Designing for inclusion starts with recognizing exclusion.
the power of mismatches. They make aspects of society accessible to some people, but not all people.
Mismatches are barriers to interacting
can feel like running into a locked door marked with a big sign that says “keep out.” Both hurt.
how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies.
is it even possible to design for all human diversity?
Human-to-human interactions are full of mismatches, but people are able to adapt themselves in an effort to connect with each other.
sympathy and pity. Treating inclusion as a benevolent
Treating inclusion as a benevolent mission increases the separation between people.
Ask a hundred people what inclusion means and you’ll get a hundred different answers. Ask them what it means to be excluded and the answer will be uniformly clear: It’s when you’re left out.
We must test our assumptions about human beings. We must wonder “who am I excluding?” and allow the answers to change our solutions.
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.
There are many different interpretations of the word “inclusion,” but very little guidance on what exactly this word means.
A common concern of designers is being forced to create a lowest-common-denominator design. Trying to please everyone is good for no one.
With inclusion, each time we create a new solution it requires careful attention in its initial design and maintenance over time.
Inclusion is ongoing and in search of a better vocabulary. By association, so is this book. In writing it, I had to constantly remind
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might not be possible to definitively design this elusive thing we call inclusion.
Exclusion, conversely, is recognizable. It’s measurable and tangible. When someone is excluded they know it unequivocally. The experience has an emotional and functional impact on them.
recognize and remedy the mismatched interactions in our world.
Can we understand the exclusion created by our solutions before we release them into the world, and design something better?
For groups with capitalistic motivations, exclusion hinders business growth. A mismatch haunts any designer or technologist who aims to create great solutions but realizes just how much people struggle to successfully use their design.
Designing for human diversity might be the key to our collective future. It’s going to take a great diversity of talent, working together, to address the challenges we face in the 21st century: climate change, urbanization, mass migration, increased longevity and aging populations, early childhood development, social isolation, education, and caring for the most vulnerable among us in an ever-widening gap of economic disparity.
Solve for one, extend to many. Focus on what’s universally important to all humans.
Often I meet new people, stories, and tools dedicated to advancing inclusion. I collect these at www.mismatch.design. These resources are a living companion to
Exclusion isn’t inherently negative, but it should at least be an intentional choice rather than an accidental harm.
Exclusion is written into the game of play. And play, as we know, will soon be the game of life.
school. It is the first real exposure to the public arena. Children are required to share materials and teachers in a space that belongs to everyone.
Equal participation is the cornerstone of most classrooms. This notion usually involves everything except free play, which is generally considered a private matter. Yet, in truth, free acceptance in play, partnerships, and teams is what matters most to any child.
Who uses it. These are the assumptions that the problem solver makes about the people who will interact with,
We don’t need to tear down existing solutions to make inclusive ones. The cycle of exclusion is pervasive and ongoing.
An engineer might focus on accessibility issues with the product they develop. A leader in human resources might focus on hiring practices. An information technology professional might focus on how to make communication tools work better between global teams that have different native languages.
long enough life span, everyone loses some
multiple studies show that social rejection might manifest in our bodies in ways that approximate physical pain.
being socially rejected might directly affect our physical well-being.
What if an object rejects us? Is it as painful as being rejected by a person?
Special-edition products created to generate interest in a new business. An invitation-only birthday for an inner circle of friends. Sometimes creating limited access can have positive benefits.
There is a risk that exclusion will become more prevalent as technology moves into every area of our lives, because interactions that were once human-to-human are now facilitated by machines. Every human interaction that includes technology gains a wild card: who will it reject and who will it accept?
assumptions about people. They might presume that someone who’s blind doesn’t use a camera.
Every day, design teams make incorrect assumptions about people. They might presume that someone who’s blind doesn’t use a camera.
Takeaways: Why It’s Time to Kick the Habit ■Mismatched designs contribute to the societal invisibility of certain groups, like people with disabilities. ■When a designed object rejects a person, it can feel like social rejection and approximate physical pain. ■Exclusion habits stem from a belief that we can’t change aspects of society that were originally set into motion by someone other than ourselves.
video games and their controllers grew more complex in the 1990s as home video games grew in popularity. Porter’s pegboard features the contoured
video games and their controllers grew more complex in the 1990s as home video games grew in popularity.
Wall of Exclusion, it’s easy to notice how the controllers grew larger, heavier, and more complex over time.
Porter can tell you exactly how to create an inclusive solution. Technology is very tightly integrated with everything he does. He uses a wheelchair to get around and assistive technologies to extend his own abilities.
Sometimes this is a hardware hack, like a switch controller that can be modified to work through head movement.
Porter ties his experience with gaming to everyday life, making insightful connections between play and inclusion.
A game controller says “This is for you” or “This is not for you.” This is true for everything we design.
Games that only allow a user to play in one way, that have a very prescriptive notion of who a player is, those tend to be the ones that are the least accessible. But games that allow more freedom and flexibility tend to be a lot more inclusive.
World of Warcraft as one of the really great inclusive games.
the game isn’t about doing quests. The game is economics. The game is building a leather-working empire and making gear that people can buy from them.
I don’t just play. I work to figure out how to play. It’s figuring out how to participate in societal moments.
for decades, games and consoles were made exclusively by large companies with massive technology requirements that took years to release. Only an elite group of designers worked for these companies.
Open-source tools enable more people to contribute to the design of everything from education to artificial intelligence.
Anyone who has ever solved a problem is, in a certain sense, a designer.
You might be a designer if you say that it’s not enough to design for yourself and you want to design experiences for other people too.
Even the most empathetic designer will typically create a solution that she herself can see, hear, and touch. She’ll use her own logic and preferred ways of communicating.
Even the design tools that she uses to create a solution will reinforce her ability biases.
No degree of wearing a blindfold will ever be equivalent to the experience of being blind. The blindfold can actually give designers a false sense of empathy, especially if they attempt to simulate disabilities without ever meeting or working alongside people with disabilities.
Figure 4.4 When we think about disability in terms of mismatched interactions, it highlights the responsibilities of people who make solutions.
OXO tools. Betsy Farber was having difficulty using kitchen utensils due to arthritis in her hands. The thin metal handles of objects, like a potato peeler, were difficult and painful to hold. Her husband, Sam Farber, worked with her to develop a new grip
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.
Goltsman led her design projects with
I-N-G’s. She would sit and observe how many different human activities were happening in a park. Goltsman would ask, “what I-N-G is most important to this environment?” Maybe it was running, digging, swinging, climbing, or sleeping.
Whatever the I-N-G, the next question was always “how many ways can human beings engage in that activity?” Imagine a playground full of only one kind of swing. A swing that requires you to be a certain height with two arms and two legs. The only people who will come to play are people who match this design, because the design welcomes them and no one else.
adjust the shape and size of the seat. You can keep a person stationary and swing the environment around them.
distinguish inclusive design from related concepts, like accessibility and universal design. Here’s a quick primer that guided our work: Accessibility: 1. The qualities that make an experience open to all. 2. A professional discipline aimed at achieving No. 1.
Wheelchair access in architecture only became prominent across the United States after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed by Congress in 1990.
Inclusive design should always start with a solid understanding of accessibility fundamentals. Accessibility criteria are the
foundation of integrity for any inclusive solution.
Universal design is one-size-fits-all. Inclusive design is one-size-fits-one.
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.
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.
inclusive design was born out of digital technologies in the 1970s and 80s,
Inclusive design, conversely, focuses on how a designer arrived at that design. Did their process include the contributions of excluded communities?
An inclusive designer is someone, arguably anyone, who recognizes and remedies mismatched interactions between people and their world.
Here are four unique challenges that people commonly face when they’re new to accessibility. ■Lack of educational resources. Accessibility fundamentals are rarely taught in school or by employers. The companies that are
leading in inclusion are creating curricula to help engineers and designers learn the basics. There’s a community of accessibility specialists who are also producing great educational content. Much of this information is available online in open formats, for free. This will give a general introduction to what you need to know.
Interdependence is about matching complementary skills and mutual contributions.
The society is a system of interdependent skills, an economy that includes many different types of novices and masters.
An inclusive designer thinks in terms of interdependent systems. They study human relationships. They observe the ways that people bring their skills together to complement each other.
many universities are struggling to maintain a relevant curriculum.
Among those evolving design roles there is a new category of skills in inclusive design.
permeates intimate areas of our lives, design becomes an intimate act.
People who’ve experienced great degrees of exclusion can translate that expertise to the solutions they create.
Their expertise stems from being familiar with exclusion and what makes it a universal human experience.
Recognize and Resolve Mismatches
Create a diversity of ways to participate in an experience.
Build a basic literacy in accessibility, and grow a depth of expertise in the specific
Note the orientation of buildings, the intensity of sounds or crowds of people. Who designed that street corner? How are their choices influencing your ability to move?
shifting a 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, long time.
In 2015, Detroit became the first U.S. city
to be named a UNESCO City of Design.
city’s rich architectural heritage and a long list of influential local architects and designers who defined American Modern design.
Tiffany Brown guided me through the city. An architectural designer and native Detroiter, Brown is exceptionally talented at building connections with people.
A growing number of architects, like Brown, believe the people who inhabit a space should contribute directly to its design. Her firsthand experience with how design can fail communities motivated her to pursue architecture. She understands how designing for, not with, people
Brown, believe the people who inhabit a space should contribute directly to its design. Her firsthand experience with how design can fail communities motivated her to pursue architecture. She understands how designing for, not with, people can lead to exclusion.
The promise of family-oriented housing started to change when the Frederick Douglass towers were added to the Brewster Homes in 1951. The stark, cramped design of these twenty-story block-shaped towers was a far cry from the original town homes.
Robert Moses, a man known as the “master builder” of New York City in the mid-twentieth century.
The Power Broker. Moses built extensive parks, beaches, roadways, tunnels, and bridges that transformed New York City during the decades of his tenure as an appointed public official. And he did so with a keen focus on excluding communities that he deemed unworthy to enjoy them. In one infamous example, he lowered the height of overpasses to prevent the passage of public buses, the primary mode of transit for low-income and African American residents.
Through the 1950s and 1960s Congress allocated fewer and fewer funds to building and maintaining high-quality public housing. As they did, the design quality declined. High-rise towers, often with one elevator to service scores of families, became a design standard for public housing projects across the United States.
The pattern of destroying Black and low-income neighborhoods to make way for “urban renewal” projects has been repeated across Detroit for decades.
Brewster-Douglass was built for low-income African American families. But who created the design? Who chose what to tear down and what to rebuild? What was their cultural agenda?
In the history of the profession, just over 450 architects have been African American women. In 2017 there were approximately 110,000 licensed architects in the United States. Just over 400 of these active practitioners, roughly 0.3%, are African American women.
How did you choose architecture? Growing up in Detroit’s inner city, we didn’t have doctors, lawyers, and engineers running to our schools for career day. We had little access to the arts and zero exposure to architecture.
designing with a community: that no course of action should be decided without total contribution from the people affected by that course of action.
As designers we try to have some kind of reason for what we did and some kind concept that we start with. Rather than jumping to a design and then rationalizing why we did it.
She had placed a lot of stores along the front of the city. She explained that shopping was something she did with her mom when she was alive.
she created this block filled with things that she liked to do with her mom. She didn’t have to understand design thinking. She just needed to take a step back and clarify the reason why she was making certain choices.
When people are excluded by mismatched designs, they grow intimately familiar with the nature of the exclusion and how it might be resolved
Us and Them To illustrate the problem let’s consider the Dodge LaFemme, a car designed specifically for women, brought to market in 1955 and canceled in 1956. The car was pink, inside and out, decorated with small roses.
studies revealed that a female driver, wearing a seatbelt, faced a 47% higher risk of death or serious injury than a male driver.
Decades of design choices where made based on average male-sized testing standards.
The problem is separation. It’s rooted in the ways we categorize human diversity. The most common ways that we group people by diversity are single dimensions like ability, gender, race, ethnicity, income, sexual orientation, and age.
