Inclusive design: access

Welcome to the first part of our series of blog posts all about 'inclusive design'. Two little words that have enormous meaning and are central to many areas of engineering and consultancy. But what do they really mean?

Well, the 'design' part is fairly easy. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines design as:

1. To plan and make decisions about (something that is being built or created), to create the plans, drawings, etc., that show how (something) will be made
2. To plan and make (something) for a specific use or purpose
3. To think of (something, such as a plan), to plan (something) in your mind.

As engineering consultants, we all have to make decisions about how things will be created and often have to produce drawings showing how things should be made. The first part is actually the most difficult. How do we define 'inclusive' design when we don’t know how people are excluded?

Again, the Merriam-Webster dictionary provides the following definition:

allowing and accommodating people who have historically been excluded (because of their race, gender, sexuality or ability)

Research from Coqual (formerly the Center for Talent Innovation) shows that allies – people who support LGBT colleagues or work as advocates – play a decisive role in creating an inclusive community where individuals are comfortable being themselves.

While this is a good starting point, it still doesn’t tell us how to include people. This is such a huge topic that it will be split into multiple articles – and will still only address the basics as written by a lay person.

A good place to start this conversation is to look at blind-spots and assumptions. We all have/make them and it can be very difficult to identify them in ourselves.

A large part of our role is to accommodate the needs of people who have historically been excluded from planning or design decisions – particularly when items have been made for specific uses or purposes. For example, scissors designed for the approximately 10% of people who are left-handed, pedestrian crossings with audible alerts so that people with visual impairments are notified it is safe to cross the road. Once again this highlights an issue with definitions – how do we define the use(s) or purpose(s) of what we’re designing? Let's take a seemingly simple scenario and look at possible solutions.

Scenario: A building has two or more floors. How do you get between them?

The simplest answer may be to put a hole in the upper floor and put a metal pole between the floors to climb up and slide down. Easy on the way down, very tough on the way up and impossible if it’s a hot day and your hands are slippery.

Why not swap the metal pole for a big thick rope? Slightly harder to get down, slightly easier to get up and it doesn’t matter if your hands are sweaty. You really do need to be quite fit and strong to get up and down a rope safely.

If you install a ladder you can get up or down with weaker hands and less technique. This is more inclusive, but without great skill it is incredibly difficult to get up or down with your hands full – imagine a Monday morning cup of coffee up a ladder!

If we tip the ladder over to about 40 degrees the holes between the rungs will be enormous, but if they were filled in you could have steps. Suddenly you might be able to get up and down between the floors without needing to use your hands. Although it’s still a lot of effort if you need to climb the stairs for a couple of floors.

So why don’t we make the steps move? An escalator doesn’t require much effort to get up or down assuming you have one for each direction.

That’s five different options for moving between floors, but have we made any assumptions?

Other than assuming we need to get between the floors inside the building while potentially carrying things, what have we assumed?

We’ve assumed that everyone will be able to stand and move about generally in a bipedal fashion for at least a short period of time. However, not everyone is capable of standing for long enough to move between floors on an escalator. Think of your own experiences, if you’re tired of standing up then you probably want to be sitting down. So let’s make a chair on our moving stairs or even, why not just make the chair move? Then you can get between the floors without even having to expend the energy to stand up, but it’s a very slow method of moving individuals between floors and it makes another assumption.

Did you spot it? It assumes that the people using it are able to easily move into and out of that moving stair-chair (more commonly known as a stairlift). Again, this is not necessarily true. There are lots of people who use wheelchairs temporarily or permanently and it is not unreasonable to assume that at some stage, you / your colleagues in your own office will be confined to a wheelchair due to injury. After all, how many of us have broken bones? The solution we now reach is a different kind of solution – a lift / elevator. A section of floor that moves between the floors and enables wheelchair users to remain within their chairs while moving between floors.

How simple was the problem? It seemed very simple at first, but we’ve covered five options in very short order and there are many others that we haven’t covered here. We haven’t even looked at any other kind of user exclusivity than physical ability to stand. There are so many other problems that we face as designers and consultants that combine problems and require solutions to be carefully considered and designed.

It’s easy to say that design is inclusive, but without taking time and making a serious, concerted effort and consulting with various sources to try and define the problem we are seeking to solve, truly inclusive design is difficult.