Experiment 1: Who is excluded?
If you landed on this article without context, here is a summary of what I am looking to do: I am running an inclusive design experiment focused on culture — I explain the reason I’m running the project here. In summary, I want to learn more and apply inclusive design in practise #learnbydoing; in order to achieve this, I picked a project dear to my heart. For context, I come from an African country (Burkina Faso) which is culturally very under-represented on the global scale. A big part of Burkina’s cultural heritage is intangible, and most of it is shared through stories. The reason I believe this is an inclusion design challenge is because these stories are mostly accessible locally; even though I was able to get my hands on a handwritten version, I had to purchase the book from France (and the stories are only available in French). So to reframe my design challenge is: How might we create different ways for people from around the world to have access to a piece of this intangible heritage?
Even though my design challenge is quite unique (and emotionally connected to me), I will be sharing inclusive design principles through my experiments, which you can apply to your own use cases. I also believe this project touches on a broader cultural challenge, inter-cultual communication as we grow into a global village. What are the mainstream stories? What are the hidden stories? Taking full advantage of our diverse pool of talent requires some degree of cultural understanding.
I’ve been reading “Mismatch” by Kat Holmes, which inspired me to test out different ways of designing inclusive solutions. A key takeaway for me is that the goal of inclusive design is to create a diversity of ways for people to participate. We cannot design for everyone, but we can try to include everyone by providing different options for them to interact with the solutions we design.
There are two key paths to achieve inclusive design, which are listed below.
First: Take a moment to pause:
Recognize the exclusion around you, and think about the exclusion you’re potentially embedding in your solution. This is important because if you fail to do this, you’re indirectly picking you gets to participate and who’s left out.
Second: Invite people with complementary abilities to help you co-design your solution (note that a complementary ability can be cognitive, an area of expertise, a physical ability etc). Similarly to any kind of design project where you bring together complementary abilities, the same applies here. Everyone with their lived experience has something to contribute.
Since this is a personal endeavour, I hope that as a reader you can play a part in helping me co-design by sharing your ideas and suggestions!
Help me co-design an inclusive solution by joining my design TEAM - Together Each Achieves More!
I decided to start my journey by looking at the world around me to see where I notice exclusion. This simple statement in and of itself already assumes my biases which are based on the part of the world I live in, the people I know, those I’ve have met through the course of my life, the socio-economical statuses I’m surrounded by, etc. When doing this exercise for your own applications, take note of these to see where your biases lie.
First things first: recognizing exclusion. In this first part I will focus on identifying those who currently cannot access to these cultural tales (the cultural tales are the object of design in this case, in the form of a book):
- People without the socio-economic power to purchase the book
- People who don’t speak the language (in this case French) in which the tales are shared
- People who don’t live in a country where French books are accessible
- Further to the above point, people without the ability to purchase online (in my case for instance, I had to purchase mine from a library in France)
- People who cannot read, as they will not be able to read the book
- People with dyslexia might have some difficulty in reading the book
- As an extension to the above, people who don’t have access to someone who could read for them
- People who don’t understand the cultural context of the tale, thus won’t be able to fully grasp the meaning of the tale
- People without the cognitive ability to sit through the length of the tale
- People who cannot see are excluded, as the text is not provided in braille
- People with dyslexia might have some difficulty in reading the book
If you think of other groups who are excluded, please comment below! I will keep the list current as I continue this experiment.
As I went through the exercise of identifying “exclusion” I did notice a strong bias in the way I was analyzing: I was looking at some of the challenges I’d faced when trying to access this myself. However, it’s extremely difficult (if not impossible) to see exclusion from a point of view different from ours. This is why it’s so critical to have a diverse team of people identify exclusion. Even if I have awareness, I cannot come up with a lived experience that isn’t mine, or that I haven’t encountered through others in my circle.
I will prioritize the above listed exclusions, and each will be set up as an experiment to further explore ways we can co-design to promote inclusion. After every experiment, ideas for inclusive design will be captured; at the end of this project, the takeaway will be a pool of ideas for inclusive design allowing for a more inclusive way to access Burkina’s intangible cultural heritage.
Takeaways:
- Recognize exclusion, and identify those currently excluded from the solution at hand
- Ensure you are working with a diverse team with diverse perspectives when going through this exercise
- Recognize your biases and ignorance on certain subjects, and invite people with complementary abilities to help you co-design your solution
Experiment 2 will be posted here (link will be provided when available).
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