Diversity as a source of innovation: the case for inclusive design
Ashley Walls, Microsoft & Margaret Price, Microsoft
Humans have been at the center of design practices for a long time. Although product makers and designers have always sought to understand their customers, they often miss an opportunity. This participatory workshop uncovered how exclusion is designed into experiences today and introduced inclusive methodologies available that remove barriers, increase access, and create adaptive systems for one or seven billion.
There are more than 7 billion people on the planet. How do we design something that empowers each and every one of them to achieve more?
That’s the question that Margaret Price and the Microsoft Design team set out to answer several years ago. Their solution, an inclusion-based design model, was the focus of a workshop at IxDA’s Education Summit in Lyon, France, in early February.
Inclusive design is a methodology, born out of digital environments, 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. Inclusive design is based on thinking about simultaneously designing for the personal experience and the universal experience.
“Inclusive design doesn’t mean you’re designing one thing for all people,” according to Susan Goltsman, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. “You’re designing a diversity of things so everyone finds a way to participate.”
By designing inclusively, — and creating products that are physically, cognitively, and emotionally appropriate for each of the 7.4 billion people in the world — we see human diversity as a resource for better designs.
To illuminate that point, educators dove into an activity together. Their task? Think about your favorite play activity as a child.
Why play? Play is a universal experience and takes so many personal forms. It’s also a perfect way to think about motivation, which is a key component of designing inclusively.
After sharing out their favorite play experiences — everything from swinging to playing soccer — attendees were asked to think about who might be excluded from that activity, and what solution they could design to include them.
After the activity, we shared a video about Victor Pineda, an urban planner and filmmaker with gradual muscle weakness that has put him in a wheelchair since childhood.
“Would I take a pill to make my disability go away? That’s a really hard question, because I have so much insight and such a rich life that not having this perspective would really change the way that I kind of view the world,” -Victor Pineda
Even with his wheelchair, using personalized adaptations, he hikes Machu Pichu and attends Burning Man.
His call to action for designers?
“The tools that you design really change the equation in terms of what I can contribute. Remove those obstacles and let me contribute my talents, because I want to be a part of society, I want to give everything I have, and I don’t want to sit on the sidelines. You can change that. You can change the rules of the game so the game includes me and includes my talents.”
To help accomplish just that, inclusive design is broken down into three major principles: recognize exclusion, learn from diversity, and solve for one — extend to many. Let’s take a look at what each of those means.
Recognize Exclusion
Our play activity directly emphasized this. Exclusion happens when we solve problems using our own biases. Often, designers tend to generate and evaluate ideas based on what they know — not with any malicious intent, but as a result of the environments we’re shaped by. But, if we use our own abilities as a baseline, we make things that are easy for some people to use, but difficult for everyone else.
In 1980, the World Health Organization published its first definition of disability as, “any restriction or lack of ability (resulting from impairment) to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being.”
But, in 2001, the narrative changed. Instead of a personal attribute, disability is now defined as context dependent — meaning disability happens when there is a mismatch between an individual and the world around them. “Disability is not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.”
“As designers, it’s our responsibility to know how our designs affect these interactions and create mismatches,” Margaret said.
Learn from diversity
Inclusive design puts people in the center from the very start of the process. As we saw with Victor, when experiences don’t serve people the way they should, people adapt — sometimes in incredible ways that designers never predicted. We can attempt to imagine how someone may use an experience, but that’s no replacement for connecting with people using those adaptations.
Empathy is an important part of many different forms of design. When building empathy for exclusion and disability, it’s misleading to rely only on simulating different abilities through blindfolds and earplugs. Learning how people adapt to the world around them means spending time understanding their experience from their perspective. When we do this and do it well, we recognize more than just the barriers people encounter — we also recognize the motivations that all people have in common.
Solve for one, extend to many
There are universal ways human beings experience the world. All people have motivations and build relationships. We all have abilities, and limits to those abilities. Everyone experiences exclusion as they interact with our designs. Inclusive design works across a spectrum or related abilities, connecting different people in similar circumstances.
Designing for what we call a persona spectrum extends benefits to more people. Each of us has different abilities, and different needs. How does something that was designed for one person extend to many? Take closed captions, for example. Originally created for the deaf community, closed captions are now used be people who may not have headphones but want to watch a movie on their device in a public space. Or, someone who is teaching a child to read. Solving for a range of abilities can inspire new solutions, and it’s important to realize that we all experience varying types of limitations in our daily lives.
What are the benefits of inclusive design? Of taking the time to ensure that our designs are designing for many, but also for individual users?
Increased access, reduced friction, and more emotional context are all ways that designing inclusively pays off.
The impact of inclusive design is more than just products that people use — it’s also a shift in our mindset, methods, and behaviors.
“I often find it hard to explain to people who aren’t open to [inclusive design] that it’s important. The way this workshop is run is super accessible,” Nina Lysbakken, from the University College of Southeast Norway, said. “The playground exercise and how we discussed it was very eye opening for me, and you reflect on yourself at the same time.”
Michael Lahey, a professor of interaction design at Kennesaw State University, said the workshop has inspired him to make a shift in his curriculum. “We’re working on adding an accessibility and access class, and this is going to be a great addition to that lesson.” He added, “Design for disability can be used for multiple people. Sometimes it feels crazy that we have to make a business case for this. [Inclusive design] should be a fundamental part of design.”
Sometimes it feels crazy that we have to make a business case for this. [inclusive design] should be a fundamental part of design. — Michael Lahey, Kennesaw State University professor
Find out more
IxDA Student Design Competition
Finalist’s Perspective:
From the Co-Chair:
About Margaret
Margaret focus on the intersection of technology, human insights, and, design inspiration as a Principal Design Strategist at Microsoft. Margaret has a background in philosophy — studying human nature and monitoring the cultural landscape to identify areas for creative and strategic growth. Her passion for identifying latent human needs and fueling empathy, creativity, and, experimentation has taken her to over 40 countries. Margaret is currently helping to create, evolve, and, scale the Inclusive Design practice at Microsoft. Most recently, Margaret collaborated with a series of industry experts to create a documentary about Inclusive Design and the importance of understanding, designing for, and embracing human diversity. Her strategy is featured in the Inclusive Toolkit which was recently awarded by IXDA and nominated as a FastCO World Changing Idea. Her curriculum has been taught in Universities worldwide.
