By Pete Kercher

An article for the first anniversary edition of the newsletter of the Design for All Institute of India, January 2007.

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“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet….”

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2

When Sunil Bhatia invited me to write an article for this first anniversary edition of the newsletter of the Design for All Institute of India and specified that I was to describe the development of Design for All in the year 2006, I immediately found myself in a difficult situation: how should I go about crystallising the development of Design for All in one year, when that development takes such different forms from one country to another (not to mention continents…) and to all intents and purposes defies segmentation into annual bite-sized milestones?

So I started by looking back at some of the events that could be identified as milestones in the last year, in random order:

- Activities involving EIDD and its member organisations took place in an unprecedented 22 European countries;

- A highly active new group was set up in Serbia: very promising for a blossoming future in south-eastern Europe;

- Organisations in two new countries joined EIDD;

- The first Work for All conference was held in Ireland and attended by top politicians;

- Design for All was factored into several top international design awards;

- New contacts were established in several countries worldwide;

- The European Commission showed signs of being prepared to explore an holistic rather than a sectoral approach to social inclusion.

Most of these milestones are concerned with the organisational interests of EIDD and its allied institutes: they are significant in relation to the development of Design for All because every practical approach – and, like all design disciplines, Design for All is a practical approach, as well as a philosophy – requires an organisational infrastructure to further its interests.

What transpires immediately from a cursory glance at these milestones is their eurocentric focus: while this is natural enough, as my perspective is that of President of a European organisation, I do not want to give the impression that the relevance of Design for All is necessarily restricted to any particular model of socio-economic development. Indeed, the geographical area that we know as Europe (whatever that happens to be at any moment in time – and it is a concept that has been changing constantly over the centuries) contains a wide diversity of models, some of which have more in common with other, extra-European counterparts than with each other.

In the case of India, of course, the establishment of the Design for All Institute of India must certainly be classified as the most important milestone in the local advance of Design for All. Congratulations are due to Sunil Bhatia and the team in India for all their hard work.

To answer the question, then, the best approach is probably to look at the significance of ongoing developments that can be expected to have a fallout effect on the discipline as a whole in due course. These developments may be self-evident, such as the adoption on 13 December 2006 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which has at long last included disabled people in the recognised pattern of enshrinement and endorsement of civil rights. Exactly what the material effects of such a laudable piece of international paper will turn out to be in the long term is of course a moot point: if the model of the United Nations Assembly’s recognition of human rights is anything to go by, then the adoption of a Convention could well be interpreted by future historians as a danger signal. How many civilians and military (and one man’s freedom fighter has always been another man’s terrorist) have been killed quite senselessly and for the greater glory of self-aggrandising politicians of whatever hue since human life was declared to be inviolable (by the same politicians or their representatives) in the Universal Declaration of 1948? As Tommasi de Lampedusa wrote in his great novel about the Italian Risorgimento, The Leopard, all things must change (apparently), so that nothing changes in reality…

So perhaps it is more pertinent for me to look at apparently much more modest developments that have taken place within our own field of competence, as a closer study reveals them to be indicative of a groundswell of massive change.

One such development took place in the course of 2006, with ramifications that are far more extensive than its apparent organisational motives. In May 2006, in evident disagreement with the sentiments expressed by the Bard and quoted at the beginning of this article, EIDD changed its name. This is how the name change was reported on the EIDD website on 20 May:

EIDD changes its name: "EIDD - Design for All Europe":

Reflecting the development in its core business since foundation thirteen years ago, the EIDD Annual General Meeting 2006 made the major decision to change the Institute's name: from today, the Institute shall be known as "EIDD - Design for All Europe", with the abbreviations "EIDD" and "European Institute" continuing in use.
This decision reflects the Institute's longstanding focus on Design for All as a path towards the achievement of social inclusion following an holistic methodology. At the same time, the Institute's new name maintains a clear reference to its roots as the European Institute for Design and Disability, thus maintaining a cultural continuity of essential importance to any complete understanding of Design for All.

The discussion about how to take this momentous step had been under way for several years, punctuated at irregular intervals by (less emotionally charged) amendments of the Institute’s mission statement, which has gradually evolved from the first 1993 version

"A non-profit making foundation contributing to the participation of people with disabilities through the application of design"

through such intermediate phases as the 1995 version

"Contributing to enhancing the quality of life of all citizens by promoting the ideal of barrier-free design"

and the 1998 amendment

"Contributing to enhancing the quality of life of all citizens by promoting the ideal of Design for All."

to its current version of

"Enhancing the Quality of Life through Design for All".

EIDD did not "invent" Design for All: the Institute was originally established because design and its practising professions, which can make such an important difference to the quality of everyone’s life, were nevertheless often leading the way in manifestations of appalling complacency and ignorance. Something had to be done about improving design’s track record in the area of disability and the founders of EIDD succeeded in gathering together the necessary critical mass from several European countries to establish the Institute in 1993.

Almost immediately (at the Bonn symposium in December of the same year), EIDD started discussing Design for All, as it was rapidly apparent that there were (and still are) two ways of applying the practice of design to improving things for disabled people. Let’s call them, for the sake of argument, the straightforward approach and the complex approach. In design parlance, we might distinguish them as "Design for Disability" and "Design for All", though their ramifications in practice indicate that they are perhaps best described as “design for the inclusion of identified categories”, or "exclusively inclusive design", and "design for holistic social inclusion", or "inclusively inclusive design". The one is straightforward, because it avoids the many and varied issues of human diversity and the ethical responsibilities of creativity applied for utilitarian purposes, preferring to aim straight at the objective of a clearly-defined and sometimes narrow (these days often increasingly narrow and highly specialised) target; the other is complex, for the very reason that it is built on the synergic concomitance of these and many other factors, influences and variables: in short, like nature, the world and life itself, it is complex, though not necessarily complicated.

The straightforward approach

The straightforward approach is the one that could reasonably have been expected of any competent designer, architect or other exponent of the creative professions already at the time when EIDD was established. The first step is to identify a problem, which may be in the way a product is used (usability), the way an environment or building is accessed (accessibility) or the way a communication system is understood (comprehensibility). Having identified the problem, a competent professional should next explore the range of potential users of the product, environment or communication system, then start drawing up targeted design hypotheses to respond to the identified challenges.

In this respect, the individual disabled person, with an identifiable life situation requiring improvement, and the community of disabled people sharing comparable life situations both constitute rather clearly identifiable targets for the design process. The result is that designers have developed a series of specialisations that have first related rather closely to the sciences of rehabilitation and have tended more recently to develop synergies with information and communication technologies (ICTs), as tools for enhancing the quality of life for identifiable disabled groups.

Of course, the process of catering for an identified need with a clear design process is not (and never has been) quite that simple in the real world. Numerous other factors have a bad habit of getting in the way, factors that range from the realistic to the patently absurd (but not less influential). The stresses induced by the perceived need to shorten products’ time to market have made it increasingly difficult for designers to take the necessary time out to ponder their creations, consider their subsidiary effects (unplanned usages, like using a pen as a telephone dialler or a back-scratcher, for example) and involve real focus user groups in preliminary and ongoing development evaluations… and this is a realistic development that we are expected to accept in respectful silence, because it is dictated by curiously ineffable "market forces". But the influence of the patently absurd is also there for all to perceive: one example for all is the restaurant owner who resists adapting his premises to make them wheelchair accessible out of an illogical and rather disgusting prejudicial fear that disabled patrons would scare his “normal” able-bodied clients away. These are different problems which require different answers. In the first case, there is a real need for the methods and advantages of good design to be taught not only to future designers and architects, but also to those whose decisions dictate the scope of their activities: marketing, management and public administration are fields that spring to mind immediately. In the second case, the need is for more useful education from infancy onwards, whose purpose must be to reduce and eventually eliminate prejudices.

The straightforward approach has actually had a rather good innings in the last fifteen to twenty years. It has achieved major milestones of its own, particularly in Europe and the United States. Since the war, advances in medical science have made it possible to live longer and healthier lives despite having a permanent disability. Also, the writing has been on the wall for Europe and North America ever since the post-war baby boom: sooner or later, the population was going to get old, so some form of allowance had to be made. The European Union responded by gradually factoring elements of specialised research for disabled and elderly applications of existing and future ICTs into its framework research programmes (1 January 2007 saw the launch of the seventh of these, known in jargon as FP7). The result has been the growth of a rather large research community with a focus on "special needs" solutions that has done some magnificent work in facilitating everyday life for many categories of people, by generating everything from advanced prostheses and implants to improved low floor buses and more user-friendly advanced consumer electronics. In the United States, the human rights legislation embodied in the Americans with Disabilities Act moved the architectural profession to come to terms with the challenge of access to the built environment. In both cases, as indeed elsewhere in the world, notably Japan, another society that is having to learn to cope with ageing, such thinking has led gradually to the development of a design approach that attempts to broaden the scope of potential users of its end products, starting from the principle of including disabled people.

Design for All

The complex approach, or Design for All, has a parallel history. As the EIDD’s Stockholm Declaration© 2004 (reproduced in full in the first issue of the Design for All Institute of India Newsletter, in February 2006) states:

"Design for All has roots both in Scandinavian functionalism in the 1950s and in ergonomic design from the 1960s. There is also a socio-political background in Scandinavian welfare policies, which in Sweden in the late 1960s gave birth to the concept of ‘A society for all’ referring primarily to accessibility."

It is no coincidence, obviously, that the authority for this statement comes from Finn Petrén, Vice-President of EIDD since 2003, who has long played the leading role in the socio-political development of Design for All in Scandinavia, until quite recently as Director of the Nordic Council on Disability Policy, then as President of EIDD Sverige and co-ordinator of Sweden’s major national Design for All programme.

The first and fundamental difference between the two approaches is the attitude taken towards the world and its inhabitants. Though both approaches aim at achieving inclusion, the straightforward approach developed from a matrix of design for disability, which leads it to tend to continue targeting inclusion by identifying categories to be included and dealing with them, one by one or group by group, as the need is perceived to arise, while Design for All developed from a socio-political matrix in which the foremost emphasis has always been on social inclusion as such, rather than on one or more identifiable groups of people to be included, and design has been found to be the most efficient and effective tool to achieve this purpose.

No simple label is perfect and Design for All is no exception: its detractors have long enjoyed repeating the remarkably persistent, though eminently foolish myth that Design for All must fail in the attempt to make "one size fit all", demonstrating an avoidable tendency to attribute literal meanings to words, rather than study the messages they convey, and a somewhat obstinate refusal to study the discipline and its aspirations. Be that as it may, this criticism was already answered in the statement adopted by the EIDD’s Bonn Symposium in December 1993:

"[…] there will always be a need for design directed towards meeting special needs."
 
The approach adopted by the complex approach, or Design for All, may appear when first studied to be quite similar to that of the straightforward approach. Once again, the first step is to identify a problem, followed by exploring the range of potential users, consulting with them and then drawing up targeted design hypotheses to respond to the identified challenges. The difference lies in the definitions attributed to the terminology being used.

Identifying the problem

There is no substantial difference between the classical methodology used by design in general and that used by design for disability. The "problem" may be a car’s poor fuel performance, the difficulty in cleaning a household kitchen device, a building whose only access is by stairs or a road sign that needs to be read and understood rapidly. Or it may be a manufacturer’s need to create something new so as to keep his market share and stay in business. The purpose is generally identified before the designer is called in to deal with it. As a result, major decisions pertaining to the framing of the relevant questions have already been made before the intervention of design and its methodology.

In the case of Design for All, the "problem" is approached from a different angle. The first major difference is that it is never seen as a problem at all, but as a challenge to the creativity of design. This may sound like semantic hair-splitting, but it makes a world of difference to the thinking involved in the course of the entire design process and so also to the eventual results. So, now that we have established that we are never dealing with a problem, but always with a challenge, how do we start tackling the challenge?

Here the vital element of difference lies in the moment when design expertise is involved: Design for All requires that, from the very beginning, the analytical skills which the design professions are trained to exercise must be applied to the definition of the parameters. If design is essentially a problem-solving methodology (or, to put the more positive spin on it, a challenge-tackling methodology), then it needs to have an important say in the definition of the problem and hence the challenge. Unlike politicians and diplomats, whose millennial culture has led them to build us an increasingly faceless world of meaningless (and essentially contentless) compromises based on a dreary series of lowest common denominators (though the language used to depict them is redolent with high-flown phraseology, whose aim is to strike a chord with ordinary human aspirations), designers, architects and other professional creatives are more akin to entrepreneurs, whose essential function is to generate a win-win situation for everyone concerned. Notoriously, that is never achieved by adopting the platitudes of lowest common denominators.

Exploring the range of potential users

This brings me immediately to the next stage: that of identifying the potential users. In the classical design scenario, the user is the person whom we identify as the end user, i.e. the one who has to interact with the object as it executes the function for which it was made. But this approach leaves us many lacunae. The most obvious is the whole series of people who are involved in the object’s life cycle upstream and downstream of its actual usage, from those involved in its physical manufacture, supplying the raw materials and energy, shipping, wholesaling, distributing, retailing and delivering, to those concerned with its maintenance during its life cycle and those others whose task it will one day be to dispose of it responsibly and sustainably.

In addition to this, we need to question the basic assumption of the object’s user: is our user base – and hence our customer base – correctly defined? When defining the users of a simple object like a chair, for example, what limitations have we set to our thinking? Are they merely anthropometric and ergonomic? Have we started out by describing the object as a "chair", or more broadly as "seating"? Have we considered the different ways that different cultures use seating, or the adaptability expected of every product that becomes a familiar and so trusted feature of the home or workplace?

But that still only tackles the expectation that seating will be used for sitting. Before we go any further, we also need to explore the potential unplanned applications to which the object might be subjected in its lifetime. Chairs may be made for sitting, but they are often also used for climbing, for example, to reach a high shelf, or, when combined together, as ad hoc adventure playgrounds by children… All of these are potential users, though purist designers may frown on such unworthy applications of their earth-shattering masterpieces…!

The principle here is inclusive thinking: when defining who is a user, every conceivable actor and every conceivable scenario should be taken into consideration. And then we should always remember to make allowance for others: because there certainly will be more!

Consulting

The consultative process is a direct development on the previous stage of identifying the range of users. To those of us who talk about this every day, it is a natural requirement to consult the users of every design at every stage in the design process, from framing the brief to marketing. But there is a very strong tendency out there in the real world to cut corners… and the more that economic pressures are perceived, the more corners end up being cut.

So perhaps it is necessary to reiterate the principle that consultation is not a corner available for cutting. For example, if a company decides to reduce its costs by eliminating secondary product packaging, it will need to consult with a wide range of actors/users if it is to get it right and so achieve its purpose. Those actors include the shippers, the distributors, the retailers, the marketing experts, a cross-section of consumers, whose reactions to the change must be positive, the manufacturers of packaging materials, who will be called upon to create the alternatives, and so on. Because the aim is to cut costs, not the manufacturer’s own throat!

The example I have chosen is apparently commonplace and hardly germane to the field of social inclusion, but I chose it intentionally: the practice of consultation makes sound business sense and it is only by applying the practices of good economics and business that Design for All can expect to have a lasting impact on society.

This is what the EIDD Stockholm Declaration© says about consultation:

"The practice of Design for All 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."

Drawing up design hypotheses

It is only at this stage that the team of practitioners applying the methodology of Design for All will venture into creating actual design hypotheses. Again, those of us who work in this field may feel it is superfluous to reiterate the obvious, but the most blatant error made repeatedly at this stage by designers, architects and other creatives the world over derives from the tendency to design for themselves, rather than for the target audience, or, even worse, to design for a dream-like idea of what they would like to be. Which is why we have so many products, buildings, environments, services and systems that seem to be made for a brand of humanity that is never born, never gets pregnant, never has a day’s illness, never breaks a leg, never ages, never… exists! It is a world of perfectly healthy males, aged about 25, who probably spring fully-grown from a pod, or are manufactured in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. It is a very impoverished view of the world… and also a very unflattering view of the imaginative capacities of the people who created it, whether they be exponents of design or marketing.

But we are diverse! As the Stockholm Declaration© already established in 2004:

Across Europe, human diversity in age, culture and ability is greater than ever. We now survive illness and injury and live with disability as never before. Although today’s world is a complex place, it is one of our own making, one in which we therefore have the possibility – and the responsibility – to base our designs on the principle of inclusion.

And we should be celebrating the cultural and human wealth that derives from this wonderful gift of human diversity, rather than stolidly obliging humanity to conform to rigid standards. Which is why the actual design stage should shun the easy recourse to compliance with standards and checklists that ascertain ex post factum that a given design will suit a given arithmetic average. Standards have a very sensible purpose: to ensure that plug X fits into socket Y or that a mobile telephone will communicate within a given bandbreadth. Human beings are neither plugs nor mobile telephones and should not be categorised as if they were.

The metamorphosis in thinking

Practically since its inception and as a result of the increasing synergy between the community of social inclusion actors and that of Design, the EIDD has been providing the platform for a gradual metamorphosis in thinking about design, its scope, its potential and its future.

This metamorphosis has received considerable stimuli from many sides, among which the need to improve design’s track record for disabled and ageing people is a very important one, favoured by the advancing age of the continent’s population, as I mentioned before. Similarly, other socio-environmental factors have exerted further major stimuli on the metamorphic process around design. Primary among these is  the enormous ethnic variety that is now commonplace in European societies: the first waves came as southern Europeans (mostly from Italy) migrated to the mines of Belgium and France between the world wars. Then came the return of colonial administrators from newly independent states shortly after the last World War, who brought the acquired taste for foreign exotica back to dreary war-torn societies. These were closely followed by the first immigrants from those same countries, although they confined their interest to the ex-colonial powers (broadly speaking, these were France, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal). The economic boom in the fifties brought more intra-European migration, as first Italians, Spaniards ands Portuguese, then Greeks, Turks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs migrated to Germany. Economic migration from the Maghreb and West Africa then turned former sources of migration into destinations for immigrants, as Italy and Spain had to learn to deal with an unfamiliar phenomenon. The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the economic development favoured by the European Union and the rise in perceived insecurity in many countries, leading to an influx of asylum seekers who only want to be allowed to live their lives in peace, out of the reach of rapacious politicians, then made migration a significant factor in the few remaining countries in Europe where it was previously unfamiliar: Scandinavia as a whole and, more recently and to a quite staggering extent, Ireland.

Europe is not today’s melting pot, because different cultures are not being forced to melt into one indistinguishable mass (regardless of what the detractors of the process of European integration claim in their simplistic rhetoric), but maintain their respective independence; as a result, it certainly provides a challenge of social inclusion that is worthy of the finest design minds.

Another factor that contributes to the metamorphosis in design thinking is the realisation of the discipline’s potential for social change. And yet, when most members of the public are asked to describe their instinctive reactions to the word "design", the adjectives they cite tend to be related to the spurious, the frivolous, the superfluous, the ephemeral, the costly, the unnecessary. This opinion is compounded by the attitudes adopted by the many of the world’s "star designers", most of whom are more deserving of the epithet “artist” than of that of "designer". By publicising their own egos as being of greater importance than the intrinsic values of their products and intimating that those products are worthy by demanding exclusively high prices, these individuals do a favour to nobody at all except themselves. They certainly have a hugely detrimental effect on the reputation of design in the mind of the general public and, as a consequence, in the opinions of decision-makers the world over, who are liable to write it off with the same set of negative adjectives.

While public opinion considers design to be relevant to nothing but expensive clothing, exclusive furniture and hugely expensive architectural creations – at least, that part of public opinion that can afford the luxury of thinking about design at all – thus perpetuating established mindsets among middle-level decision-makers (who are, after all, members of the general public), the design community itself continues to publish the expensive and the ephemeral, the fleeting and the superfluous, making a tremendous fuss about its tendencies, its aesthetics and all the other terms that are more at home in the writings of an art critic.

And yet, as those of us who have devoted our energies to the ethics of this admirable discipline know only too well, design can do a lot more than generate the latest superfluous frippery. When Britain set up the Design against Crime initiative, for example, it showed one of many ways forward. Much minor criminal behaviour can be avoided at source by "designing it out" of the context: design can be applied to ensuring that the potential for crime does not exist in the first place.

It is in this vein that Design for All applies design methodology to ensure that the potential for social exclusion – regardless of whether it is based on ethnic origins, culture, lifestyle, gender, social or sexual preferences, temporary or permanent disability, illness, or whatever other conditioning factor – does not exist in the first place. States the Stockholm Declaration©:

"Design for All aims to enable all people to have equal opportunities to participate in every aspect of society. To achieve this, the built environment, everyday objects, services, culture and information – in short, everything that is designed and made by people to be used by people – must be accessible, convenient for everyone in society to use and responsive to evolving human diversity."

Where we come from…

In the dawn of human prehistory, our ancestors lived in a hostile environment. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this fact: the history of human evolution is the history of humanity’s ability to adapt to the vagaries of that hostile environment. Indeed, the ability to adapt has become so engrained in human mindsets as to develop almost into a part of our psychological DNA, as no longer an ability, but an obligation to adapt.

While this was certainly a very favourable propensity on the part of our ancestors, one that ensured that we would survive until the present day as a species, the time has now come to question whether, like the human appendix, it has largely outlived its usefulness and deserves a quiet retirement.

The fact is that recent generations have witnessed the development if a new paradigm in humanity’s relationship with its host planet. Paradigms do not generally change overnight, but take a long time to do so and this one, being  a paradigm of such primary importance, is certainly no exception. Until the middle of the last century, the majority of humanity still lived in relatively close contact with the land: the first major paradigm change come with mankind’s increasing urbanisation. But of primary interest to us here is not so much the fact that humanity now lives in sprawling conurbations, as the fact that those sprawling conurbations were not of course created by nature, but built by the humanity that inhabits them. Here, then, is the major paradigm change, which calls for a major change in humanity’s instinctive thinking: although we inhabit a landscape of our own making, we still instinctively expect ourselves and others to adapt to the hardships, obstacles and often mind-boggling stupidities  imposed on it by bad design.

At EIDD’s establishment in 1993, the Institute’s first President Paul Hogan coined the simple slogan that encapsulates the essence of design’s responsibility and potential, when he stated that:

"Good design enables, bad design disables."

In 2004, the EIDD Stockholm Declaration© provided an equally simple, immediate definition of Design for All:

"Design for All is design for human diversity, social inclusion and equality."

Now, in response to the need for a clear statement about the methodology to be adopted in our practical approach to targeting and achieving social inclusion, the EIDD Waterford Convention©, adopted at the conclusion of the 2006 Annual Conference on the topic of Work for All, established that:

Design for All "insists on the vital importance of a seamless rather than a sectoral approach to social inclusion".

Conclusion

I started this article by explaining that I believe it to be impossible to single out any one event or milestone that can be described as the most important to have affected the discipline of Design for All during the course of 2006.

Although considerations of length (this is, after all, an article and not – yet – an outline for a book) induce me to summarise many factors in a manner that I fear leaves more to be explained than I have succeeded in clarifying, I trust that I have conveyed a few vital impressions:

1) The essence of Design for All derives from socio-political rather than from design roots;

2) Its approach is therefore essentially holistic, based on the real need to cater for the wealth of human diversity, rather than focused on restricted groups of users, however deserving in the short to medium term;

3) Design for All constitutes the methodology that lends itself best to achieving a seamless rather than a sectoral approach to social inclusion;

4) It therefore also constitutes the methodology that lends itself best to translating fine sentiments into hard, tangible facts: really making this world into a better place for everyone and not just talking about it.

© Pete Kercher, President, EIDD – Design for All Europe, January 2007