This is Why Universal Design Solves Problems You Didn’t Know Existed
I believe that designers want to reach everyone. They want people to fall in love with their work. They want to create elegant solutions that solve day-to-day challenges. They want to show off the amazing things that they have created.
Designers do not actively want to exclude anyone.
Yet, everyday an older person who is losing their vision struggles to access their online bank account. A woman asks her smart speaker the same thing repeatedly and it fails to recognize her voice. An immigrant is not sure whether he has sent his doctor the correct information because the website is not available in his first language. And there are millions more, every day that try and fail to do the things that the majority of the population takes for granted.
Although designers have good intentions, they are unaware of the struggles, the pain points, and the areas of friction that marginalized people experience when they try to use their products. Although they may practice human-centred design, they have put the wrong human at the centre of their design. Although they may try to empathize with their users, they have failed to show compassion towards the millions of people who are excluded, under-represented, or actively ignored by traditional design processes.
Universal design is a cutting-edge solution for promoting digital equality for all marginalized groups.
It comes down to a single idea. Making digital solutions that everyone can use equally. With that simple idea, we can transform our work by enabling everyone to participate in the knowledge society and digital economy. It can connect what we do, research, innovation, entrepreneurship with why we do it, people, the planet, and prosperity. Universal design started back in the 1990s, but it has spread all over the world. The UN has mainstreamed universal design in all of their policies and programmes, and under UN human rights law, countries around the world have an obligation to put universal design into practice.
Universal design comes down to four key concepts. First, equality: Universal design is about creating technology that everyone can use equally. What we want is for everyone to have the opportunity to access and use technology equally. What we have are huge digital divides that separate people into those that have access and can easily use technology and those that cannot. This means that digital divides affect women and girls more than men and boys, persons with disabilities more than persons without disabilities, persons that live in rural areas more than urban areas, older persons more than younger persons, and so on. Second, diversity: Universal design is all about recognizing the barriers that people experience participating in society. We live in an incredibly diverse world, but diversity isn’t a checklist. We must recognize that a person who holds an intersectional identity will experience greater levels of marginalization than others. This means a woman with a disability will experience barriers accessing and using technology because of her disability and her gender. Her experience will be different than a man with a disability or a woman without a disability. Third, accessibility: Universal design comes at the intersection of accessibility and usability. This means having access to technology and using technology are interrelated. Having access to a computer doesn’t enable someone to use the web. Being able to use a mobile phone, doesn’t necessarily mean someone will have access to mobile internet. Fourth, participation: universal design is all about designing technology in collaboration with relevant users and stakeholders. Historically, technology was only usable for an elite group of technical experts. Now, we expect technology to be usable for everyone. It used to be that technology was only created by an elite group of experts. But now, we can find people with almost no technical skill creating new technologies all the time. Ensuring that a diverse group of people have a key role in creating new technologies is the most critical aspect of universal design.
We need awareness.
We need to design solutions that everyone can use equally. We need universal design. The annual Universal Design Day is celebrated every year on May 28th. Innovators, entrepreneurs, and knowledge creators throughout the world will bring attention to the benefits of universal design for innovation and entrepreneurship. It is a turning point in the over thirty-year history since the invention of universal design and an opportunity to look to the future.
I believe that universal design can change the world. If you want to learn more about my life and work in universal design, subscribe to my podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, or take my course on the Fundamentals of Universal Design, which is also available on Listenable.
