Interview with Legendary Designer Bruce Hannah

While participating in IDEO’s Human Centered Design course, the randrr UX team had the opportunity to interview legendary industrial designer Bruce Hannah (he happens to be related to our UIX Design Lead, Ian Latchmansingh). Our design challenge for this assignment: “How Might We Reduce Stigma Towards and Increase Employment Opportunities for People Living with Disabilities?” We anticipated accessibility being a big issue in solving this problem, so we were lucky to talk to the guy who wrote the book.
Takeaways
The quick hour-long conversation with Bruce was inspirational to say the least. He was intelligent, eloquent, and a delightful conversationalist. Below are some of the things we learned.
Your assumptions are wrong.
He told us to assume that we can’t ever understand a disabled person’s disability because their circumstances cannot be emulated. If we think we understand the complexities behind disabilities, we will inevitably miss the mark on the design.
Everything should be universal design.
The most salient discovery from our conversation with Bruce was that making something that works better for someone with a disability, also makes it work better for everyone else.
“Every design should be universal design. Everything should be able to be picked up and understood with human intuition. When something is designed to be universally accessible, it makes the product better for everybody.”
He used examples such as text messaging, which was initially designed to help people with hearing impairments communicate and is now the primary mode of interpersonal communication worldwide. From elevators to potato peelers, when something is designed for universal accessibility, everyone benefits from it, not just people living with disabilities.
Make something people want.
This one seems obvious, but his insights were profound.
“The 3 things people will pay for is safety, ease, and comfort. It isn’t enough for them to need the product, you have to design something they want to use. That is when they fall in love with it. If your design is great, you’ll know it because the tester won’t give it back.”
We started to realize how tall of an order this design challenge really was. It’s one thing to come up with a solution people need, it’s another to make it something people love.
Transitions are opportunities for great design.
Another interesting insight from our conversation was Bruce’s take on transitions: “transitions are opportunities for great design.” A corinthian column is boring, he explained, until it gets to that place where the structure is transitioning from the vertical column to the horizontal header. That is where the decorative elements that define the design are evinced.
This was encouraging to us because the people we’re trying to help are in an important transition in their lives, a transition between the job they have and the job they want, so there must be great opportunities for design in this problem. We just needed to understand the people experiencing the problem better.
Principle learnings:
- Trust the human-centered design approach because your own assumptions are your worst enemy.
- You will know when you’ve made something people want when they don’t want to give it back.
- Life transitions, such as finding good work, are opportunities for great design.
The conversation with Bruce was inspiring. He helped us understand how much and how little to trust people when it comes to how they think about problems they experience. We explored how to design for the real problem and why to understand nuance and peripheral contexts. What an incredible teacher.

TL;DR
Bruce Hannah literally wrote the book on accessibility design (Access by Design, 1996), making him an ideal expert to interview about how we can make a workplace more accessible for people living with disabilities. He told us our assumptions are wrong, get out in the world and see the problem for ourselves. Listen only to the people that are experiencing the problem. Make something they want to keep for themselves.
(This article is a supplement to a series of articles to be featured on https://randrr.com/blog/ about our IDEO course, the app we prototyped, and how the process inspired us to bring Design Thinking to the randrr product design process.)
