escape uniformity, liberate diversity

by Kathryn Gilbertson
Red Nicholson sees himself as a typical guy, with a positive outlook on life. He has spastic quadriplegia and uses a wheelchair to get around. He feels the biggest barriers to his independence are accessibility in transport and housing, and attitude problems in society. He believes that “disability awareness is such a cliché – it is more than just about making sure people have ramps. Its about educating and informing people about different types of disability, and what they can do to not make people with disabilities feel so alienated.”

Visit Red’s blog, and read his story, and the experiences of other New Zealanders living with disabilities in this book, ‘Life is for Living’. [right click here to download, 1.8 Mb]

Inclusivity is very important regardless of age or ability. Designers can promote this by realising everyone is different, therefore the best solutions for a diverse society consider all users. In one poster entry for this year’s EIDD competition, I worked on the theme of liberating diversity. Everyone is unique, so uniformity will never be the best solution in a design sense.

As with the EIDD, the 48 hour Inclusive Design Challenge aims to emphasise the importance of inclusive design. The challenge gets teams of designers to come up with inclusive innovations, involving members of the disabled community in the design process. Check out this year’s competition results.

To get a range of perspectives when attempting inclusive design, bodystorming is a technique that can be used to empathise with a wide range of users. Below is a clip about experience prototyping released by Indiana University. It shows how bodystorming could be used to attempt to experience a disability. Employing this technique is insightful in learning how different types of users interact with a space or perform a task. This would lead to better solutions and more accessible design.