Four Reasons Why Ability Matters For The Future Of Your Organization
- Ability is about fueling human potential
Ability is about human potential. And understanding that potential is pivotal to culture — and your business.
Fifty years ago, runner Kathrine Switzer entered the Boston Marathon with the gender-defying registration, KV Switzer. Back in 1967, women weren’t thought of being physically capable of running — much less a marathon — in a sport exclusively reserved for men. In an infamous capture, a race official attempted to tear off Switzer’s bib number 261 mid-race. It would be another five years before women were allowed to compete in the marathon. Switzer’s famous strides paved the way for generations of women runners. Since 1990, 9.75 million female runners have completed running events in the US. And all because one woman changed the perception of what ‘ability’ meant in the sport.
Culture’s perception of ability is evolving by the day. This spring, 18-year-old Arizona high school senior Becca Longo became the first female high schooler to get a full Division II football scholarship. And on our TVs, Sesame Street introduced its first character who has autism, with a red-headed muppet called Julia. From our preschool years to our senior years, the one certainty in life is that our abilities change over time. YouTube’s Mandeville Sisters playfully address what life is like when you only have one hand to their 100K and then some viewers. And 83-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s daily workout routine that’s tough enough to defy the regime of most millennials.
All of the above (and so many more) examples nod to bringing people who have long been on the periphery into the forefront of culture. Ignoring it could be costly — to your brand. On one end of the ability spectrum, people with disabilities have $220 billion dollars in discretionary income. “And they are still virtually ignored,” said Danielle Sheypuk, disability activist and model.
You may not even be aware of it, but we’ve been morphing, tweaking and designing for enhanced abilities for some time, whether it’s infused in our bodies with pacemakers, contact lenses, or tech tattoos.
Led by the force of technology, we’re shifting our idea of human potential. Morphing our bodies can enhance our well-being or even help a runner perform faster in prosthetics. Ability is a constantly reverberating tide across culture that affects all of us. And it will lead to a future of the super-abled.
But is your brand or business ready to embrace a super-abled world?
2. Inclusion magnifies the perception of your industry
The ability spectrum is pervasive across the aesthetic world, in art, fashion and media, by boldly owning and presenting who you are, or the trend of Unapologetic. It’s the aesthetics of ability that is carving out a path for other industries, starting with the fashion world. Fashion and art are materializing to represent people of all abilities, from young to senior, and across life circumstances. This distinctly unapologetic and inclusive vibe is influencing what everyone wears, or wants to wear.
But how is your brand aspiring to cater to the needs of people with all abilities? Take a few cues from fashion.
This season, four times as many models aged 50 and over worked the runways of New York Fashion Week’s Fall 2017 shows, compared to the previous season, according to theFashionSpot Runway Diversity Report Fall 2017. Gracing the Simone Rocha show, 72-year-old Jan de Villeneuve was one of them. Inclusivity is permeating everything from the faces of fashion to the clothes we wear. Online, Everlane’s 100% Human collection sends a ‘brand as activist’ message that flattens divides between genders, races or abilities.
From the casual to the high end, we use fashion to cover or accentuate the parts of ourselves we want to expose to the world. Increasingly, people are using their bodies as a canvas for self-expression, whether it’s by accentuating a freckled face or adorning the hidden. Fashion trainer Michael Olajide, Jr., who is blind in one eye, wears dramatic eye patches of steampunk metal, creating a maximalist vision of his lack of vision.
In design, innovations in texture design are helping to bridge the emotional connection between garment and wearer. German fashion designer Babette Sperling created a clothing collection that incorporates braille notes, using 3D printing technology. Each item contains a hidden message embedded in the piece, adding a layer of extrasensory intrigue and emotion.
Beyond emotions, what we wear can build on our physical abilities, too. Smart shirts such as the Polar Team Pro Shirt, introduced at CES this year, are set to compete against performance-enhancing wearables that you might attach to your wrist or track on your phone. This smart running shirt is embedded with fabric sensors that can monitor your heart rate, track your motion, speed, distance run and just how fast you did it all.
What may be a fashion statement for some is a therapeutic companion or performance builder for others. These ability-enhancing items could be hanging in your closet.
Now, ask yourself, what ability-enhancing products or service could your brand have in its closet?
3. Design for everyone is a self-service to your brand
Creating a world where people of all abilities are embraced starts with designing services and spaces that emphasize the human in all of us. Such inclusive design is about putting the person at the center of everything, whether it’s the utensils you eat with, your mode of transport or the spaces you move through. From the homefront to the workplace and beyond, the lives of people across the ability spectrum — and that’s all of us — can be enhanced with creative design solutions.
Wellness design responds to urbanization
Such wellness design is about a future that hinges on a united vision of people living in ever-closer proximity to one another. By 2050, the UN estimates that 66% of the world’s population will live in cities. Increasingly, many of those residents will be in megacities, defined as urban centers with more than 15 million people. Such tightly knit quarters will not only mean we might get to know our neighbors, but it also challenges our urban and experience designs, as we build up into new air spaces (even to the moon), or under water.
Inclusive design can give a voice to the intangible. In the UK, a wellness design campaign by Transport for London (TfL) created blue badges you can wear on your lapel on the city’s public transportation. These “please offer me a seat” badges are worn by passengers who have conditions that are not immediately visible.
In Scotland, Tesco grocery introduced an extra-slow checkout lane, the relaxed lane, where people can take their time getting through the mundane task of buying food. Many people, some who may have dementia or social anxiety, can find such tasks daunting. But Tesco wanted to take that added stress out of their day with their simple, user experience driven checkout design. The staff manning the checkout are especially trained to help people of all abilities, and speeds.
Designed for our altered human behaviors
Urban design is responding to our behaviors and abilities, which are rapidly changing thanks to our keen attachments to tech. Every minute spent hunched over a screen adds up, and eventually our bodies either adapt or develop what we call technomaladies, or physical ailments that result from using too much technology. Teens are developing pains previously seen only in the older population, such as a stiff neck, known as text neck.
The changing way we move through spaces is gradually being reflected in our environments. In the London underground, there’s a Direct Lane for pedestrians who have places to get to, quickly. It supports walkers who move at speeds of at least three miles per hour. The other lane is reserved for the texters, YouTube viewers or other casual strollers. In Germany, the streets are evolving to our lower-gaze eye levels. The cities of Augsburg and Cologne were concerned with the growing number of people glued to their devices, who were ignoring red lights. To help, they installed traffic lights — on the sidewalk.
Relax, it’s green
The more connected we are, the more we’ll need to recharge with greenery to enhance our abilities, both cognitive and physical. In any environment we move through, inside our outside, we’re looking for quick fixes to digitally detox. In Japan, that comes with the practice of forest bathing, or simply being in the presence of trees, which is said to lower blood pressure, reduce stress hormones and overall, fuel the ‘bather’ in feel-good vibes.
Nature is the next aspiration — and now clever brands and businesses are bringing it indoors.
It’s no wonder the 2017 Pantone color is a shade of green, Verdant. The hue reflects our desire for green life in the spaces we occupy. We’re seeking completely immersive experiences in nature brought directly to us. To serve that need, Pantone has partnered with Airbnb to fill a home with plants and projects to match its shade. There, you can (temporarily) live in a tropical-themed bathroom or a bedroom with a lawn.
Work spaces are also catching on to the cognitive and ability-enhancing benefits of greenery. Integrating nature views into the workplace has wellness benefits that translate to savings: a business can save over $2,000 per employee annually in office costs.
You may invest in a few more plants for your collective working space, but how are you fueling the well-being of your organization?
4. Keep up with the super-abled to prepare for the future
The future is happening faster than we mere mortals can comprehend. The speed of technological development can quickly leave us trying to catch up, but ironically, technology is working hard and fast to bridge this gap. The question is, are you augmenting your business abilities to understand people better?
Ping Fu, a futurist and 3D pioneer, said, “Technology should disappear. What we should focus on is how to live better and enjoy our lives.”
Tap into the emotion market
To drive that vision of a future, technology is helping us understand nuanced emotion better, which can be a lifeline for those who may struggle to read other’s expressions and emotions. MIT’s empathy-building app is a wearable that allows you to detect emotion in conversation. Every five seconds, its neural networks analyze a person’s speech and vital signs to detect conversation emotion such as “happy” or “sad” in tone.
The perhaps unnerving ability of other people to read or interpret our moods or thoughts might be an anxiety-fueling prospect, but less so if we feel in control and understood by our environment and the people in it. When we enter a home, the lights may respond to your presence by turning on, but they could do much more. “An Internet of Things mesh network that makes up a home or office could offer much more to a user if it understood their feelings,” said Dr. Vivienne Ming. “Commoditizing (our emotions) isn’t all bad, if I’m an informed participant in that ‘emotion market,’” said neuroscientist and technologist Dr. Vivienne Ming, who is a co-founder of Socos. Instead of a tech-focused environment where our machines communicate with us, we communicate with them.
Get ready for new cohorts of humans
On the spectrum of ability, morphing, tweaking or adding to your body can give you abilities previously unimaginable, or super-ability.
With it, the line between robot and human is blurring by the day. After all, you can brand yourself with a tech tattoo that automatically orders your favorite pizza (if you really, really like Pizza Hut), or swallow a wireless thermometer like the e-Celsius by BodyCap, designed to monitor your core temperature–from the inside out. And a biomimetic artificial skin layer is a material that can sense change in temperature with more sensitivity than actual human skin. Developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the material could be seen as a kind of super sense, more sophisticated than its human-only inspiration.
Super-ability for athletes participating in the world’s first Cybathlon, a sporting competition designed for people with severe physical disabilities, ‘bionic’ could mean winning in the Powered Exoskeleton Race. You may have to wait to see until the next Cybathlon in 2020, however.
Every minute of the day, we’re already quantifying everything, from the steps we take (or don’t take) to our sleep patterns. Brainwave-altering headsets can help us perform or focus better in athletics or other high-pressure situations. Or, we are increasingly able to outperform, or simply perform, by adding robotic limbs to our bodies.
“This evolution is going to lead to the collision of biological and synthetic technology and hardware,” said Dr. Andy Walshe, human potential hacker and Information Sciences & Technology DARPA advisor. “This will manifest in another generation of humans and I see the community of people with disabilities as one area where many of these ideas and concepts are going to be pioneered.”
We’re already speeding towards the future, and living in it through our ever-closer connections with technology. Are you ready to keep up with the super-abled?
Find out more about your future with “The Economics of Ability,” a Culture Forecast by sparks & honey.
