When I transferred to California College of the Arts(CCA), I was passionate about designing useful and visually appealing products or service but didn’t really know about the definition of design and my own value of designing. As soon as I started taking classes in CCA, I had a chance to learn about rough idea of “what is design”. It was really simple, “Design tries to solve the problem”. But in my head, I was questioning myself, “Okay, but what problem? For who?, How do you find the problem?”. As I started to take more Interaction Design related courses, I began to realize the more specific definition/responsibility of design. It is to create a solution for the problem without excluding part of people. And we called it, “Inclusivity”.
Almost all of us have experienced excluded feeling from product or service once in a life. But it is not our fault as users, it is designers fault for failing to make users feel welcomed to use. Especially, people with disability, and foreign people, and even people with various physical characteristics, such as size of body can be the victims of non-inclusive designs. It can be prevented by proper design process that includes user researches and testings. It tends to be more successful when designers think about the inclusivity in accessibilities in every stages of design process, because it will allow the idea to more focus on ability of users rather than functionality of the products. If designers keep creating exclusive products for people with disability, it may cause the “social construct” of disability to remain in the world, to the point we can say that disability is designed, when they can be solved and banished by users’ ability focused designs. So especially us, interaction designers, who more focus on interaction between users and designed product, have responsibility to get educated about inclusivity, apply that to every stage of design process to redirect the focus of design to users’ ability rather than functionality of product.
Inclusive design!