Universal design
This section outlines the social and commercial rationale for ensuring that designers create products and services that address the widest possible audience, irrespective of ability, age, or social background. It will discuss the demographic changes occurring in Western society and identify key criteria and user-centred methodologies needing to be considered when “designing for all.”
What is inclusive design?
“Universal design,” also known as “universal design” and “design for all,” is an approach to design that aims to ensure that products are usable by, and accessible to, as many members of society as reasonably possible, without the need for special adaption or specialized design. All products exclude some users, often inadvertently, and it aims to highlight and reduce such exclusion.
Universal design forces designers to question their own practice. All designers strive to create products that satisfy the needs and desires of their intended users, but are they always aware of what the actual rather than perceived needs are? Designers know that intuitive, easy-to-operate products are satisfying to use, but why do they persist in producing designs that place unnecessarily high physical demands on users or exclude some altogether? Are designers fully aware that each decision they take during the design process can adversely affect large numbers of people, from older people and the disabled to economically vulnerable groups and those affected by changing technologies and work practices? Design that includes marginalized social groups is not just socially desirable but a genuine commercial opportunity, and a responsibility that designers should embrace.
Within the European Union there are currently more than 130 million over-50-year-olds, and by 2020 one in every two adults in Europe will be over the age of 50. This demographic shift is having a profound impact on how designers are developing new products, and the methods required to develop them. Over the last decade society has begun to treat older people and the disabled differently, moving away from the outdated perspective of viewing them as special cases, and embracing a new social equality agenda that aims to integrate them into the mainstream of everyday life through a more inclusive approach to the design of buildings, products, and services. By addressing the needs of those excluded from using products, designers can produce better designs that improve how a broad range of users experience their product designs, increase their potential customer base, and ensure a more equal and cohesive society.
Designers need to be aware that universal design is an integrated approach to design that extends to all stages of the design process, and is not simply a stage that can be bolted on. By embedding it within the design process, designers will be able to produce better-designed mainstream products that are pleasurable, desirable, and satisfying to use. Many companies and designers, while agreeing with its basic principles, pay lip service to the practice, assuming that if a product is deemed easy to use that they are adequately covering their social responsibilities, or naively believing that it is always possible to design a product that addresses the needs of an entire population.
To avoid such pitfalls and promote a universal design agenda, designers need to develop an awareness of the needs of users with different capabilities and how to accommodate them into the design cycle. The Center for Universal Design, a leading American design research centre, published a set of principles in 1997 drawn up by a working group of architects, product designers, engineers, and environmental design researchers. These seven principles of universal design can be applied to evaluate existing designs, guide the design process, and educate both designers and consumers.
Definitions for designing usable products
Equitable use
The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
Flexibility in use
The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
Simple and intuitive use
Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
Perceptible information
The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
Tolerance for error
The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
Low physical effort
The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
Size and space for approach and use
Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility. (Copyright © 1997 NC State University, The Center for Universal Design.)
How do we design inclusively?
Faced with the challenge of using design as a tool for delivering on social, cultural and political expectations of equality and inclusivity, leading design researchers in the field, such as the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the Royal College of Art in London, have created a series of techniques that enable designers to create products that support people to live independent and fulfilling lives for as long as possible.
The following techniques aim to provide you with the knowledge and tools to maximize inclusivity and minimize design exclusion.
Capability assessment
Cabability assessment enables designers to evaluate products by comparing the capability levels required to use them. How users interact with or use a product can be broken down into a series of tasks and activities where demands are made on users, which are then measured against each other to form a comparison. These user capabilities are commonly grouped into three categories:
- sensory—vision and hearing
- cognitive—thinking and communication
- motor—locomotion, reach and stretch, and dexterity.
By using these crude yet effective scales, with low demand to the left and high demand to the right, designers can evaluate different products and concepts against each of the three categories, and focus on reducing capability demands in order to produce products that can be used by a larger percentage of the population.
Capability simulators
Capability simulators are physical or software devices that designers can use to reduce their ability to interact with a product. Basic simulators can be created using gloves or sports braces to reproduce the loss of dexterity or movement, while spectacles can be smeared with grease to simulate the loss of a user’s vision.
Such quick and cheap devices enable designers to empathize with potential or an actual user’s capability losses, and can be used throughout the design process to help designers simulate the physical and cognitive issues that their design needs to address. However, no capability simulation device can ever truly reproduce what it is like to live with a particular capability reduction on an everyday basis, and as such they should never be considered as a replacement for involving real users in developing, designing, and evaluating a product.
Ergonomics
Ergonomics is the study of human anatomical, anthropometric, physiological, and biomechanical characteristics as they relate to physical activity and usability. Designers commonly use such data and testing to evaluate the physical design of controls and displays, seating postures, and health and safety. Ergonomics also addresses the psychological aspects of how peopleinteract with products, such as user perception, cognition, memory, reasoning, and emotion. Designers need to consider such aspects in order to identify characteristics that should inform the design process.
Although product designers have considered the comfort and scale of products on an intuitive level since the discipline’s emergence, and architects such as Le Corbusier had attempted to develop aesthetic design styles based on the proportions of the human body with his Le Modular man, the widespread use of ergonomics was not established until the 1960s. Henry Dreyfuss, the founding member of the Industrial Designers Society of America and famous for his streamlined designs, published his seminal book The Measure of Man in 1960, establishing the industry-wide application of such data.
Humanscale 1/2/3, female selector, by Niels Diffrient, Alvin R. Tilley; and Joan Bardagjy, 1974.This invaluable tool for designers incorporates an extensive amount of human anthropometric data, which enables designers to create ergonomically appropriate products.
Exclusion audit
An exclusion audit is a technique used to evaluate different products by comparing the proportion of the population that will be unable to use them. Exclusion audits provide more detailed statistical data than simple capability assessments, and often require the assistance of specialist consultants. Exclusion audits use objective scales to measure the level of capability that a product requires in order to use it. For example, such an audit when applied to a new portable television design would evaluate a series of tasks: opening its box, plugging it in, tuning it, turning it on, changing channels, and moving it around.
Once the appropriate demand level has been identified, data from international and national surveys can provide the number of people that will be excluded and, in conjunction with other techniques, provide a framework for specifying and designing products and the interactions required to operate and understand them.
Inclusive user involvement
Designing “with” rather than “for” users is an approach that yields success at all stages of the design process. To ensure a truly universal design agenda it is vital to realize that members of the design team are often not representative users, and as such it is important to involve an appropriate mix of people to input into the design process. This mix may vary from stage to stage.
As in all user-centred design methods, the focus of inclusive design research is to ask, observe, and participate. Involving large numbers of users undoubtedly improves accuracy and the possibility of uncovering unperceived issues, but is often impossible due to time or financial constraints. As such, it is common practice to try to gain useful feedback from a number of diverse representative users to reduce biases in the sample users’ responses and observations. The following list can help to structure such research:
Broad user mix—this involves users from a range of market segments, which can help understand general user requirements.
Boundary users—this involves users on the limit of being able to use the product, which can help identify opportunities for design improvement.
Extreme users—those with a severe loss of capability can inspire creativity during concept development.
Mixed-experience users—those with different levels of experience with similar products can help understand the impact of experience on use.
Community groups—again, those sharing experience of interacting with similar products can provide a broad understanding of product use.
CASE STUDY: OXO Good Grips
All too often, commercial or time pressures mean that inclusive design and ergonomic principles are compromised or not given adequate priority until too late in the design process, but the commercial benefits of adopting a fully integrated inclusive approach are significant. A prime example is Good Grips kitchen utensils for people whose capabilities are limited by arthritis. Working with users, OXO International moved beyond merely functional agendas and the traditional assistive model of designing for a specific disability, by focusing on meeting actual users’ needs and experiences.
These award-winning products, created by New York-based Smart Design, from 1999 to present, offer a distinct stylish aesthetic and desirability that enables the ergonomically designed products to cross over to a mainstream consumer audience, thus bringing the benefits of ergonomic inclusive design to all. The financial benefits to the company of such an approach were manifested in the company growing at an annual rate of more than 30% since the Good Grips range’s introduction, and a number of major companies have since adopted similar design strategies.
OXO Good Grips Salad Spinner with pump mechanism and brake, which also doubles as a salad bowl; Y-Peeler; and the Pour & Store Watering Can, with soft-grip handle and rotating spout that tucks away for storage.