Here is the 2nd of Michael Wolff's letters to designers in India - and to all of us too.
Dear Reader,
“Remember, remember the 5th of November.”
Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night in England and we’re celebrating the failure of his plot, in 1605, to blow up our Parliament. My ears are full of the sound of crackling fireworks and the sky is full of brilliant colour and light. At the same time in India, and in England too, people will be celebrating the Festival of Diwali.
In many of England’s cities there’ll be a glorious firework competition. I hope you enjoy a happy and colourful Diwali.
In my first letter to you, I wrote about going to a design conference in Oslo. I was invited to talk about the opportunities we have as designers to contribute to making our world a happier, healthier and better place. I was surprised because I was expecting yet another conference with designers explaining how wonderful and significant we are and how brilliant our work is. But here was a conference focused on inclusive design, in which all sorts of people, including me, shared experiences of how inadequate our antennae still are, in the way they notice the needs of differently-abled people. How, at best, so much of the physical world that we designers have influenced, doesn’t work well enough for many people. And at worst, is actually callous.
In Oslo, Marcus Berglund, Disability Ambassador for the Scandic Hotel Group, asked me how I would feel if, when I wanted to take money from an ATM, I had to ask a stranger to take my card, use my pin number, check my bank balance, handle my money and then give the card and the money back to me. Obviously I wouldn’t feel good at all. No one would. But that’s what most wheelchair users have to do because the ATM’s are often not positioned with sufficient consideration.
Equally surprising is how many wheelchairs don’t allow their users to raise themselves to their full height, so, much of the time people who live in them have cricked necks from looking up, or are endlessly looked down on, like children, by full-height people. There’s only one wheel chair I know that enables this flexibility, but its appearance is typical of the aesthetically impoverished and functional aesthetic that disabled people are offered. And it’s very expensive. I’m surprised at the beauty and wonders of bicycle, motorbike and even small car design compared to the worthy but gloomy ranges of products whenever disability is concerned.
There’s an enormous and growing global population of differently-abled and aging people. It’s the elephant in the room that many of us in the design business are still choosing to ignore. It’s a substantial opportunity for designers and entrepreneurs around the world – an opportunity that will handsomely reward those who take it. What’s needed now is elegant innovation and great design that includes everyone in the enjoyment of practical and delightful things and places. Many of the great ideas produced in our conference in Oslo, in just 24 hours, showed how with collaboration, inspiration and imagination, wonderful ideas can come to life and improve the lives of millions.
Recently in the UK, there have been initiatives to demonstrate how design can improve both the cross-infection statistics and the respect and dignity that people who are ill in hospitals are given. The Design Council ran competitions to generate new and more considerate ideas. Although there were many innovative and useful ideas, nearly all the work I saw looked like my dentist’s surgery. Most of it had that look of implacably dull product design, still influenced by modernism where humour, charm and the joy of colour appeared to have little place. It seemed to me to still be a reflection of some product designer’s vision of the world, in which everything is serious, simple and plain and where pleasure, delight and human idiosyncrasy don’t quite fit.
Of course there were many benefits in much of the innovation and nearly all of it was worthwhile and intelligent. Although, in my view, there didn’t seem to have been enough evidence of the designers having taken their own shoes off and having spent time living in the shoes of the people we all serve.
Being in other people’s
shoes is no different from being in any kind of naturally considerate
relationship. But it requires an extra amount of curiosity and appreciation.
That extra amount of curiosity means pushing into more intrusive and personal
details to discover deeper and more emotional things than you find out from
ethnographic research. It means a journey of exploration with your partner or client or customer – the
person who will use the results of your imagination, your creativity and design. The deeper you go and the more you can be in their
shoes, the better prepared and more effective the results of your creativity will
become.
The same is true of appreciation. Among the most valuable attributes we’re fortunate to have as designers, is a capacity of noticing – a kind of fearless openness to everything. Like a zoom lens, we can see from the widest picture of a person’s anxiety in a scary hospital reception area to the most detailed close-up of a person with arthritis struggling to open a piece of bad packaging.
We can use our zoom lens actively and notice how people are reacting to everything around them. Any designer can use their noticing and appreciation to open conversations with people about their experiences with things and places. I’ve found most people enjoy these conversations and then find out that they hadn’t noticed themselves, how well or badly the things they use in their lives serve them. Many, like the wheelchair users with the ATM’s I described, just put up with it, and so the banks have no pressure to review and correct what they do.
The inspirations from inside you that drive your imagination will come directly from the power and intensity of your curiosity and appreciation of others. I’ve always called these the muscles that enable me to progress the quality of what I expect from myself. Muscles, because I exercise them. The same is true for my imagination and performance as a designer. It’s hard to give up the preconceptions of style that you choose to express you, and the taste that you enjoy personally, nor should you. It’s a question of when and how you give them the reins.
In my own experience, until I feel complete with the work of my curiosity and the learning from my appreciation, I don’t trust the interventions of my imagination. The many ideas that lurk unused and unappreciated within us are no substitute to removing our shoes and living in the shoes of those that our work is intended to serve. Sometimes swapping shoes isn’t easy.
A year ago, during one of the RCA (Royal College of Art) and DBA (Design Business Association) 24-hour design challenges, in Dublin, I was supporting five groups of designers – each working with partners with various impairments. Their challenge was to make Dublin easier to navigate. One partner, with cerebral palsy, was in a wheelchair. He found it hard to control his movements, including the muscles in his face. He communicated by moving his head so that a small unit at the back of his neck transformed his movements into text on a screen. I felt awkward in his presence and even found childlike fear inhibiting me in approaching him. I was ashamed of myself.
Later in the day, I walked behind him and the designers he was working with, by the side of Dublin’s river Liffy. They were walking beside a wall designed to protect children from falling in and to allow adults to enjoy the river view – but not adults in wheelchairs. Suddenly the words “I can’t see over this fucking wall” appeared on his screen. I cracked up, and at that moment of humour, our relationship became possible for me. We started our conversation. He’d inspired me to be able to be in his shoes. So for me, embracing everybody, whatever individual problems they face, and especially the things and qualities that make them different, is what inclusive design is all about.
It’s the quality of our inspirations that define what we can achieve. Before imagination, innovation, design and technology can come into play, inspiration, that moment, or even split second, has to have happened. It’s like a thought appearing from nowhere or from a moment of enlightenment – a thought that went from not being there to being there – a sudden unpredictable moment or flash of inspiration. That’s what my friend in his wheelchair in Dublin, gave me.
When you have the insights and the empathy you gain from taking your own shoes off and being in the shoes of those you serve, you’re bound to get that inspiration, and only then you’ll be in the position to put your own shoes back on and take the steps you choose towards making the world a happier, healthier and better place for us all.
With my best wishes to you,
Related Post:
A Letter from Michael Wolff No.1