My name is Nico Santiago. I am an industrial design student going into my junior year at Rochester Institute of Technology. My dream is to one day own a small industrial design firm focused on creating products for people with disabilities. Growing up with Congenital Myasthenia Gravis (CMG) taught me that the world was not designed for people like me. Today, I’ll break down design approaches addressing this issue from different perspectives.
A world of roadblocks
My name is Nico Santiago. I am an industrial design student going into my junior year at Rochester Institute of Technology. My dream is to one day own a small industrial design firm focused on creating products for people with disabilities.
Growing up with Congenital Myasthenia Gravis (CMG) taught me that the world was not designed for people like me. There is always a roadblock — whether it’s environmental, social, programmatic, financial, or legislative. I’ve had to adapt to the world in order to succeed. I’ve learned how to do things that seemed impossible for me like cooking, putting my chair into my car, and even traveling. But I’ve also been exposed to many people experiencing different challenges. Through my personal experiences and learning from others, I can identify and often predict issues that someone with a disability may come across in efforts to be independent. My motivation to solve these complex problems only grows.
Accessible vs. Inclusive Design
I’ve noticed that “inclusive design” is often misused, or used interchangeably, with other terms like “accessible design.” Yet, the two are different.
“Inclusive design is related to accessibility since they are both focused on making products or services available to a wider range of people. However, accessibility is more limited in scope as it is focused on specific accommodations to enable people with disabilities to obtain access to products, services or environments.” -Wikipedia
Inclusive design strives to reach a certain percentile of a target population. In contrast, accessible design strives to design specifically for people with disabilities.
Consider luxury cars as one example of the difference between inclusive and accessible design approaches. Car companies typically design these cars to be accommodating for a variety of people with different heights. The seat allows almost anyone to adjust it according to their preferences. Inclusive, right? Not necessarily. Refer back to the key word “almost.”
When we talk about inclusive design, we may assume the term means to include everyone. However, this is often not the case. Inclusive design is still not designing to reach 100% of the target audience. Now if the car company was striving for accessible design, they might make the seat adjustable and removable and include a ramp to allow someone who uses a wheelchair for mobility to get into the car.
Universal Design
Now let’s consider a third design approach. Inclusive design is also different from “universal design.” Universal design is designing to reach 100%, or the greatest percent possible, of the user population.
This can be seen in the architectural field. Imagine the front of a building. To enter the building, there are a few steps as well as a ramp off to the side. Though the ramp off to the side does make the building accessible, it also creates a separation between persons who use the ramp and persons who use the stairs. If the entrance was universally designed, it may look like just one ramp that is wide enough for multiple users and directions of traffic, at a slope that everyone across all mobility devices can use.
Due to these nuances, it’s understandable that there is confusion between accessible, inclusive, and universal design. This confusion can happen because, when designing a product or solution, you might follow principles from each process or have a subjective understanding and expectation of the terms accessible, inclusive, and universal.
Designer Perspectives
When learning about design approaches in class, we are taught that inclusive design can be vague, and products are generally produced to accommodate for a certain percentile of a target audience. Many people also have their own interpretations as to what inclusive means or should be. To illustrate this, I interviewed other design students on what inclusive design means to them:
“...I've had the opportunity to see just how much variance exists on a global scale that needs to be accommodated for (and that is often either neglected to cut cost or forgotten altogether).”
“...Inclusive design to me is not just trying to reach 5%- 95% of the population, but a true 100% of people, although that's hard to achieve.”
As you can see, designers around the world will continue to use these three processes of design in many ways, towards their own solutions. My goal is to strive for more. I would personally be discouraged if I designed a product that excluded someone from using it because I didn’t think of them in the design process. Just because something was created with an inclusive design process, doesn’t mean it is inherently accessible to everyone. And just because something is made through an accessible design approach, doesn’t mean that it is inherently inclusive or universal.
Design is nuanced, but I will continue to chase the 100%.