At Ability Summit 2022, Christina Mallon, director of inclusive design at Microsoft facilitated a panel discussion with Bas Korsten, global chief creative officer at Wunderman Thompson, Sinead Burke, CEO and founder of Tilting the Lens, and KR Liu, head of brand accessibility at Google.
Their talk focused on how organizations can build inclusive design into their workplace. And how being full inclusive, accessible, and representative is not only the right thing to do.
It’s a business advantage.
Thanks to the livestream, I watched the online discussion of inclusive design with hundreds of other Ability Summit attendees. Here are my notes from the talk.
Inclusive Design in the Heart of the Organization
- Organizations and brands like the idea of inclusive design, but often don’t allocate resources to make it happen
- From a business perspective, people underestimate the importance of inclusive design
- The shear number of disabled people around the world is huge, yet businesses overlook that audience. And the number of disabled people continues to grow.
- Inclusive design needs to be looked at as an investment, not a cost
- When a service or product is created without considering inclusive design, it creates a mismatch with the environment or with the product/service. And to make it inclusive requires 40-100% more than the original investment.
- Making inclusive design core to the business agenda, built in at the beginning of product innovation or policy development, is crucial
- Inclusive design is not a “nice to do”, rather it’s core functionality of every workflow
- Organizations need to look beyond the market value of disabled people, and create or improve inclusive design of office spaces and studios
- Fundamental principle: long-term sustainability of businesses is dependent on inclusive design, which will produce innovative and better products/services
- While you may have an accessibility product or service, when your content, marketing, and advertising doesn’t speak to disabled people, they won’t know about your service/product. And won’t know if the product is for them.
- There’s more work to be done in product/service storytelling because disabled people aren’t seeing themselves in advertising, media, or content
- Everyone will experience some form or disability at some point in their life, even if only temporary
- While creating a long-term strategy for inclusive design is important, recognize the short-term wins
- One challenge with inclusive design: remembering to do it with disabled people, not only for disabled people. Recruit disabled people with lived experiences to work at your organization, on your design, development, marketing, and content teams.
- Also, don’t only rely on disabled people within your organization. They can get burned out from being constantly asked. It’s helpful to have consultants or third-parties to get outside perspective. They’ll see things differently than you and other employees who are caught up in internal processes.
- Creating inclusive design at an organization involves more than including disabled people in the process. We need to consider how to create a pipeline of talent through education, scholarship, and schools to provide employment and leadership opportunities
- How to learn more about inclusive design? Networking, social media, and connecting with folks on LinkedIn
- Books to learn about inclusive design: Mismatched by Kat Holmes, Accessible America by Bess Williamson
- Examples of inclusive design work: Guggenheim Museum, Gucci Outfits, and Action Audio
- When you’re in a discussion/meeting about product/services, ask yourself: who’s not in the room that should be in the room? Make sure their voice is represented.
- When you’re not actively inclusive, you’re actively exclusive
