What We’re Leaving Out of the Discussion Around Inclusive Design
To truly achieve inclusiveness, we need to first look at who we’re excluding.
As you may have noticed, there’s a growing focus on inclusion in the tech industry. Specifically, there’s a rise in the use of the word “inclusion.” Companies are creating new executive roles to lead inclusion initiatives, promoting their inclusivity in marketing campaigns, and, crucially, making changes in their products to include overlooked communities.
But what does inclusion actually mean — especially when it’s so feverishly applied to broad areas of society? The word is as axiomatic as it is unspecific. I’ve wrestled with this ambiguity as director of inclusive design at Microsoft, in my own independent design practice, and while writing a book about inclusion. Inclusion is a vast promise — as immense, in fact, as human diversity — and that’s what makes it a great design challenge. But without a clear agreement on what inclusion is, can we ever hope to achieve it? How can we design for something that means so many different things to different people?
Perhaps we can’t, at least not effectively. What I have seen make a difference is a slight shift in the way we think and talk about inclusive design. To do this, we need to address that less popular…
