- in Delo magazine

An interview with Pete Kercher for Delo Magazine in Ljubljana to mark the Slovenian Month of Design 2007, where Pete Kercher was speaking.

 

Question: Can you in short describe the idea of Design for All and its beginnings in Europe

Answer: That’s difficult in short... and I also don’t want to turn a short interview into a long book! So let me just quote the EIDD Stockholm Declaration 2004: “Design for All is design for human diversity, social inclusion and equality”. It is an approach that “makes conscious use of the analysis of human needs and aspirations and requires the involvement of end users at every stage in the design process”. It developed in Scandinavia, as a logical continuation of that region’s society for all concept, before gradually spreading through Europe, largely as a result of the pro-active proselytising work done by EIDD and its members.

Q: Why is this type of design interesting to you? Do you find its social dimension interesting and important? How do you see the combination of aesthetics and functionality of design in general?

A: DfA applies design thinking and methodology to the reality of human diversity: instead of trying to force people to adapt to pre-packaged conceptions (of products, environments, services etc.), it sets out to ensure that they adapt to varying humanity. Surely we should be intelligent enough by now to realise that it is time we made the artificial environment adapt to us rather than keep on obstinately insisting that we adapt to what we have created ourselves?

Yes, absolutely.

That’s far too big a question to deal with satisfactorily in a short interview, but in a nutshell: if you only have aesthetics, then you are talking about art; if you only have functionality, then you are talking about engineering; design starts to come about when form and function combine... But these days design is more than just form and function: it is both of those factors plus process, to ensure a feasible, economically viable and sustainable response to needs and requirements.

Q: Does Design for All bring any consequences for design in general? Does it make designers rethink some of their products in order to make them available to everyone? What is the role of design aesthetics in Design for All?

A: Yes of course it does: design can only be good if it is DfA. All the rest is just artistic ego tripping.

What good is a product to anyone if the majority of people find it awkward to use? What possible good can that sort of product be to a mainstream manufacturer, who needs to make a profit at the end of the day, keep his shareholders happy and make sure his employees don’t get laid off? But let’s not just blame the designers here: the decision-makers also have to learn more about how design in general, and DfA in particular, can make a fundamental difference to their profitability.

Aesthetics has the same role to play in DfA as in all good design in general: the end product (environment, service etc.) must be appealing and attractive as well as functional, otherwise it will never be sustainably profitable, will it?

Q: How is the idea of Design for All implemented in Europe? Do you maybe know how is it working in other parts of the world. Do you know how is it working in Slovenia?

A: As a result of the pro-active, proselytising stance adopted by EIDD over the years, DfA is becoming increasingly central to the development and implementation of new products, environments and services, especially in Europe. Unfortunately, the European Commission has restricted its interest in DfA to the area of eInclusion, as though the rest of our artificial environment were already so perfect that there is no need for any further action. As that is glaringly not the case, the Commission’s efforts do not have a seamlessly accessible base on which to be grafted (that, I would suggest, is the sine qua non for DfA to be applied in eAnything) so just end up in the development of further and undoubtedly excellent assistive technologies for identified groups of disabled or elderly users, applying an approach that in practice runs almost diametrically counter to the philosophy of DfA. As a grouping of purely voluntary member organisations in sixteen countries, EIDD carries the majority of the burden of furthering the theory and practice of DfA almost on its own, receiving virtually no financial assistance and no institutional encouragement at all. So why do we persist? Because we really believe that we have the key to a better world in our hands.

Although there is a limit to what volunteers can do under such circumstances, EIDD and its members are engaged in many high-level operations at national and international levels, indeed, too many to list here. So here is just a sample of activities:

- Organising a major international conference every year to discuss how DfA in practice can make fundamental changes in different macro areas of mainstream society (culture, work, tourism, sustainability, transportation, education, equality etc.);

- Pro-actively identifying and campaigning with major international organisations in mainstream areas (public transport, tourism, labour relations, conference organisation etc.);

- Contributing to and organising masters courses in the areas of design and management education and training;

- Organising and addressing public meetings of architects, designers and decision makers all over Europe and often in other parts of the world.

In the rest of the world, there is a gradual increase in interest which can be expected to take off at different rhythms in different geographical regions, as experience in Europe is already teaching us. While our American and Japanese colleagues have done much sterling work in the related discipline of Universal Design, though, there are significant differences between UD and DfA that preclude an exact equivalence.

Since it joined the European Union, Slovenia’s economy has been flourishing to the point when it was the first of the new Member States to adopt the Euro, yet I very much regret to say that the degree of discussion and implementation of the theory and practice of DfA is actually lagging behind other countries whose economies are less florid. If Slovenian decision makers believe that they will be better able to afford the investments necessary to implement DfA at some stage in future, when the economy has grown more, they are making a serious mistake: add-ons are far more costly than features that are designed in from the beginning. And that is an approach that is equally validly applicable to an economy as a whole. I really hope that the Slovenian design community will succeed in convincing the economy’s decision makers to learn about DfA and implement before inclusion becomes an economically expensive option.

Q: Do you see any connection between Design for All and this year's theme of the festival Month of Design: the Mediterranean identity? Can Design for All be something that Mediterranean countries can identify with?

A: We in the Mediterranean area can use design to establish a regional identity in many different ways. Perhaps the most pertinent application of DfA in this respect is going to be rather different from what you might expect to hear from me. DfA is essentially a process that requires the involvement of all users in the creation of a product, an environment, a service and so on. Those users are not only the people normally identified as end users, but also include everyone who takes part, in one way or another, in producing, providing, distributing, selling, delivering, installing, maintaining, removing, decommissioning, demolishing and recycling that product. As a result, the DfA process offers a unique insight into creating viable interest communities where there were previously only disjointed and non-communicating actors. I would suggest that this approach would be far more effective at creating a real sense of community, so also of identity, between the different cultures whose shores are washed by Mare Nostrum than the rather pathetic lowest-common-denominator results achieved by our politicians, who seem to be quite content to go no further than stumbling through their crisis management, repressing outright violence, though increasingly at the cost of seriously mortgaging the security and happiness of future generations. And the simple reason for this is, of course, that they do not consult with everyone interested or try to build real communities, but restrict their activities to communing with their peers... and I am afraid that the Mediterranean’s politicians are anything but a fully representative cross-section of all the societies that live around the sea. I realise that this is most probably not the sort of answer you expected from me!

Q: I would also be interested in your view on Mediterranean culture, design? And maybe - if you have seen Ljubljana - how do you find it in the context of Mediterranean?

A: To answer this question as it deserves, I would really have to write a treatise about Mediterranean history. The sea united our ancestors for millennia before it was ever used as a divisive factor: we have so much more in common than developments in the last couple of hundred years lead us all to think. Millennial traditions of trade and exchange have left their mark in terms of cultural mindsets that generate similar understandings, which also have repercussions in how we apply design thinking in practice. Etymologically speaking, the world “design” implies a very definite sense of intention, as well as its execution in the form of an act. While our acts may differ around the Mediterranean, it is interesting to discover just how similar our underlying cultural attitudes – and so our intentions – can be.

Ljubljana is a fascinating city that sits on several sources of cultural cross-fertilisation: between the Germanic, the Romance and the Slavonic areas of Europe; between the Mediterranean and the inland Mitteleuropa region; between post-war “Western” Europe and post-war “Eastern” Europe. As such, the city (and in fact the whole country) is ideally placed to act as a cultural interface. It would be sad if it were to be reduced “only” to a Mediterranean relevance.

Q: Do you have any role-models in the field of painting, design, art in general? Who among artists of the past century was an inspiration for your work? I believe Design for All is a relatively new type of design, but were there any artistic attempts in history that can be seen in the context of Design for All - The avant-garde artists in the beginning of 20th century had the idea of art for all - can we see any connection with Design for All?

A: This is a fascinating question, although it really has very little to do with Design for All. It is my firm belief that art and artists should not be confused with design and designers. Artists create art as a totally and necessarily free expression of their own inner drives, while designers create products, environments, services and systems that result from perspicacious analyses of a wide variety of parameters (technologies, costs, materials, potential markets etc.) and are totally and necessarily tailored to catering for identified or even unidentified needs and requirements. What artists and designers have in common is the fact that they apply human ingenuity to creating something original, but that does not make their work interchangeable. The clear distinction between art as unrestrained creativity and design as applied creativity (please, let’s stop calling it “applied art”, as that is an oxymoron) is often blurred by the natural tendency of many architects and designers, from the Renaissance onwards, to spend time creating as artists, too. A lawyer may also play golf, but that does not make every golfer a lawyer.

After this essential premise, I shall answer your question by saying that my role model in my work for and with EIDD has always been Paul Hogan, whose work led to the Institute’s establishment in 1993 and who served as its first President until 1996. Paul has always had the vision necessary to understand that design can and must do so much more to make this world a better place.

If I really have to seek another role model, it would probably be the Roman senator Cincinnatus, who served his country when it called him, then returned to private life afterwards, without clinging to power and all its attendant privileges. In my own small way, that is what I have tried to do with EIDD. I wish our politicians would learn that we would like them to do the same.

The avant-garde artists, with their approach of art for all, intended to popularise art, perfectly aware of the fact that mankind can survive without art. But mankind cannot survive without design: for better or for worse, everything we do and have is designed by someone, often unconsciously and so rather badly. In its approach, Design for All attempts to optimise a process that takes place in any case, so makes a fundamental difference in an essential aspect of human living, while the move towards “art for all” aimed to bring an aesthetic quality to the lives of people who would certainly not have expired if they had not been exposed to art.

Q: In order to illustrate the concept of Design for All for our readers, could you name examples of products where Design for All is manifested?

A: Products of this kind fall under two headings: the involuntary and the intentional application of Design for All. The first category is rather broader and has a very long history. Perhaps the most familiar product in this case is the ball-point pen, which was originally designed to deal with the problems caused by trying to write with a fountain pen at altitude, but is now the standard writing implement used by practically all of us, simply because it is so much easier and more intuitive than a fountain pen.

Another good example is glasses: these days, so many of us wear glasses for reading or to protect our eyes from bright sunlight that we tend to forget that the product can originally be classified as a “technical aid” for coping with a recognised disability. And yet glasses are now so popular that they have become fashion statements on a par with any other item of clothing or accessory.

If you want a good example of the intentional application of Design for All, look at the driverless Copenhagen metro system: the designers’ brief included installing a full-size mock-up of the carriage in Copenhagen’s main square, so that the general public could comment and suggest improvements. A whole host of features makes the entire system (not just the train itself, but everything from the stations, access and ticketing to facilitating cleaning and maintenance operations) easier for everyone concerned – and that means not only the passengers, but also the staff. This is a fine example of the “conscious involvement of users at every stage in the design process”, as the EIDD Stockholm Declaration© recites.

To complete the picture, I think we also need to point out some of the obvious discrepancies, cases where Design for All is often famously trumpeted from the rooftops but ignored in practice. The worst of these by far is practically everything to do with e-Anything. Despite lavish funds invested by the European Commission, which have practically all found their way into the bottomless pockets of established research organisations with their own pre-existing agendas based on niche product developments (the diametric opposite to DfA), if you are not an IT fanatic, you will most probably be baffled when you try to use a new computer, a new software application or a new mobile phone for the first time. For example, the instructions always seem to be written by technical experts in such a way that only other technical experts can understand them (in other words, the only people who can understand them are the ones that don’t need them in the first place). No sooner have we all at last mastered the basics of an operating system than some bright spark decides to change it all for no apparent reason: is there really any purpose behind the bewildering recent changes in Microsoft Word, other than the desire to generate a new market?

Design for All describes clear, simple methods for bridging the gaps between application developers and users, but is not employed by the IT community, which prefers to focus on increasingly sophisticated technical aids for identified niches, real electronic miracle gimmicks in many cases, while studiously avoiding the big picture questions, such as “why do I still have to use an 1867 invention (the typewriter keyboard, based on a British patent dated 1714) to interface with my database?”. Instead of inventing the n-millionth violent video game, could we not invest one n-millionth of our resources in researching a viable alternative to the keyboard?

Q: How many designers in, let’s say, western European countries implement this concept in their work and how many design products are at the same time Design for All (percentage wise)?

A: The answer to that question is: lamentably few. But, as I said before, don’t point accusing fingers at designers alone: if the decision-makers do not allow them the necessary freedom of action, even the most aware designers cannot always factor Design for All methodology into their product and system development processes. I shall not even attempt to guess a percentage, as it would not really mean anything at all. I would prefer to say that a good percentage of our designers are capable of using Design for All methods if they are allowed to do so.

Pete Kercher