CFIT at Include 2011
Written by Antoinette Fennell Thursday, 09 June 2011
At the end of April, CFIT’s Antoinette Fennell attended Include 2011 in London’s Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre as presenter and session chair for one of Europe’s leading inclusive design conferences. The conference, as always, was packed to the brim with exciting inclusive design developments and was attended by over 200 delegates from 29 countries.
The theme of Include 2011 was ‘Inclusive Design Making Social Innovation Happen’. So rather than focusing on how inclusive design needs to adapt to keep up with emerging design trends, this year’s conference explored how inclusive design itself can in fact lead to innovative concepts and design approaches. The theme intended not only to take the focus of inclusive design out of the specific and into the mainstream, but also to demonstrate how (or if) the mainstream has been influenced by inclusive design.
For Antoinette, two crucial messages seemed to emerge (perhaps not intentionally!) from the three-day conference. The first was the scale at which inclusive design processes are applicable.
A number of sessions explored the role that inclusive design can play in enhancing public participation in, for example, education, employment and civic engagement. Inclusive design processes can be easily applied to small-scale product design, but what happens when they are applied at a larger scale, for example, in the design of a new public transport system for a city or in the regeneration of an inner city streetscape?
Some papers described how members of the public could use technology to communicate with their local authority or local service providers, allowing them to voice their concerns about public spaces and services. This is not a new concept, however, and the collection of feedback from “users” (in this case, members of the public who are using their local public spaces and services) represents only one step in a complicated process. How (and how effectively) that feedback is actually implemented by government bodies in practice is another story altogether.
Many papers described the problems of implementing inclusive design into large-scale projects, but none (to my knowledge) have yet identified a large-scale solution. The current approach appears to be to break down a service or system into its elements and address inclusive design at the level of each individual element. So, for example, in the development of an inclusive public transport system, inclusive design will be separately applied to vehicle/carriage design, to ticketing, to station/platform design, to customer service design, and so on. With this approach however, and with so many stakeholders involved (potentially including numerous contractors from many different countries), inclusive design could easily be ignored at higher-level decision making, at early planning and at procurement stages. With such a disjointed and inconsistent approach to inclusive design, something will surely be omitted. Furthermore, any inclusive design knowledge that is acquired during the process will likely be lost once a project ends and the project team dissipates. Higher-level and larger-scale inclusive design strategies are therefore still needed.
The second crucial take home message was the importance of customisation in inclusive design.
There is one key fact upon which inclusive design is founded and that is that the population is diverse. When something is badly designed, people with disabilities and older people tend to be at the greatest disadvantage, and therefore the focus of inclusive design often lies upon disability. But ultimately inclusive design is about meeting the needs of a diverse population. One important solution to meeting diverse needs is to provide choice.
A customer service department that only accepts communication via email excludes those who cannot type, who cannot use a computer, who do not have internet access, who do not have an email account, and so on. A customer service department that accepts communication via both email and telephone will cater for more customers. Furthermore one that also accepts communication via post, text message, and so on, will cater for even more customers. The wider the range of choice, the more likely every customer’s needs will be met.
Taking this element of choice even further, customisation attempts to cater for specific requirements of individuals. It is most familiar in the ICT arena, with the user selecting their own preferences and the interface of their computer or device adapting accordingly. In some cases the element of choice is purely for aesthetic reasons, with the user being allowed to change, for example, the colour scheme or a background picture. But many customisable options are there to influence and optimise accessibility and usability.
Customisation is not unique to ICT. Height adjustable furniture, for example, is customisable design. Some companies actually base their entire business upon customisation, providing it as a service. Although you need the annual income of Michael Schumacher to be able to afford a custom built steering wheel to fit your exact hand shape, there are companies that specialise in identifying existing products that best suit your shape, size and movement patterns (runners, for example, can have a gait analysis carried out, to identify the most appropriate running shoe). The products are not exactly made to measure, but this type of service acknowledges that different customers have different requirements and that there are massive benefits to having a product that fits.
At Include 2011, Roger Ball described a project called SIZECHINA. Exploiting the difference between Asian and Caucasian head shapes, his project team took 3-D scans of thousands of Asian adults. The resulting database is available (at a fee) to manufacturers of head ware, eye wear and face wear products (e.g. glasses, sunglasses, goggles, helmets, headphones) who wish to tap into Asian markets.
Although the extent to which something can be customised differs greatly, with software being far more flexible and adaptable than a product or a feature of a building, at least some element of choice will cater for a wider range of user needs. So the degree to which any product, service or built environment element can be customised should as a general rule always be explored (see Principle 2 of the Seven Principles of Universal Design).
The Include conference takes place every two years, and this was the fifth in the series. Further details and full proceedings can be found here.