Julia Cassim

Critical users in design innovation

Each year, the Small Business Programme of the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Research Centre (HHRC) organises the DBA Design Challenge in collaboration with the Design Business Association (DBA), a major professional organisation of designers in the UK. Leading design consultancies are teamed with young disabled users and challenged to develop innovative scenarios for new inclusive products and services for the mainstream market. Now in its third year, the theme for the event is ‘innovation through inclusive design’ with projects undertaken to date covering such areas as packaging, mobility, product design, digital communications, ‘smart’ wearables and public and work environments(Cassim, 2001, Cassim 2002).

Implementing inclusive design: the discrepancy between theory and practice

The theory of inclusive design tends to require user involvement and iterative assessment throughout the whole design process. However, in an industrial context, companies are restricted by design constraints such as time and cost. Through investigating eight projects focusing on inclusive design, the authors highlight discrepancies between theoretical models and industry practice and analyse the underlying reasons. Related issues such as bottom-up design approaches and estimates of design exclusion are also discussed. It is concluded that a change of attitudes towards people with disabilities by people commissioning, as well as performing, design and the provision of design support tools are necessary to bring inclusive design theory and practice closer together.

it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it: the challenge workshop - a designer-centred inclusive design knowledge transfer mechanism for different contexts

This paper will look at the Challenge Workshop, a knowledge transfer model on the inclusive design process based on the seven DBA Inclusive Design Challenges organised at the Royal College of Art (RCA) since 2000 by the author in collaboration with the Design Business Association, the leading trade association for designers in the UK. This mentored annual competition sees leading UK design firms work with consumers with severe disabilities to develop innovative, inclusive and aspirational product and service prototypes for the mainstream market. It will focus on how this collaborative model has been further developed into creative workshops of varying lengths and iterations in different contexts in the UK, Japan, Israel and Singapore to inspire and inform designers, engineers and others of the innovative possibilities of inclusive design and in the process change their perceptions. The paper will also describe how the workshop has been adapted to and addressed the different knowledge transfer challenges of each cultural context and will show examples of some of the outstanding design proposals that have emerged.

Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design – The Challenge Workshops model

The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge and the Challenge Workshops organised by the lead author has exposed numerous design teams to the benefit of working with extreme users - this paper will analyse the challenges and benefits of this approach to inclusive design and suggest how the lessons learned from competition can be transferred into design practice.

Critical User Forums for Inclusive Design

E R G O N O M I C S I N D E S I G N • F A L L 2 0 0 7 nclusive design has emerged as a hot topic in the design and ergonomics communities in the UK since the beginning of the 21st century. Conferences such as Include (http://www.hhc. rca.ac.uk/kt/include/) have been dedicated to it, and inclusive design has been featured in recent Ergonomics Society, Human-Computer Interaction Group, and Human-Computer Interaction International conferences (e.g., HCI 2007, Beijing, http://www.hcii2007.org/). Compared with the United States, where legislation has played a key role in pushing universal design (synonymous with inclusive design), the UK’s approach to inclusive design appears to be more bottom-up – that is, driven by a fastgrowing aging population and by pioneering design companies and organizations such as Scope, the cerebral palsy charity that made inclusive design and access to work the dual planks of its policy drive. Legislation such as the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) has had an impact on service delivery and the built environment and served as an incentive for compliance, but the all-important visualization of inclusive design has been left to designers themselves. In this article, we look at a collaborative initiative that has resulted in the creation of a set of visualized benchmark exemplars of inclusive design covering products, services, visual communications, and environmental design. This initiative has been extremely influential in alerting designers to the innovation and business possibilities that result from an inclusive process.

DBA design challenge: engaging design professionals with inclusive design

The value and relevance of inclusive design is increasingly recognised by design professionals in the UK. An initiative that has encouraged this is the DBA (Inclusive) Design Challenge. Organised by the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre (HHRC) at the Royal College of Art (RCA), it was launched in 2000 in collaboration with the Design Business Association (DBA), a major professional organisation of designers, and it drew on the experience of three previous design challenges organised by the DesignAge programme, whose achievements led to the establishment of the HHRC in 1999.