“The Life I Wish” is an experimental project started in Trieste in 2012 aimed at promoting the independent living of people with disabilities. In some apartment, defined as “School Homes”, young persons (from 18 to 35 years old) with low intellectual disabilities may prove themselves in achieving the highest possible level of autonomy (practical, affective and relational) under the guide of some “education workers”. The intervention of the education workers is not finalized to ensure, for the disabled people, the continuation of the “School Home”, but rather to the final exit from it. In fact, their intervention envisages the possibility to build self-sufficient living units that may be defined “Home-Home”. In this sense technologies, and even more the ability to exploit them efficiently (Cook, 2011), can become a useful contribution for supporting people’s independent living. It is important to identify how and on what occasions technologies are functional for people with disability. In this paper we present some preliminary results related to a participatory research study on people with intellectual disabilities involved in co-constructing strategies that can facilitate their autonomy in independent living through the use of recent low-cost technological devices.
