Designing a more Just World
OM’s Inclusive Design Journey
In July of this year, I had the opportunity to join the Women in Leadership & Design initiative at AIGA San Francisco to share my thoughts on OM’s journey toward a more inclusive approach to design. Our efforts are possible because of the many activists, scholars, and advocates who have dedicated their efforts to advancing equity, access, and inclusion in the design field and beyond. Their contributions have paved the way for a more compassionate world and provide the foundation that we’re building on today.
“1 in 6 people in the world experience significant disability.” — World Health Organization
1 in 6 people in the world experience significant disability. This makes disabled people the largest minority on the planet. [WHO] These are not just numbers, but real people whose voices often go unheard.
Yet, when we look around us as product designers and people working in the field of design, we see a world where products and experiences are designed for an unspoken majority. This approach excludes and marginalizes a huge number of people. Over time, this precedent has led to a world that is inaccessible and often harmful for many.
Today, as a design community, we confront this reality head-on. We have a responsibility to challenge the status quo, take down barriers, and pave the way for a more inclusive design landscape. In sharing our studio’s wins, challenges, and aspirations, we hope to inspire others to take action within their own practices and organizations.
Inclusive design is a toolkit for creating a more just world.
At OM, we’ve seen the transformative power of inclusive design firsthand. We’ve seen that it’s not just a buzzword — it’s a necessary and urgent paradigm shift. Inclusive design asks us to reimagine the way we approach design and to commit to creating experiences that reflect the needs and values of everyone. Inclusive design is a toolkit for creating a more just world.
The catalyst for change within our studio started following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. We launched a comprehensive effort to examine the internal practices and to increase the fairness, consistency, and transparency of our policies and systems. Over the course of two years, we overhauled our hiring process, created a more structured employee onboarding program, launched training to mitigate bias and promote inclusive behavior, developed a more structured job ladder with pay transparency, and rolled out a more formal process for performance reviews and professional goal setting.
This is the moment where we first took a stance, made a commitment, and made substantive changes within our organization. But the work isn’t finished. It will continue as we strive to continually improve.
“We are dedicated to creating a world that is accessible and beneficial to all by using design as a tool for bettering people’s lives.”— OM’s Just Cause
After focusing on our internal practices, we identified the need for a rallying cry — something that everyone at OM could get behind. Likewise, we needed a way to apply our values to how we shape the world, through design. In response to these needs, we developed what we call our “just cause” as a tool to align the studio to a specific vision of the future that motivates us.
As a mission statement, it proved useful right away. In our hiring process, it helped us to shape interview questions, which ensured that every person joining the team was excited by our studio’s vision.
With everyone in alignment, we began to consider how we could extend our influence and drive broader industry-wide transformation to live up to our newfound mission. This prompted us to look at our relationships with clients and ask: ‘How might we leverage our position as an agency to make change on a larger scale?’ We recognized the potential of our design practices to serve as a vector for our values.
“Once we aligned on a common vision, we had to figure out what to actually do on a daily basis to make a difference.” — Rob Young, Co-founder and CEO, OM
At this point in our journey, we had a huge, aspirational statement to live up to. Rob Young, co-founder and CEO of OM sums up the weight of the moment: “Once we aligned on a common vision, we had to figure out what to actually do on a daily basis to make a difference.”
Our answer was the Inclusive Design Council. This task force brings together folks across roles and levels at OM to drive the transformation of our design practices. To really make change, we needed dedicated resources and accountability. In this case, we had a designer devoted full-time to the effort, another designer helping part-time, a dedicated project manager, and an executive sponsor.
Even with resources in place, it’s daunting to stand at the edge of change and not have a blueprint for how to move forward. That’s where we turned to our design process, beginning as we would any design engagement — with a discovery period to gather input and information, and to align around goals and needs. During this period, we sent out surveys to gather input from the studio team, held workshops to brainstorm opportunities, and conducted interviews to understand how project teams were currently thinking of inclusion and accessibility. At the end of this process, we had a roadmap for how to continue our work.
“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.” — Microsoft Inclusive Design definition
Above all else, the findings from our discovery period pointed to the need to align around an understanding of what we mean when we talk about “inclusive design”. In our research, we found many useful definitions of inclusive design that already exist. One that we reference regularly is from Microsoft: “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.” One key part of this definition that factors into our work is including people into our design process who can speak to a diverse set of needs.
Universally in the definitions we encountered, we saw inclusive design framed as a methodology, an approach, or a set of processes. This inspired us to focus on creating a framework for supporting action that builds upon existing definitions, which we could apply directly to our work.
Not knowing what shape our action framework would take, we held a series of studio-wide workshops to tease out the concepts on which we wanted to anchor our next steps. We used our just cause as a starting place and discussed the meaning behind its words. What do “accessible and beneficial” really mean for digital experiences? How do we practically “use design as a tool for bettering people’s lives”?
Through this process, we landed on a set of core elements to be used together as a guide for practicing inclusive design. This forms not only our core understanding of inclusive design, but also provides a set of instructions for how to enact it:
- Our just cause is our specific vision for how the world ideally should be.
- To that we add an intention statement that lays out the problems we see in the world and declares our intention to make change. It provides both the context and strategy for achieving our just cause.
“Products are often designed with an unspoken majority in mind, resulting in user experiences that don’t reflect the values, beliefs, and needs of everyone. This precedent has led to products and experiences that are inaccessible and harmful for historically excluded communities.
We design digital products and experiences that are useful, accessible, and affirming. This means identifying potential areas of exclusion, collaborating with historically excluded communities, and finding solutions that eliminate barriers to create a more just world.” — OM’s Intention Statement
We also developed a set of principles that provide practical considerations to guide our actions towards our ideal state. Through a series of conversations, brainstorms, and exercises, we distilled these principles down into five key strategies:
Principle 1: Center excluded communities. Amplify historically excluded voices and respect the nuances of people’s needs.
This principle reflects the imperative to include real people in the design process who can speak to their individual needs. It moves us away from a generalizing approach, away from the idea of designing for an imagined “average” user, and away from the search for a single universal solution. We must always start with people who have been the most excluded historically and create specific solutions with them. By “solving for one and extending to many” we can generate a diversity of solutions that work for a broad range of people.
Principle 2: Honor people’s agency. We aim to design flexible and transparent experiences that empower people.
This principle is about creating experiences that put the power in users’ hands. By providing options, we give people the tools to tailor solutions to their own requirements. By providing transparency, we share the information people need to make informed choices.
Principle 3: Innovate with intention. Interrogate existing conventions to innovate responsibly.
This principle prompts us to ask “why.” Interrogating the motivations behind change help us understand who it serves and who it might not serve, so that we can see, understand, and address exclusions.
Principle 4: Take responsibility. We are accountable for the real world consequences of what we design.
It’s inevitable that there will be times when our actions don’t lead to the outcomes we intend. Our framework needs to support failure and give us a way to recover from mistakes so that we can remain resilient, even through sometimes difficult work. We will be able to continue moving forward by taking responsibility for our actions and holding ourselves accountable to outcomes we create.
Principle 5: Set a new standard. Start with accessibility and create experiences that affirm people.
Accessibility is the standard. It is a requirement. In fact, it’s also the law. Despite this, accessibility considerations are often thought of as nice-to-have. We believe the bar can be pushed so much further. How do we go above and beyond that? How do we make it exciting? How do we make it joyful?
“Everyone wants to learn and feel more confident and comfortable, not only in their own understanding of what inclusive design means, but also being able to advocate for it with clients.” — Kristin Waites, Senior Project Manager, OM
Returning to our inclusive design journey, we now had a solid foundation in place. The Council had been highly effective at driving progress. At the same time, we began to see the potential risks of keeping our efforts siloed to a small working group. A pulse check survey of the team revealed that many still felt unsure about how to put the inclusive principles into action. For our inclusive design transformation to be successful, we needed everyone to feel empowered to act.
Kristin Waites, the PM driving the Council notes that, “Everyone wants to learn and feel more confident and comfortable, not only in their own understanding of what inclusive design means, but also being able to advocate for it with clients.”
In response, we used education to bring the team together around inclusive design. The goal was to help us all feel equipped with the context and insight needed to practice inclusive design. Our reading list began with Kat Holme’s Mismatched, which we read together in a studio-wide book club. Mismatched informed our principles heavily and today is a part of our welcome package for new employees.
We also launched a monthly study hall to discuss material related to inclusive design. We took part of Microsoft’s Accessibility Fundamentals course together, read about the mission of Project Inkblot, a collective innovating methods for inclusive co-designing, watched a talk from Treyce Meredith, a product designer focused on designing for neurodiversity, and toured Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab with Bryce Johnson. We attended AxeCon, a digital accessibility conference, and pooled our learnings into a shared Figma file.
“We gotta time box this and just take a step forward. The debate will be endless on what to do next, especially in a room full of designers.” — Mika Albornoz, Senior Product Designer, OM
In short, we turned our words into actions. Everyone at the studio was empowered with inclusive design fundamentals and equipped to understand the core concepts of inclusive design. Even though there was still trepidation, we understood that the work would never be done to continue to learn and evolve, so we needed to start implementing our ideas in a tangible way.
We conducted an audit of our practices to identify specific opportunities to apply our principles as a start. We framed this period as one of experimentation to free the team up to try new things and see what worked. So far, we’ve had sprints to update our research practices and our project kickoff process. This is work that will continue as we incrementally make progress, push the bar further, and set new standards for accessible and inclusive interfaces. We’re calling this next leg of the journey “Maintain and Evolve.”
One year into our dedicated inclusive design efforts, we are considering the impact of turning our values into actions. Certainly, we now approach projects with accessibility and inclusion at the forefront of our process. We are leading with our values from the first conversation with our partners and we have only encountered positive reception to our approach so far. With credit to our partners, we’ve seen a strong desire across most of the companies we’ve worked with to foreground and commit to more inclusive practices. Though it’s hard to quantify, perhaps this reception can be attributed to a broader sea change in our industry to set a new standard where inclusive design is the norm.
We have truly undergone a fundamental transformation from more equitable internal practices, to a new mission, to a new set of standards for practicing design. Making this change happen together as a group has been profound. It’s shown us that evolving is possible and it gives us a model for how to reinvent the structures and systems around us.
“We have to be brave as designers, and as an industry. It’s being brave and leaning forward that’s going to create change.” — Mika Albornoz, Senior Product Designer, OM
The time for action is now.
As designers, innovators, and change-makers, we have the power to challenge norms and create a world where everyone belongs. Let’s devote our efforts and resources to enhancing social inclusion, building vibrant, cohesive, safe, productive, and dynamic societies. If you have a project collaboration you’d like to talk about, or if you want to learn more about our work on inclusive design, feel free to drop us a note. Together, we can harness the force of design to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
