TO ADD: Kat Holmes Inclusive Design

Where in life do we learn inclusive skills? In my education as an engineer, designer and citizen I never formally learned about inclusion or exclusion. Accessibility, sociology and civil rights weren’t required curricula for learning how to build technology. (P.7)

As I grew in my career as a technologist, I noticed a void of information in how to practice inclusive design for digital technologies. (P.7).

One of the most common fears related to inclusion is a fear of using the wrong words, many leaders would rather avoid the topic than look bad or offend someone (p.8)

There are many interpretations of the word ‘inclusion’ but very little guidance on what exactly this word means (p.8).

The underlying challenge is the vast complexity of human diversity, there are endless nuances and considerations when designing for people. There is no single answer that suits everyone (p.9).

Technologies are permeating our public and private spaces (p.11)

One small change towards inclusion can benefit many people in a positive way (p.11).

When inclusion means so many different things to so many different people, understanding how to build it is far from self-evident (p.18).

Dr. Victor Pineda, a leader in accessible urban design and co-founder of the Smart Cities Initiative describes:

Inclusive design is about engaging with people that can be completely different than you, it’s stretches your imagination of what’s possible. It has a trickle effect, it has a multiplier effect in that it changes those people, and in a sense changes society. Because the fact that a designer thought about a wider group of people opens up for society to see these people that were once invisible (p.21).

A shift to inclusive design means we are constantly looking for and resolving mismatches through all stages of the development process (p.24).

Disability is critical to any conversation about exclusion. It touches everyone’s life, eventually. Yet disability is commonly misunderstood as applying to only a marginal percentage of the human population. This is simply untrue (p.28).

As we age, we all gain and lose abilities. Our abilities change through illness and injury. Eventually we are all excluded by designs that don’t fit our ever changing bodies (p.29).

Exclusion has a profound impact on disability communities, and the consequences are rarely given the attention they deserve. The societal omission of disability runs deep, so deep that entire populations of people are virtually invisible in society. 

For example, disability rights and history are rarely incorporated in school curricula. Accessibility is scarcely a required course for engineers and designers. Formative disability rights leaders and the movements they champion are seldom mentioned alongside other civil rights leaders. The omissions can further reinforce stereotypes and isolate people with disabilities from society (p.31).

There are many other significant gaps in equality for people with disabilities and design alone isn’t going to close all of these gaps, yet progress can be made towards equality with every design decision they make (p.32).

We have rules in schools and society against physically harming each other, but for some people being left out is treated as a fact of life (p.33).

Without an explicit understanding of how exclusion works, our default habits, habits we have formed in our early childhood can dominate, creating a cycle of exclusion (p.36).

Some cultures of behaviour that were set a long time ago and we may believe it’s someone else’s job to rewrite the rules, but we forget that these rules were also written by a human being and can be rewritten (p.36).

It seems easier to defer responsibility by claiming this is just how the world worked when we arrived (p.38)

Exclusion habits can be hard to break, but like any habit, they can be changed over time with new practices to challenge our mindsets and behaviours (p.38)

To gain fluency you will need to change aspects of your routine and make adjustments to support your new goal (p.38).

In 2011 the World Heath Organisation published their World Report on Disability, referring to disability as ‘a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of society in which they live. This is also known as the social definition of disability. For designers this can open a new mindset (p.51).

Jutta Treviranus founded the Inclusive Design Research Centre in 1993 to focus on ways that digital technology can improve societal inclusion (p.53).

A design leader Susan Goltsman had a definition of inclusive design ‘Inclusive design doesn’t mean you’re designing one thing for all people, you’re designing a diversity of ways to participate so that everyone has a sense of belonging (p.53).

This is a working definition of inclusive design developed at Microsoft ‘Inclusive design is a methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Most importantly, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives (p.54).

An important distinction is that accessibility is an attribute, while inclusive design is a method. While practicing inclusive design should make a product more accessible, it’s not a process for meeting all accessibility standards. Ideally, accessibility and inclusive design work together to make experiences that are not only compliant with standards, but truly usable and open to all (p.55).

 Inclusive design should always start with a solid understanding of accessible fundamentals. Accessibility criteria are the foundation of integrity for any inclusive solution (p.55).

A concept that is closely related to inclusive design is universal design: Universal design: the design of an environment so that it might be accessed and used in the widest possible range of situations without the need for adaptation (p.55).

Universal design was built out of the built environment. It is rooted in architecture and environmental design. It emphasises the end solution. The principles of universal design are focused on attributes of the end result, such as ‘simple and intuitive to use’ and ‘perceptible information’. In contrast inclusive design was born out of digital technologies in the 1970s and 80s, like captioning for people who are deaf and audio recorded books for blind communities. Inclusive design is now growing into adulthood alongside the internet (p.56).

Universal design is strongest at describing the qualities of a final design. It is exceptionally good at describing the nature of physical objects. Inclusive design, conversely focuses on how designers arrived at that design and did their processes include the contributions of excluded communities (p56).

Another distinction, initially coined by Treviranus: Univeral design is one size fits all. Inclusive design is one size fits one. Inclusive designs might not lead to universal designs. Universal designs might not involve the participation of excluded communities (p.56).

Inclusive design, accessibility and universal design are important for different reasons and have different strengths, and designers should be familiar with all three (p.56).

Accessibility fundamentals are rarely taught in school or by employers (p.57).

Shifting the cycle of exclusion toward inclusion isn’t simply a matter of designing an object in new ways. We also need to disrupt the momentum of how things have been done for a long time (p.64).

Personas are a common tool that designers and marketers employ when thinking about who will use their product. A persona is a description of a mythical person backed by research data (p.98).

A persona spectrum is an inclusive design method that solves for one person then extends to many (p.104).

Many assistive solutions that were originally marketed to people with disabilities, eventually found mainstream potential (p.115).

Accessibility products are often thought of as fixed and specialised solutions for people with disabilities (p.117).

Many teams and companies treat accessibility and inclusion as an add-on, something to consider only in the final stages of completing a product (p.126).

After decades of building products with an average human mindset, there is a lot of neglected accessibility work that needs to be addressed. It can often take huge resource investment to fix these basic issues. This is the high cost of treating accessibility as an after-thought (p.127).

Ideally, every new product or project would consider inclusive design from the beginning, as a way to proactively save time and resources and there would be no retrofitting required. The best way to do this is to weave inclusive design methods throughout the entire process of developing a solution (p.128).

What we choose to make shapes the future of who can participate and contribute to society (p.129).

There are professional reasons why inclusion matters. It expands our own thinking about problems that are worth solving. It sparks our creativity to think in new ways, in partnership with new people (p.131).

Inclusive design is simply good design and we can all be beneficiaries of inclusive design over the course of our lifetimes (p.140).

We can all shift the cycle towards inclusion one choice at a time. With each design, you shape who can contribute their talents to society, and their contributions in turn will shape the future for all of us (p.141).