The flexible straw was designed by father Joseph Friedman to help his daughter drink a milkshake at a high table and is now a useful tool for millions, for people who are bed-bound, to those sipping cocktails on the beach.
Captioning and subtitles designed for the hard of hearing are valued by people in noisy spaces, or people learning a new language.
Examples of products designed for a specific need and then extended to be invaluable to users outside that spectrum are endless. Moving away from the binary narrative of ‘able’ and ‘disabled’, we’re introduced to the spectrum of ability or ‘the persona spectrum’ “An inclusive design method that solves for one person and then extends to many”. One of the book’s key missions is reframing the way readers consider ‘disability’. – Redefining the term inclusion, who is excluded and why The first part of the book guides the reader to recognise exclusion – as this is the first stem to understanding inclusion. Whether architects, urban planners, product designers or technologists, our design decisions influence who can contribute to society, and whether those interactions are easy, stressful, fun or challenging. She creates a 5-step circle of inclusion to be integrated into the design process. Most importantly, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives.ĭrawing from the ‘Nothing about us, without us’ slogan popularised in America by disability activist and author James Charlton in the late 1990’s, Kat continually reiterates throughout the book that the job of a designer is to involve the end user at each stage of the design journey. Kat defines Inclusive design as: A methodology that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. She has dedicated her career to understanding the true scope of human diversity, studying different ways in which people can feel excluded by design with the view to make a shift from the concept of inclusive design as ‘nice add-on’ to a culture of design in which inclusivity is embedded at every stage. Kat is an engineer turned designer who headed up the inclusive product innovation at Microsoft for 7 years and went on to Google as UX design director.
As a fledgling UX designer with an intention to design for projects for social good, it felt like an important read. Published by MIT press, it’s considered a strong starting point for design students and practitioners who want to better understand inclusion in design. I picked up the book Mismatch – How Inclusion Shapes Design, by Kat Holmes, as part of my User Experience Design Masters study.
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