June 25, 2018 • Kat Holmes
Stories
So many of the strategies that have led us to exclusion have been about avoiding uncertainty. As children, we protect our games from disruption and uninvited intrusions. As designers and engineers, we use mathematical models to homogenize the people we design for. Uncertainty is assumed away as degrees of error or deviations from the norm. It’s dismissed as an edge case.
Bravery Kids Gym is a place where all children, with and without disabilities, can learn, play and grow together. Physical development, cognition, communication, and social development, along with a strong sensory component, create the foundation for the equipment and activities the gym provides. Everything inside of Bravery has purpose and, when matched with intent, can be used as a platform to encourage child development in many areas.
We would have more nurturing neighborhoods and nurturing spaces in our schools. They would be designed by people who have lived there and will continue to live there
Our daughter, Lyra, was two years old when she was diagnosed with autism. My wife and I immediately experienced waves of shock and confusion. What did this mean for Lyra’s future?
There is a growing interest in making inclusion a positive goal for companies, teams, and products. Now, especially, as inclusion drives daily news headlines related to governmental policies, and representation of excluded groups in mainstream industries, the urgency to reach a collective consciousness about inclusive practices is more acute.
As you may have noticed, there’s a growing focus on inclusion in the tech industry. Specifically, there’s a rise in the use of the word “inclusion.” Companies are creating new executive roles to lead inclusion initiatives, promoting their inclusivity in marketing campaigns, and, crucially, making changes in their products to include overlooked communities.
In the News
If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it’s easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sidewalk and the street. Today, these curb cuts are everywhere, but fifty years ago — when an activist named Ed Roberts was young — most urban corners featured a sharp drop-off, making it difficult for him and other wheelchair users to get between blocks without assistance.
As cities and companies — including Starbucks — move to oust straws in a bid to reduce pollution, people with disabilities say they're losing access to a necessary, lifesaving tool.
Hunker.com features Tiffany Brown as an Architect of Impact. “Seeing her at the podium, one would think she's never been mistaken for anyone but the boss, but Brown tells it differently: When she goes to a build site, dressed down and in a hard hat, she's not immediately recognized as the person there to sign paychecks — she's sometimes mistaken as the cleaning lady.”
Roughly one in five Americans has a disability. Those numbers increase with age and vary across race and gender. And every single one of those people is carving out an economic life. Marketplace Weekend with Lizzie O'Leary produced a one-hour special that covered how people with disabilities access the economy, with a focus on education, workplace, and healthcare.
As a disabled designer, I have come to believe that products are a manifestation of relationships. Disabled people have long been integral to design processes, though we’re frequently viewed as “inspiration” rather than active participants.
Gabrielle Bullock, principal and director of global diversity at architecture and design firm Perkins+Will, was sworn in as president of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA)’s international board of directors. She is the first African-American woman to preside over the world’s leading industry group for interior designers.
“It can be hard to focus when Alice Sheppard dances. Her sold-out run of DESCENT at New York Live Arts, for instance, offered a constellation of stimulation. Onstage was a large architectural ramp with an assortment of peaks and planes. There was an intricate lighting and projection design. There was a musical score that unfolded like an epic poem.”
In this Keynote Session, John Maeda, creator of the Design in Tech Report and Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic, will talk about how to design products and services to reach the broadest range of people possible. Hannah Beachler, Production Designer for Marvel’s Black Panther movie, will talk about her worldwide search for inspiration while designing the futuristic African world of Wakanda and its people, culture, and history.
Resources
In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.
A revealing look at how tech industry bias and blind spots get baked into digital products―and harm us all.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.
How design for disabled people and mainstream design could inspire, provoke, and radically change each other.Eyeglasses have been transformed from medical necessity to fashion accessory. This revolution has come about through embracing the design culture of the fashion industry. Why shouldn't design sensibilities also be applied to hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, and communication aids? In return, disability can provoke radical new directions in mainstream design.
Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind.
Disability is not just the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States is the first book to place the experiences of people with disabilities at the center of the American narrative.
James Charlton has produced a ringing indictment of disability oppression, which, he says, is rooted in degradation, dependency, and powerlessness and is experienced in some form by five hundred million persons throughout the world who have physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disabilities. Nothing About Us Without Us is the first book in the literature on disability to provide a theoretical overview of disability oppression that shows its similarities to, and differences from, racism, sexism, and colonialism.
Designing Disability traces the emergence of an idea and an ideal – physical access for the disabled – through the evolution of the iconic International Symbol of Access (ISA). The book draws on design history, material culture and recent critical disability studies to examine not only the development of a design icon, but also the cultural history surrounding it.
Accessibility Tools
This is an adapted training course to introduce people to the concepts and terminology used around disability and accessibility in the workplace.
Making work accessible creates a better experience across the board. Use this checklist to help build accessibility into your process no matter your role or stage in a project.
Universal Design for Web Applications teaches you how to build websites that are more accessible to people with disabilities and explains why doing so is good business. It takes more work up front, but the potential payoff is huge -- especially when mobile users need to access your sites.