Embracing a wholeness view of people’s capabilities: from Inclusive Design to Design Justice
Exploratory research piece conducted at TU Delft, supervised by Nynke Tromp
In a nutshell
Inclusive Design is an established field that fundamentally aims to guarantee that products are accessible to people with disabilities and to the broadest possible audience. Design Justice shares common ground with Inclusive Design but draws more attention to the social structure that systemically excludes people based not only on disabilities and age but also on race, religion, gender, social class. These design approaches have overlapping and complementary views on addressing people’s capabilities, and confront each other on how to conduct the design process, frame the discourse around people’s position in society and finally on how they think designers are suitable to create and spread knowledge.
Understanding the Origins of Inclusive Design and Design Justice
As inequality in the world increases, a call for ethical and socially responsible decision-making arises in all fields. In the design field, awareness about the unintended consequences of products, services, and processes arises. Design practitioners started to consider that even though working under the purpose of increasing people’s well-being, their activity can enable or disable people participating in society (Clarkson & Coleman, 2015). Therefore, the question posted for designers is in what extend what they create is facilitating equal opportunities and not reproducing injustice social structures that exclude certain groups.
Social inclusion has received attention in design mainly in the 1990s when several approaches aim to achieve “inclusivity”. Universal Design, Design for All, Accessible Design and Inclusive Design share the same philosophical foundation, the belief on the diversity of human capabilities (mental and physical) and that a “normal standard” does not exist (Bianchin & Heylighen, 2017; Persson et al., 2015). All these approaches spread worldwide and were embraced by academia, industry and design practitioners. The Danish Designers association stated that Design for All approach brings benefits to society, and it a way to display the designer’s responsibility (Bendixen & Bentzon, 2015).
Not established as the previous field, Design Justice does not have the same amount of published papers, specialised design centres and research groups as Inclusive Design has. However, the emergence, in last five years, of the terms “Just Design” and “Design Justice” describes an approach that brings a critical and relevant view to the field, for instance, acknowledging that society values ableism; and that products and services can create an extra barrier for people with disabilities (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Therefore, its perspective shares common ground with Inclusive Design, and precisely because of these connections led to the formulation of the present research.
This research attempts to analyse the overlapping between Inclusive Design and closely related terms and the recent appearance of the Design Justice approach. By noticing the convergence and divergence of understanding that these two fields embrace, this research visualises how they complement and confront each other by bringing light into their differences and similarities. The aim is not to define the approach’s boundaries, but to draw lines of connection that can serve to further research. Linking the established field of Inclusive Design with a still-developing process helps understand the evolution of the design research and how socio-inclusion concerns have been gradually incorporated into design practice.
Inclusive Design
The origin of Inclusive Design approach is closely linked to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the Movements of People with Disabilities in the 1950s (Persson et al., 2015). Decades later, the international reinforcement to eliminate discrimination towards people with special needs came in 2006 with the ratification of UN United Nations Convention about the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Bendixen & Bentzon, 2015). This document defines disability as unable to participate on equal terms irrespectively of the human characteristics and is frequently adopted in Inclusive Design (Persson et al., 2015). Hence, the first focal point of Inclusive Design is the emphasis on enabling equal opportunity to participate in society.
Not only facilitating participating in society by promoting inclusivity, but the approach also emphasises human diversity. Considering a wide range of human characteristics leads to enhancing accessibility of products, then everyone benefits, not only people with disabilities (Abascal & Nicolle, 2005). Also, stated at the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge University, user diversity is key to directly inform decisions in the design process (Waller et al., 2015).
In 1994, when Coleman introduced the term “Inclusive Design”, the purpose was to present the two main challenges for designers: to address the needs of people with disability and the ageing population (Clarkson & Coleman, 2015). Therefore, the driver of developing this approach was also the pressure of a population that is getting older in the industrialised nations (Persson et al., 2015). As a consequence of age, a larger number of people with functional limitations.
Lastly is essential to highlight that Inclusive Design is continuously evolving philosophy that aims to create functional products, services and environments that can be used on equal terms by everyone, which requires the inclusion of a diverse range of users to capture their needs and desires (Persson et al., 2015).
Design Justice
Designers are not prepared to deal with social and ethical problems; they pass specific responsibilities to service providers, institutions and public authorities (Abascal & Nicolle, 2005). By not taking a stand, design processes can reproduce the social structures that generate inequalities (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Based on these arguments that designers lack an understanding of how the objects and systems they create, distribute benefits and burdens among people, that Design Justice approach emerges.
As an emerging field, the authors and working groups of design practitioners are still developing. For this study, two key researchers were selected because of their advocacy for equitable distribution of design’s benefits, Costanza-Chock and Bardzell. The first registered the Design Justice Network’s foundation, based in the US; the group created ten principles that help designers avoid reproducing existing inequalities. The second author is from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and criticises specifically how design practices oppress women and calls for a feminist agenda.
Bardzell proposes a feminist agenda in HCI based on the academic definition of feminism which “examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social and psychological oppression of women” (Bardzell, 2010, p. 2). Similarly, Design Justice Network principles are also grounded on Black feminist scholars that introduce the concepts of a matrix of domination and intersectionality to talk about power and privilege (Costanza-Chock, 2018).
For this study, the interest lies in how these recent developments that aim to bring frameworks, principles, and guidelines to the design discipline help build a more equitable society.
The Evolution and Emergence of Design Theories
As mentioned before, Inclusive Design is a worldwide established field with extensive research over the last 30 years; in contrast, Design Justice arose in previous five years generating less academic resources. Because the two areas share common ground, it seems valuable to analyse how they interact. By filling this knowledge gap and creating more awareness and understanding of the evolution of design theories, this research investigates the discourse, guidelines and practices proposed by the two approaches. For this study, the “Universal Design”, “Design for All” were considered sharing the same principles as Inclusive Design.
How this research was planned?
A literature review was conducted to study the similarities and differences between Inclusive Design and Design Justice. This paper focuses on two contributions: How the two approaches overlap in terms of values, practices and world-views? What design theory path the emergence of Design Justice suggests?
Methods
This literature review comprehends a search on design journals and conferences that involve the terms “inclusive design” and words that are interchangeable to this field such as “design for all” and “universal design” besides these also “design justice” and its related keywords. The papers were searched for the key terms using Google Scholar on articles published from 2000 to 2020.
The articles selected were published in the English language and had the key terms as the main focus of their research. Three criteria were used to exclude papers on the initial list. First criteria for exclusion were to filter out articles that were marginally connected to the focus of the present research (i.e., the terms were used in sentences that focus on the other topic). Second, papers centred in manufacturing processes, because they did not explore the key terms critically, and they would add significant lower value compared to other articles to the present research. Third, it comes to the relevance to the field, papers that had fewer than ten citations were excluded. Below follows a table with the final selection.
5 Major Overlaps and Tensions
Through analysis of the selected articles, the findings were synthesised in five visualisations to clarify the overlaps between the approaches. However, these five aspects would not cover all the overlaps, but they sign the main points that help understand design theories’ developments.
1. Amplitude
The first overlap between the approaches refers to understanding which characteristics create a barrier or advantage in accessing products and services (see figure 1).
Design Justice Network based their principles in the intersectionality theory proposed by Kimberle Crenshaw and the matrix of domination developed by Patricia Hill Collins. Intersectionality refers to the acknowledgement that a single axis cannot analyse the dynamics between, for instance, race and gender, since women of colour will face racism and sexism while being marginalised in the feminist and antiracist movements (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Therefore, depending on the summative positions that individuals hold in this framework, they are more or less likely to experience certain privileges and oppressions (Costanza-Chock, 2018). For instance, a white male visually impaired in the western society encounters difficulties in using transportation system in a city, in contrast, a black male visually impaired living in the same city encounters the same problems in getting across the urban area and faces prejudice because of his race.
In contrast with the broad and systemic understanding of society structures and how they influence the personal, group, and population levels, Inclusive Design has a more narrow and deep focus of two main factors: disability and age. However, several Design Institutions and Declarations include terms that suggest a broader spectrum such as “social inclusion” and “status”. The European Institute for Design and Disability defined Design for All as “design for human diversity, social inclusion and equality” (Persson et al., 2015, p. 3). Moreover, Universal Design definition states design “for the needs of people, regardless of their age, ability or status in life” (Persson et al., 2015, p. 4). Even though the definitions include words that can suggest socioeconomic status, they are used in an immediate context to disabilities.
The precedents movements of Inclusive Design had a strong focus on the disabled and elderly rights that continued in the 1990s and beyond (Clarkson & Coleman, 2015). However, the more recently comprehension of Inclusive Design “aims to enable all people to have equal opportunities to participate in society, irrespective of physical, cognitive or socio-cultural factors” (Bendixen & Bentzon, 2015, p. 255). The adoption of socio-cultural factors can suggest an attempt to consider race and ethnicity, for instance.
2. Discourse Weight
By analysing the discourse used in both approaches to explain individuals’ restrictions and privileges in society, they perceive different the benefits and harms that accompany human conditions (see figure 2).
Design Justice is intrinsically connected to the matrix of domination mentioned in the last section. It sees the differences in how society allocates power across individuals, groups and how it changes throughout a lifetime. Then, the purpose of Design Justice is to raise consciousness in how designers create objects, systems and processes that distribute power and privilege to individuals based on their position in the matrix of domination (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Hence, the focus is addressing penalties and privileges with equal efforts because they are inseparable.
In contrast, when analysing the discourse around Inclusive Design approach, the weight is unevenly distributed. Tracing back to its origin, in the 1950s, the context of returning veterans from the Vietnam War to the US pushed changes on public policies and design and architectural practices to have “barrier-free” buildings where disabled soldiers could access them (Persson et al., 2015). So the term “disability” is associated with the needs of people with cognitive, sensory or motion limitations (Keates et al., 2000). Thus, certain conditions cause constraints and limitations weight more as penalties.
However, this Inclusive Design focus on the negative constraints that disability causes are also shifting. Research commissioned by Microsoft pointed out that using the word “disability” reduces the comprehension that accessible technology is beneficial to many people and not only those with disabilities (Waller et al., 2015). When a product is designed to meet some people’s essential needs, it usually makes it more efficient to people with no impairments (Persson et al., 2015; and Keates et al., 2000). Nowadays, Bendixen & Bentzon claim that Inclusive design in Scandinavian countries had deviated from a focus on disabilities to abilities (2015).
Therefore, the Inclusive Design penalties’ focus suggests a more reduced view of human capability, where having a physical or cognitive restriction, leads to more difficulties on accessible basic services and consequently decreasing well-being. This focus on penalty is not a negative in itself, Waller et al., states that defining disability by comparing with the majority of people helps draw recognition on the rights for those that need support (2015). In contrast, the equal balance of Design Justice underlies a view that power dynamics are not static, and it changes and interacts in three different levels: individual, community and institutional.
3. Interpreting Individual Capabilities
Each approach has directed focus and effort to address the causes that constraints individual capabilities (see figure 3).
The emergence of Inclusive Design happened in the 1990s not as an entirely new approach, but more as a synthesis of advances in the design field which address ageing, disability and social equality (Clarkson & Coleman, 2015). Its predecessors’ authors such as Goldsmith that wrote, “Designing for the Disabled” in 1963, provided guidelines for creating an accessible building for wheelchair users (Clarkson & Coleman, 2015).
After the 90s a change in perspective occurs: from aiming to help people to perform work that is suitable to individual’s capabilities to the understanding that disability arises in relation to a context or somebody and not inherently to the individual health status (Bianchin & Heylighen, 2017; Persson et al., 2015). In this sense, products and environments constraint or empower individuals. Even though the approach evolves to not see people with disabilities as objects, it does not mention the layers above the context of the use of products such as the institutional structures that oppresses individuals abilities.
Specifically, in this macro-level that Design Justice sets their principles, a great effort is made to incorporate social sciences theory about social inequality to the design practice. “Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and settler colonialism)” (Costanza-Chock, 2018, p. 5).
While Inclusive Design highlights the importance on products defining people abilities, Design Justice view can be considered more ambitious since it forces to go beyond the traditional design role and pushes designers to integrate a broad picture of structural society. The questions that the approach present address equity, values, scope, sites, ownership, accountability, political economy, discourse (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Design Justice is still present in the products and environment layer but with less intensity than Inclusive Design.
4. Outcome vs Process Centred
On Zooming out on each approach, the differences in how they organise the design process become apparent (see figure 4).
Through the years, Inclusive Design research has developed tools to measure design exclusion; in other words, how many people are excluded from using particular product and services (Clarkson & Coleman, 2015). Also, they integrate a wide range of ISO standards to meet accessibility requirements, mainly in the field of Ergonomics and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The emphasis in Inclusive Design is to observe users to identify their needs and include them in the evaluation of early stages of prototypes (Waller et al. 2015).
In contrast Design Justice plays a substantial effort on emphasising that how the process is conducted is essential to the outcome. It takes this position because it steers from the thought that design can only be accomplished and recognised by experts, and promotes the design practices conducted by marginalised people (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Hence, the approach nurtures a focus on designing “with” people instead of “for” people.
The two approaches bridge the understanding that users need to be involved in the development process, for instance, the inspiring quote from the disability movement inspired both approaches “nothing about us, without us” (Costanza-Chock, 2018). Therefore the Inclusive Design process is more detained in ensuring an accessible outcome than on how participatory the design path is.
5. Universalism vs Pluralism
The last point to present relates to the understanding of knowledge creation, reproduction and meeting human diversity (see figure 5).
Abascal and Nicolle refer to Inclusive Design as the “universal accessibility philosophy” which means in the human-computer interaction field that design interfaces need to be based on the needs of all users to avoid adaptations or modifications (2005). The authors also point out that meeting all users’ needs is unrealistic due to users’ great diversity (Abascal & Nicolle, 2005). To illustrate, what meets the needs of visually impair person differs from someone in a wheelchair (Bianchin & Heylighen, 2017). In short, the universalism ideal is to aim for all people and avoid unnecessary barriers.
Design Justice rejects the goal to find a common solution to address everyone. Bardzell criticises that usability evaluations and mental models in design that are under a “universal” acceptance, but in reality, represents masculine thoughts and beliefs (2010). Therefore the universalism understanding that Inclusive Design is trying to achieve is yet embedded with a majoritarian male perspective and marginalises other groups’ views. To face this unbalanced society, Bardzell advocates for pluralism that translates to design by creating products and services that do not follow only one truth/perspective/point of view (2010). By fostering pluralist design, the author also reinforces the need to be culturally sensitive, active engage and include more diverse voices in their process (2010).
Discussion: complementary approaches
Through these five visuals becomes clear that both approaches complement themselves in some aspects. While Design Justice leads to interpret a bigger picture to situate product and services on local contexts before starting designing, Inclusive Design aims to create tangible outcomes accessible to a broader population.
It terms of processes, Design Justice by involving marginalised people on decision-making suggests a stronger procedural character. In contrast, Inclusive Design with all parameters to ensure inclusivity shows a more pragmatic thought. Considering that most HCI professionals do not have knowledge and expertise to design for people with disabilities, and at the same time, they are willing to follow the legislation (Abascal & Nicolle, 2005). In this sense, the relevance of Inclusive Design and its guidelines increases in this scenario. Again, these two perspectives complement and both bring benefits to society.
The point the both most collapse is the universalism vs pluralism understanding. Taking the arguments of Design Justice about the structures that reproduce inequality, for instance, that knowledge production is in the hand of a few people; it seems pluralism is more inclusive. In that, why would not be adopted by Inclusive Design? One possible reason is that pluralist views add granularity and complexity, and more quantifiable tools would be required. Still, Inclusive Design as the stabilised field, even not homogenous, can take further the message to academia, industry and practitioners that Design Justice is pushing hard to convey.
Concluding
Based on a selection of key papers that address Inclusive Design and Design Justice approaches, this research shows slightly different and complementary views on how both see people’s abilities (amplitude and individual’s capabilities). However, the approaches present more significant differences on how the lead the design process (outcome vs process centred), how they frame the discourse around people’s position in society (penalties and privileges) and how they aim to create and spread knowledge (universalism vs pluralism).
References
Abascal, J., & Nicolle, C. (2005). Moving towards inclusive design guidelines for socially and ethically aware HCI. Interacting with computers, 17, 484–505.
Bardzell, S. (2010). Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 1301–1310. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753521
Bendixen, K., & Benktzon, M. (2015). Design for All in Scandinavia–A strong concept. Applied Ergonomics, 46, 248–257.
Bianchin, M., & Heylighen, A. (2017). Fair by design. Addressing the paradox of inclusive design approaches. The Design Journal, 20, 3162–3170. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352822
Clarkson, P. J., & Coleman, R. (2015). History of Inclusive Design in the UK. Applied Ergonomics, 46, 235–247.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. Proceedings of the Design Research Society. doi: 10.21606/dma.2017.679
Keates, S., Clarkson, P. J., Harrison, L. A., & Robinson, P. (2000, November). Towards a practical inclusive design approach. Proceedings on the 2000 conference on Universal Usability, 45–52. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/355460.355471
Persson, H., Åhman, H., Yngling, A. A., & Gulliksen, J. (2015). Universal design, inclusive design, accessible design, design for all: different concepts — one goal? On the concept of accessibility — historical, methodological and philosophical aspects. Universal Access in the Information Society, 14(4), 505–526.
Waller, S., Bradley, M., Hosking, I., & Clarkson, P. J. (2015). Making the case for inclusive design. Applied Ergonomics, 46, 297–303. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.012
