How To Design For Everyone, In 3
Steps
First? Ignore the average user–they don’t exist.
Inclusive design is officially a buzzword,
with companies like Airbnb releasing an inclusion toolkit and Microsoft attempting to use its principles to make
better products. But the idea behind that buzzword–that
designing for a wider variety of people makes more effective products for
everyone–is still far from mainstream. At a panel at the Cooper Hewitt design
museum in New York, four designers working on the front lines of the
fight to make products, services, and spaces more accessible shared why
inclusive design should be the primary way of thinking about design–regardless
of who the end user is.
The World Health Organization defines disability in part
as a mismatch between the features of a person and the features of the environment
in which they live. While you can’t necessarily give a blind person sight or
make an old person young again, you can adapt their
environments so that that mismatch is less pronounced–or doesn’t exist at all.
This is where inclusive design comes in.
The panelists, many of whom have physical and
psychological disabilities themselves, advocated for a more universal way of
thinking about design. Some of the design principles they shared were hidden in
the most ordinary places, like in eyeglasses, or in airplane cockpits. Others
could be found in the most mundane behaviors, like tying your shoes or brushing
your teeth. Here’s what those simple, universal objects and experiences can
teach us about inclusive design.
FORM IS JUST AS VALUABLE AS
FUNCTION
We don’t think of glasses as medical assistive devices, but that’s what they were–at least until the 1960s or so, when
designers got their hands on them. Through the force of design, glasses become
instruments of self-expression rather than stigmatized objects that connote
that the wearer is different.
Many of today’s assistive devices look as
medical, hard, and uninviting as the eyeglasses of centuries past. The
emotional impact of these devices can be the difference between the user
feeling empowered or feeling ashamed. That’s according to the designer Keira Gwynn. “Aesthetics have become just as important as
function itself,” she said.
Take hearing aids, for example. Many of them
are flesh-colored so they’re less obvious to onlookers. During her talk,
designer, lawyer, and advocate Elise Roy spoke about how she always wore a
beige hearing aid when she was younger because she wanted to appear as though
she was just your average kid. But now she opts for bright colors like red and
neon green. “I’ve come to realize is that different is the new normal,” she
says. “Different, even if it seems like a limitation, is what makes us thrive,
what makes us valuable.”
Products–particularly products that are
targeted at disabled people–need not look particularly medical, nor should they
necessarily “blend in.” Giving people an array of choice that allows them to
wear something that expresses their personality is a vital element of inclusive
design.
DESIGN FOR THE EXTREME USER–AND
MAKE THE AVERAGE USER SUPERHUMAN
It’s a myth deeply ingrained in our society
that there’s an average or “normal” person. The idea dates back to the 1800s,
when the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet attempted to find the numerical
average for a host of body measurements, like the
chest circumference of soldiers, as well as the average stature, the average
weight, the average age of marriage, and even the average of death for humans.
This attempt to calculate how an ideal human looks and acts ended up codified
in design as the “average user.”
Except that Quetelet’s theory, which was
aimed at bringing order to human society and creating a metric against which
each individual can be measured, doesn’t work. Roy illustrated why using an
example from the 1940s, when U.S. Air Force fighter jet cockpits were
typically designed to fit the “average”
man. Yet pilots commonly lost control of their
planes, leading to frequent plane crashes. In an attempt to find out if the
design of the cockpits had something to do with the crashes, researchers took
the measurements of just over 4,000 pilots–and found that not a single one fit
within the average measurements for the entire group. The planes were
redesigned to fit the extremes instead, and the crashes stopped.
“In design, again and again, we see that
looking to the average does not produce cutting-edge innovations,” Roy said.
“Instead we should be looking to extremes. What gets forgotten is that people
with disabilities are great examples of extreme users. We experience the world
in such a different way. They are a gold mine for helping us to think
differently.”
For Kat Holmes, the founder of a firm that helps companies
build equitable digital experiences (and who formerly led inclusive design at
Microsoft), the illusion of the average user is one of designers’ biggest
biases. “There’s this myth that endures to this day that shows up in design and
engineering: the 80/20 rule. You design for the middle of that curve, and we’ll
get to the 20% later,” she says. “What if there was no such thing as a normal
human being? If there’s no normal, there’s no edge cases–just diverse people
changing from one moment to the next.”
So what happens if you do design for the
extreme user? Even people who are abled become superhuman. “We are learning how
to create ability in the absence of natural human ability,” Roy says. “The
typewriter, audiobooks, the remote control were originally designed for people
with disabilities, but they’re loved by everyone because they created the
super-abilities we all want.”
Who doesn’t want to change the channel
without leaving the couch, or read and drive at the same time?
INCLUSIVE DESIGN GIVES PEOPLE
INDEPENDENCE
When she was working for the famed product
designer Raymond Loewy, the designer Patricia Moore saw her grandparents unable
to do the things they needed to do, like dressing themselves, brushing their
teeth, or opening the refrigerator door. “There was nothing wrong with my
grandma,” Moore says. “She wasn’t broken. But the tools we gave her were
inadequate.”
Her statement perfectly captures that
mismatch between someone’s ability and their environment. While her coworkers
thought her outrage over the issue was unworthy of their time and attention,
Loewy, who was in his 80s at the time, thought differently–and pushed Moore
toward the field that has become her specialty.
Moore, a renowned gerontologist and designer
who has spent years traveling around the U.S. disguised as an 80-year-old woman
to understand the challenges that elderly people face, believes that inclusive
design is first and foremost about giving people independence. That’s something
we all crave, from the early moment in your life when your mother is tying your
shoe and you yearn to do it yourself, to the moment decades later when you
struggle to put on your shoes and wish you didn’t need to ask for help. “What
all of us know and wish and hope and dream [is] that by design we’re taken into
account and by design we’re given the autonomy and the independence we deserve
and desire,” Moore says.
She points to countless examples of everyday
people making the environment around them work, even when it isn’t designed to
be accessible for them–and sometimes even when it is. She met one elderly woman
in particular who would climb 100 stairs every day, step by step, supported by
her cane, to get to her temple to pray. Moore met this woman’s daughter, who in
frustration told her that she could easily drive her mother up the ramp right
to the temple’s door. But Moore had a different interpretation: “She is
living the life she desires, she is hanging on to the last threads of capacity
and independence and ability,” she says. “And that is what we must design.”
Moore’s insight that designing for
inclusivity is fundamentally about designing for independence is coupled with
another sobering truth–we will all be disabled at some point, whether by age or
by a chance accident (that includes Moore, who was hit by a car last year).
Even when you pass in and out of moments of disability, whether with a broken
leg or a nasty bout of the flu, feeling independent is still crucial. That’s
why she believes in designing products, services, and spaces so they’re more
accessible to the elderly.
“When you design for the greatest generation
you design for all generations,” Moore says. “When you recognize it’s the life
span we should be designing for and not any one silo, you recognize we all have
questions and we’re trying to figure out where to go. Then you have your design
brief and then you can begin.”
BY KATHARINE SCHWAB
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90160000/how-to-design-for-everyone-in-3-steps?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Weekly&position=4&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=02162018
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