Inclusive Design toolkit — a modern approach to design
In today’s design world, ethics and inclusivity are essential. Teaching Inclusive Design at Politecnico di Milano since 2018 has given me valuable insights. I’m excited to share my experience and a unique toolkit that reimagines Ethical and Inclusive design with Generative AI.
Inclusive and Ethical design starts from YOU
In the ever-evolving landscape of design, fostering inclusivity and ethics has never been more critical. Since 2018, I have had the privilege of teaching Inclusive Design at the prestigious School of Design at Politecnico di Milano. In this article, I am excited to share not only my extensive experience but also a unique toolkit that has proven invaluable in both classroom settings and professional consultations.
This toolkit goes beyond the conventional, embracing the power of Generative AI, to provide a fresh perspective on Ethical and Inclusive design. Whether you are an educator looking to inspire the next generation of designers or a practitioner seeking innovative approaches to address contemporary challenges, join me on this journey as we explore the fusion of traditional wisdom and cutting-edge technology, all in the pursuit of creating a more inclusive and ethically grounded design landscape.
To instil an inclusive approach, you must navigate through three crucial stages: raising awareness, taking meaningful action, and making that change evident. While many organizations excel at raising awareness about the importance of inclusivity, all too often, the momentum grinds to a halt.
Raising awareness, though pivotal, falls short of transforming this awareness into actionable and enduring practice. Many companies and design teams find themselves at a crossroads, grappling with the question, “What now?”
There is no magic wand that can instantaneously overhaul design practices to be more ethical and inclusive, nor a one-click tool to reshape mindsets instantly.
To ensure that your organization or design teams can transition from awareness to action and tangibly demonstrate the value of inclusion, a three-step transformation is essential:
Step 1 — Inclusion starts with you recognizing and mitigating biases to view situations through diverse perspectives.
Step 2 — Capitalize the diversity within your teams, enabling every member, regardless of their physical-cognitive, cultural, or economic diversity, to contribute their unique value.
Step 3 — Recognize diversity and overcome barriers, nurturing heightened sensitivity to identify instances of exclusion.
Throughout my Inclusive Design course, I’ve curated a collection of exercises, rituals, and tools specifically designed to accompany you on this three-step journey, enhancing your abilities and nurturing new skills along the way.
The four skills of a “modern” designer
In the modern design landscape, the pursuit of ethics and inclusivity isn’t just an option — it’s mandatory.
It requires developing and honing four indispensable skills:
- Expanding your Worldview
- Unlearning
- Training Perspective and Systemic Thinking
- Empathizing with Diversity
Let’s delve into each one.
Expanding your Worldview: Seeing the world through different lenses transforms us, helping us see situations clearly and reduce unconscious biases. Expanding perspectives enhances our awareness of the complex factors shaping our design choices.
Unlearning: Change starts with unlearning: shedding old ideas, reevaluating practices, and forging innovative, unbiased paths.
Training Perspective and Systemic Thinking: To design ethically and inclusively, we need perspective and systemic thinking to foresee and mitigate unintended consequences in interconnected systems
Empathizing with Diversity: Empathy goes beyond stereotypes, embracing diverse experiences including cultural and economic aspects. It helps create designs that genuinely include a wide range of people.
As we embark on this journey to cultivate these four critical skills, we take the first steps towards becoming designers who not only create aesthetically pleasing products but also shape a world that is more ethically conscious, empathetic, and inclusive. Together, these skills form the foundation upon which our design practice can thrive, leaving a lasting impact on society.
The Importance of Unlearning
In the pursuit of ethical and inclusive design, the path often leads us toward unlearning rather than acquiring new knowledge.
This concept is far from novel; it finds its roots in the Bauhaus culture, where approaching topics without preconceived notions and the influence of prior knowledge was a guiding principle. Unlearning is our key to innovation, a process through which we dismantle ingrained biases, ensuring they don’t cast a shadow on our decisions and design solutions.
Our ability to question our established methods is the linchpin of innovation and bias reduction. It prevents our past experiences from acting as mirrors that merely reflect our previous choices. For anyone vested with decision-making responsibilities and entrusted with designing solutions, the practice of unlearning should be woven into the fabric of their work. In every project, time should be allocated to explore fresh approaches to familiar tasks.
All too often, we resort to autopilot mode, opting for the familiar and conservative path to save time. However, a more profound transformation can occur when we learn to engage in dialogue with uncertainty, forging unexpected connections and venturing into uncharted territory. This practice fortifies our ability to perform at our best without relying on pre-established protocols, allowing us to engage with the unforeseen, sometimes in real-time, akin to the improvisation of jazz musicians.
Unlearning becomes our compass, guiding us toward a more ethical, inclusive, and innovative design journey.
The Toolkit Components
In essence, the Inclusive Design Toolkit equips designers with the skills and tools needed to navigate the complexities of modern design, fostering inclusivity and ethical practices while promoting innovative solutions that benefit a diverse society.
This toolkit empowers designers and organizations to:
- systematically reduce biases
- establish inclusive workflows within their teams
- sharpen their ability to identify exclusionary practices
by utilising 8 main tools to develop 4 skills during the design process.
Let’s explore every single skill and tool in more detail.
Skill no. 1 — Expanding Your Worldview
To broaden one’s worldview, the toolkit offers exercises such as the “7 Lenses Exercise”. This exercise helps designers confront their biases, which can inadvertently seep into their solutions, potentially causing exclusion. By conducting this exercise at the outset of the design process, designers can mitigate blind spots during decision-making.
“Inclusive Rituals” serve to capitalize on the diversity within design teams, allowing every team member to contribute equitably, regardless of physical, cognitive, cultural, or economic differences. These rituals and tools foster an environment where the full power of diversity can be harnessed while minimizing blind spots.
Skill no. 2 — Unlearning
Unlearning is facilitated through exercises like “Connecting Dots”, a tool that trains designers to forge unexpected connections between disparate topics, paving the way for innovative pathways and solutions. This exercise is particularly useful in the early stages of research to stimulate creativity.
“Unbiased User Research” offers a set of nine rules to guide researchers in minimizing biases during user research, ensuring a more objective perspective.
“Improvisation” injects unpredictability into the design process, offering an outside-in viewpoint during ideation. This technique can be applied both in the early stages to test initial ideas and later to uncover unexpected usage patterns by end-users.
Skill no. 3 — Training Perspective and Systemic View
The toolkit includes exercises like the “Responsibility Diamond”, a tool that evaluates ideas by visualizing their impact on individuals, society, and the environment over time, fostering a systemic view of design decisions.
Skill no. 4 — Empathize with Diversity
The “Diversity Map” trains designers to identify disparities between people’s abilities and the context in which their solutions reside, heightening sensitivity to exclusion.
The support from generative AI
In the toolkit, we employ eight different tools grouped under four pivotal skills to nurture a more inclusive approach to design. While every tool holds its unique value, six of them are more design-process oriented, where AI can significantly amplify the insights and inputs, providing a richer, more expansive outlook. Conversely, “7 Lenses” and “Inclusive Rituals” are crafted for group sessions, leveraging human interaction over AI intervention, and therefore remain untouched by AI intervention, to ensure a balanced approach between technology and personal touch.
AI-augment for the skill: Expanding your world’s view
When it comes to broadening one’s worldview, AI acts as a catalyst, aiding in the exploration of untrodden paths and untapped potential. For instance, the “Validation Workshop” tool leverages AI to scrutinize design concepts from three different angles: improving, destroying, and saving the concept, thereby guiding designers to refine their creations adeptly.
AI-augment for the skill: Unlearning
In the realm of unlearning, AI functions as a compass, guiding designers to navigate beyond their inherent biases. For example, within the “Connecting the Dots” tool, Gen-AI gathers inspirations for designs from diverse fields such as industry, nature, and arts, further generating ideas grounded in these inspirations to offer a fresh perspective on design challenges.
AI-augment for the skill: Training perspective view
AI shines as a discerning mentor in “Training Perspective View,” aiding designers in the scrupulous assessment of their design concepts. The “Responsibility Diamond” tool is pivotal here; it takes the concept through an evaluation across five dimensions — viability, desirability, feasibility, sustainability, and social responsibility — and offers comprehensive feedback, ensuring a responsible and balanced design output.
AI-augment for the skill: Empathize with diversity
In nurturing the skill to “Empathize with Diversity,” AI turns into a skilled analyst, enabling designers to walk a mile in others’ shoes more effectively. The “Diversity Map” tool stands as a testament to this, where AI interprets personas deeply to find potential scenarios and mismatches, hence guiding designers to craft solutions that resonate with the persona in different situations.
Supporting human creativity with Generative AI, this toolkit could be a small yet significant step in ushering in a modern approach to inclusive design.
This blend of technology and humanity helps designers leverage AI to navigate through complex landscapes with a more understanding and empathetic lens, nurturing a fertile ground where inclusivity is not just a goal, but a natural outcome.
Conclusion
By embedding inclusivity as a non-negotiable cornerstone, we foster a modern approach to design that prioritizes ethics and innovation, creating solutions capable of dialogue fluently with the present and the future of our society and planet.
Mastering four crucial skills — Expanding Worldview, Unlearning, Training Perspective and Systemic Thinking, and Recognising Exclusion — is essential in today’s design landscape.
We have experimented with the support of Gen AI as an accomplice, not as an enemy, to amplify and augment human creativity.
The creation of rituals and tools is paramount in developing new skills. This is precisely why we have developed the toolkit — to enable individuals to craft a more modern, inclusive, and ethical design perspective.
By fostering these practices, we empower people to cultivate the best versions of themselves as designers, driving positive change and innovation in the design landscape.
Discover the Inclusive Design toolkit here.
We encourage you to explore, experiment, share suggestions, and connect with us to shape a modern approach to design collaboratively.
Credits:
Antonio Grillo — Inclusive Design professor at The School of Design at Politecnico di Milano and Executive Design Director at Tangity an NTT DATA design studio, author of the toolkit.
Jinlong Garon (余金龙) Yu — assistant professor 23/24, co-author of the toolkit, Generative AI expert and Designer at Tangity an NTT DATA design studio.
Akanksha Gupta— former assistant professor, co-author of the toolkit and former Senior UX and Service Designer at Tangity an NTT DATA design studio.
