Designing for Disability Elevates Everyone

Creating a more inclusive and better world

Photo by marianne bos on Unsplash

“We spend a lot time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it.” — Dr. Prabhjot Singh, Director of Systems Design at the Earth Institute

In a TED Talk at TEDxMidAtlantic in 2016, Elise Roy delivered a message that is imperative for designers everywhere to understand. The message is simple — when we design for the disabled, everyone benefits. Elise Roy is a deaf human centered designer, and she has become an outspoken advocate for the notion of designing for disability. She is on the frontlines of design suggesting that solutions developed by designing for the disabled will outperform solutions developed by designing for the norm. This is a powerful idea.

Elise Roy | TEDxMidAtlantic 2016

In her Talk, Elise tells the story of her time in a design school woodshop. “As you’re working with a tool, right before it’s about to kick back at you — which means the piece or the tool jumps back at you — it makes a sound. And I couldn’t hear this sound. So I decided, why not try and solve it? My solution was a pair of safety glasses that were engineered to visually alert the user to pitch changes in the tool, before the human ear could pick it up. Why hadn’t tool designers thought of this before?” Her story is very personal, but it resonates, because it illustrates her point perfectly. There are so many things that designers will not naturally design for if they are only designing for the norm. The glasses Elise engineered are of course useful to people that are not deaf too. And, there are thousands of products that could be designed better by thinking about disability. And, there are quite a few products that exist because people designed with disability in mind. Elise’s website identifies a few, ‘The typewriter, audio books, remote controls, OXO grips, & closed captioning were all created by designing for disability.’

“Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’” — Neil deGrasse Tyson

Perhaps we should start to teach designers to design with disability in mind. Educating future designers to design for disability would likely lead to better design with more functionality. And, ingraining the empathy necessary for this work into new designers will make them better humans in the process of educating them. Likewise, we should encourage more people with disabilities to be designers. Having this perspective at the table of the design industry will inherently add an important perspective to conversations about how we should design products and experiences.

“Designing for a user problem that you don’t deeply understand is really hard to do. You’re much more likely to successfully design for a user problem that you deeply understand. It also makes you more creative and more innovative when you do this kind of counterfactual thinking. It has a neurological effect that stimulates creativity.” — Katy Mogal

It is conceivable that if we as a society decide to design with disability in mind, then the quality of life for everyone will increase. Also, designers can enable people with the systems, products, and experiences they design. If we leverage a deeper understanding of the human experience of everyone, we will be able to create a world that is more inclusive and better designed for everyone. This is an opportunity for designers to have a massive disruptive positive impact on the future.