EDI and Inclusive Design

Rationale:

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is widely accepted as an approach across businesses. Within design, this manifests in two different ways. On the one hand, Inclusive Design, “design that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference”(Inclusive Design Research Centre, no date), widens audience and customer bases by creating products that are suitable for a wider range of people. On the other hand, “diverse firms and product teams have repeatedly been shown to make better decisions, come up with more competitive products, and better understand potential customers. Racial and gender diversity are linked to increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater relative profits” (Wachter-Boettcher, S., 2017)

Within the design industries, we can trace a direct link between the diversity of the design team and the organisation, and the inclusiveness of the designed outputs of the team. In a sense, EDI manifests itself both on an organisational level, in the policies, practices and culture of the organisation and design teams, as well as on a design output level, in the inclusive design values, methods and outputs of the team. It is widely acknowledged (Keates et al., 2000; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Holmes, 2020; Williamson, no date) that a workforce that reflects the makeup of the general population will be able to better design for a wider range of people, as opposed to reinforcing current inequalities. On the most basic level, including team members with a lived experience of exclusion builds a different understanding of user needs into the design process. On another level, the culture of the organisation is reflected within the organisation’s outputs; what is valued internally will also create an impact on what is valued in the designed products. If the organisation values diversity within its workforce, it is likely to value diversity within its user base, and correspondingly, a diverse team and working environment is likely to build and sustain a culture that values those element of diversity and lived experience, reflecting on the ways in which the design outputs become more inclusive. (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Holmes, 2020)

Methodology:

The data collection for this research was carried out through a 3-month sabbatical funded by the University of the Arts London and hosted by Elvie as an industry partner, and was structured into three phases:

1. Initial literature review: to include academic literature on the subject of EDI and Inclusive Design, as well as books written for a more general audience, in particular focussing on the reading list that had been created by the inclusive design group at Elvie. 

2. Interviews with practitioners: Semi-structured qualitative interviews of about 45 minutes were carried out with 26 participants. The participants were recruited according to the criteria that they had experience of working within a design team within the product or digital product industries, and keeping in mind the diversity of respondents in terms of seniority and amount of experience in the field as well as in light of protected characteristics. The interviews were anonymised; participants were given aliases and the main recognisable characteristics were omitted or changed. 

3. Co-design workshops: two co-design workshops were conducted with 18 participants in total, to start defining the framework. These workshops linked good practice (in terms of policy, culture and actions) back to principles and literature and case studies, as well as forward to impact and metrics). One workshop was carried out in person at the Elvie offices with participants from across the digital and physical product design teams, and one was conducted remotely and asynchronously with participants from the same industries but outside of Elvie. Participants were given a choice whether they wanted to be named as co-authors of the framework. 

After the sabbatical an analysis and design phase followed. This consisted of 

- Qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts, identifying themes from the literature as well as emergent themes from the interviews. 

- Qualitative analysis of the results of the co-design workshops, and definition of the final framework. 

- Design of the frameworks, feedback from the co-designers, and iteration.  

References:

Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. The MIT Press. Available at: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/43542 (Accessed: 1 September 2022).

Holmes, K. (2020b) Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. MIT Press.

Inclusive Design Research Centre (no date). Available at: https://legacy.idrc.ocadu.ca/resources/idrc-online/49-articles-and-papers/443-whatisinclusivedesign (Accessed: 1 September 2022).

Keates, S. et al. (2000) ‘Towards a practical inclusive design approach’, in Proceedings on the 2000 conference on Universal Usability  - CUU ’00. Proceedings on the 2000 conference, Arlington, Virginia, United States: ACM Press, pp. 45–52. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/355460.355471.

Williamson, D. (no date) ‘‎Design Better Podcast: Detria Williamson: Making collaboration more inclusive on Apple Podcasts’. Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/detria-williamson-making-collaboration-more-inclusive/id1266839739?i=1000560230334 (Accessed: 7 October 2022).