Building with, not for
A look at inclusive design with Kat Holmes
In my own research, I’ve been obsessed with the concept of curb-cut effects. In the early 1970s, in a makeshift gesture of defiance, Michael Pachovas and a few of his friends created sloping curb ramps in their Berkeley, California, neighborhood so that they could navigate the sidewalks in their wheelchairs. This seemingly simple act had ripple effects throughout thousands of cities beyond Berkeley. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits any part of a built environment from discriminating against people with disabilities.
When curb cuts became the new normal on streets, “a magnificent and unexpected thing happened,” explains PolicyLink founder Andrea Glover Blackwell: “When the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited — not only people in wheelchairs. Parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts. So did workers pushing heavy carts, business travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders…. Cut into the curb, and we create a path forward for everyone.”
This is the basis of what is now known as universal design, an approach that aspires to benefit and be accessed and understood by every member of the population by promoting accessible and usable design and composition. “When we create the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully—everyone wins,” Blackwell explains.
So, cutting into the curb in our particular context means focusing on the obstacles that people are encountering in our education and workforce systems. This helps sharpen our focus and target our support for those with the most challenges. By engaging with those who are most distressed, everyone benefits.
But I learned something new from author and designer Kat Holmes in her book, Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. She explains that universal design is different from inclusive design. I had assumed they were interchangeable, but Holmes is eager to make the distinction that “universal design is one-size-fits-all. Inclusive design is one-size-fits-one.” And inclusive design may not actually lead to universal design, and that’s okay.
She explains that universal design is intended to “be accessed and used in the widest possible range of situations without the need for adaptation.” Universal design emerged from built environments and is “strongest at describing the qualities of a final design … Inclusive design, conversely, focuses on how a designer arrived at that design.”
The HOW
Holmes is adamant that a designer must design with and not for. Designing with means seeking out “the expertise of excluded communities”:
For designers, one important way to change invisibility is to seek out the perspectives of people who are, or risk being, the most excluded by a solution. Often, the people who carry the burden of exclusion also have the greatest insight into how to shift design toward inclusion.
When we design with excluded communities, we gain the greatest insight into how we design for the future.
Designing for, on the other hand, leads to exclusion. Holmes asserts that designing for leads to the creation of solutions “based on stereotypes or benevolent pity for someone they perceive as unlike themselves. This leads to specialized solutions that cater to stereotypes about people.”
However, when you seek out the expertise of those who are most excluded and design with them, she explains that we get closer to the “human activities, which I-N-G’s are most important to the things that we design.” Holmes is talking about the gerund form of verbs or activities, the nouns that end in -ing that can help illuminate how we focus our designs.
When I think about my research with working learners who are struggling to thrive in the labor market, they repeatedly share I-N-G’s like, I need help:
Surviving, thriving — not just existing
Proving I can do the work
Blinding the hiring process to give me a fairer shot
Wiping the slate clean (because of a criminal record)
Progressing, not waiting to never hear back on a job
Feeling motivated
Feeling safe at work
Moving in the right direction
Building confidence
Sharpening my skills
Participating despite my disability
Moving beyond my past mistakes
Beginning with the end in mind
Not wasting money and studying what is necessary for that next job
Playing into my strengths
Sharing my hidden talents
These are the kinds of specific activities that people who struggle with economic mobility and security in their communities divulge. And each of these I-N-G’s illuminates Holmes’s point that “one small change toward inclusion can benefit many people in a positive way.” It can help us unlock the mismatches, or “the barriers to interacting with the world around us.”
Mismatch is a quick and powerful read, and most importantly, Holmes shows us that inclusive design is about designing for the “most immediate kind of uncertainty that we each face”: “When we design for inclusion we are designing for our future selves. Not just for the changes in our bodies but also our ability to contribute to society … Our dignity, health, safety, and sense of being at home.”
Inclusive design helps us design for our future selves — not some amorphous group of people struggling over there or far removed from us. The future of workers is about us. We are the ones who will be affected. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put so eloquently: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Because we are tied together in this web of mutuality, we must build inclusively for our own sake. We are now and will continue to be working learners, always flexing between working and learning, or juggling both at the same time.
Even if we already have degrees or fulfilling jobs now, we will all face the same uncertain world of work ahead that will force us to grapple with many of the same I-N-G’s that millions of people face today.
So we must continue to build what Holmes calls “an extended community of ‘exclusion experts,’” so that we can get closer to building a better functioning learning ecosystem that offers more fluid and seamless on- and off-ramps in and out of learning and work.
Special thanks to my friend and colleague Jen Wells who recommended this excellent book to me.
Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet and leads Rise and Design, a strategic consulting and advisory service for businesses and higher education institutions.