state of the art of the UNIBG research contributes to inform PwD’s Life Project design process and preliminary results highlight the overall validity of the model ontology and the proposed architecture. As next research step, the prototype will be discussed with some selected stakeholders participating in ATS-UNIBG “Training Program” to collect their feedback and proceed with the re-design phase.