What are DilEMMAS?
Every person has desires and demands. These are often determined by someone’s age, living conditions, or by someone's personal situation. It is important that these desires and demands play an important part is someone’s daily life, but it is possible that they are conflicting one another. For example: if I go out tonight I will have a great time, but at the same this will cause me to be tired tomorrow and I have to go to my grandma’s birthday. We call these situations: dilemmas.
From the perspective of a disabled person, these dilemmas could seem rather paradoxical. In other words, certain decisions of a disabled child could seem absurd to other people, but make a lot of sense when taking account all the desires and demands of the child. For example, it often happens that ‘outsiders’ do not understand why a disabled child would like to do a spontaneous activity because it demands an extensive preparation whenever the child would like to do this. It seems, to the outsiders eye, very cumbersome. Designers often aim to make the process more easy, so that the aforementioned extensive preparation becomes more easy. We argue that designers should focus more on how to allow a child with a disability to be more spontaneous in the first place without it having to undergo this extensive preparation before an activity.
Can be paradoxes
Why DILemmA?
According to Ozkaramanli (2017), the desires and demands of a user of a certain product can only be fully understood when they are studied in relation to the other desires and demands of this user. She argues that by doing this, a designer will be able to consider different alternatives (for a product) without forgetting about all the (other) product goals. In other words, for a designer it is important to understand the desires and demands of a person to understand why some of their decisions might seem to be paradoxes, but could actually be understood in the context of their other demands and desires. In turn, this could be used to define what goals a certain product should have.
How to use DilEMMAS?
It is important to talk with your users about their daily life and to find out what their desires and demands are. By doing this, a product developer could figure out what the paradoxes of a user are. Please refer to the Book of dilemmas for disigners by Deger Ozakaramanli to formulate these paradoxes.
i. Evaluate your product based on the formulated paradoxes. Which desires and demands of a specific user does/doesn’t my product currently fulfil?
ii. Explain how your product currently fulfils (some of) these desires and demands.
Evaluate your product with your users. Maybe you discover more paradoxical desires and demands when you do this with their cooperation.
The Duchenne Parent Project the Netherlands and Yumen Bionics have defined paradoxes for boys with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD).

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