Being more inclusive in your practice
Super-short video for researchers and designers wanting to be more inclusive in their practice
Audree Fletcher knows a bit or two about inclusion.
She even wrote a book about one aspect. Celebrating women who’ve influenced her for International Women’s Day 2019
She has kindly prepared a softly toned, but challenging message in the form of a video for us to learn from. Alongside a great set of resources.
Take it away Audree.
I’ve created a short video for researchers and designers who want to start being more inclusive in their practice. These are people who can see why inclusive design is necessary, and who are starting to become increasingly comfortable reflecting on privilege and power in principle, but aren’t sure how or with whom to start putting it into practice.
For those of you who aren’t yet comfortable with the messages, remember that to those accustomed to privilege, equality (and equity) feels like oppression.
Watch it, sit with the discomfort and reflect on that if you can.
Otherwise feel free to come back when you’re ready later on your journey.
ALT-TEXT FOR THE 3 IMAGES IN THE VIDEO
There is an image clip 6 seconds in. It’s an image made up of two frames, each showing three people of different heights, looking over a fence to watch a baseball game. In the first of the two frames — labelled “equality” — where the three people each has a crate to stand on. The tallest person (in yellow trousers) has a completely unobstructed view, the middle-height person is straining to see over the top of the fence, and the shortest person cannot see the game at all. In the second frame, the crates have been redistributed fairly (not equally) so that all three people have an unobstructed view of the game. This is making a point about an equitable distribution not being the same as an equal one. At 10 seconds in, an additional frame is added, labelled “reality”, with the tallest person having more crates than they could possibly need, and the shortest person with none.
This is making a point about the reality of distribution of opportunity in our current society. At 3:13, I provide an image of a long list of some of the stickiest challenges and injustices that society is fighting at the moment. It reads: affordable housing, ageing population, asylum seeking, bullying, chemical dependency, child slavery, childhood obesity, civil rights, clean water, corruption, county lines, criminal justice, discrimination, domestic abuse, drug-related incarceration, environmental crises, female genital mutilation, food deserts, gang crime, hate speech, healthcare inequalities, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, human rights, hunger, immigration, indentured servitude, infectious diseases, LGBTQ+ rights, loneliness, literacy, mental health, physical disability, predatory lending, PTSD, poverty, public health crises, racism, recidivism, refugees, religious intolerance, reproductive health, segregation, sex trafficking, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, suicide, systemic racism, torture, truancy, unemployment, unplanned parenthood, wage inequality, workers rights.
LINKS FOR FURTHER READING ON PARTICIPATIVE CODESIGN AND DESIGN JUSTICE
- Beyond Sticky Notes (www.beyondstickynotes.com) by KA McKercher
- A Designer’s Critical Alphabet (https://www.etsy.com/listing/72509484...) by Lesley Ann Noel
- Equity-Centered Community Design (https://www.creativereactionlab.com/o...) by Creative Reaction Lab Guidebook to shift unequal power dynamics in participatory design practice (http://www.maymoon-design.com/partici...) by Hajira Qazi
- An Incomplete List of Resources for the Equity-Centered Designer (https://medium.com/equal-space/an-inc...) by Isabelle Yisak
- Co-design and power (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5N1S...) with Dana Shen
- Working with Care: A Co-Production Approach to Approach to Partnering with Young People Experiencing Homelessness (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/morgan...) by Morgan Lee Cataldo
- No more throwaway people: The Co-production Imperative (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...) by Edgar S. Cahn
- From the technical to the political: democratizing design thinking (http://contested-cities.net/working-p...) by Brooke Staton, Julia Kramer, Pierce Cornelius Otlhogile-Gordon and Lauren Valdez Disability Visibility (https://disabilityvisibilityproject.c...) edited by Alice Wong
- Every Space is Political (https://dscout.com/people-nerds/sarah...) with Sarah Fathallah Research justice : methodologies for social change (https://www.worldcat.org/title/resear...) by Andrew J. Jolivétte
You can lean more about Audree at http://www.audreefletcher.co.uk/
