Table of Contents
Discovery
“Instead of putting others in their place put yourself in their place.”
An Amish Proverb
Culture is a fickle beast. It often operates illogically and a decent amount of practice is needed to seamlessly integrate into any given society. But alas, not all things come in neat packages. Even when a person is born into and fully embraces their cultural norms, they can be met with various levels of stigmatization and provocation. This is especially true for those with limited abilities.
My objective for the theoretical side of social inclusivity is to open up the topic of culturally-based behaviour patterns and barriers in hope of shedding some light on this important but oft-ignored topic in inclusive design. My approach for this is that people, in general, are obtuse when it comes to dealing with those with limited abilities. This is further expounded upon and sometimes downright embarrassing if the designer or designer researcher tasked with providing a solution for an inclusivity-related problem is ignorant of certain cultural norms. Even if they come up with the grandest of solutions… if it isn’t in line with the accepted cultural norms, what good is it in the first place?
Definition
From Bjarki Hallgrimsson’s interview:
“… in general, people having certain, you know, ideas or thoughts of people who are disabled are not capable or you know, helping them in awkward ways, people feeling awkward around people in a wheelchair, treating them differently, and so on.”
I would argue that this sort of behaviour is less individually-based and more of a cultural — educational thing. There are even more extreme examples of social exclusion in other societies, as per Bjarki’s excerpt:
“…in Africa and in Uganda, stigmatization towards people with disabilities is horrendous. In fact, anecdotally, there are a lot of superstitions and when some kid is born with physical disabilities, they would often be locked up in the house, never taken outside — traditionally — and just not even acknowledged that they existed because it was like, bad omen. Like, some bad spirit has taken over the child’s body.”
A designer tasked with coming up with a service or product to enrich inclusivity and accessibility in a non-domestic society, designing while ignorant of foreign social and cultural values would be detrimental to everyone involved. This is why I’d argue that designers’ efforts to “help a user” are sometimes misguided, due to starting projects without fully grasping traditional values. Being culturally sensitive is crucial to understanding what the users actually want (e.g., why Japanese people use bidets), as well as plan the logistics to fit with their cultural customs (e.g., siestas in Spain).
“Simple things like, these locally made products made of steel, which is actually better because they don’t have to be lightweight because nobody is putting it in the trunk of a car usually, and is easier to fix because welding is easier than steel or aluminum…”
By understanding the context to which the designer has to work in, Bjarki and his undergrad design team were able to figure out what sort of approach they would take in designing for the less abled people in Africa. With this in mind:
“…what she [a student] came up with was the tricycle that converts into a wheelchair that would kind of have two fronts and so now we can get a little grant to try to bring that into production, and when I say production, it’s more like an open source project and we’re going to work with local people to make sure they can build it and find 2 ways to sort of allow that knowledge to spread somehow so that is what we’re working on now.”
Development
Although I am by no means an expert in the area of anthropology, cultural studies, and the likes, I found that there are two ways for researchers and designers to accumulate the wealth of knowledge in a particular culture:
- Live with the community, partake in their traditions, and stay for an extended amount of time (how long?)
- Employ soft research methods (e.g., read books, go to embassies, talk to societal members)
But of course, the first one has quite a bit of limitations: A monumental amount of resources and time is often required to adequately complete the task. Time and money are hard to come by.
So this leaves just the second option. But even this has significant drawbacks. One, it’s not actually a first-person account of the way the world works, but often-times an interpretation of an outsider’s accounts, which is further processed by the researcher, creating a hodge-podge of incongruent ideas and concepts (e.g., the broken telephone game). We must then ask ourselves:
Is there a way to create a tool that can help support the designers and researchers to employ a similar level of insight as living with a community from the comfort of their home and wallet?
To illustrate my point, take a gander at this scholarly illustration:
- Designers are behind a cultural barrier
- Designers have two approaches:
- Partake in lifestyle
- Study lifestyle
- Amalgamate the two approaches
Delivery
There’s only so much a designer can do to dispel any kind of stigmatization. Going against tradition and culture and educating people on the wrongs and rights of discrimination is difficult. Although efforts should be made to re-educate the people, often-times due to project scale and limitations, designers and design researchers should try to negotiate for any cultural discrepancies during the entirety of the project.
Deficiencies
This concept is still in the most preliminary of the preliminary stages, so references and other media are needed to help solidify the foundation. There could already be another solution that may work perfectly for this dilemma. Due to time constraints and for other reasons, I have not delved too deeply into research surrounding this concept. This sort of study is qualitative in nature, so rather than data, researchers will need to survey relevant type of people — designers and design researchers. This could pose a challenge because not all designers and design researchers are experienced on the foreign cultural side of design. On top of that weighing responses based on the amount of experience should also be considered.
Departing
In conclusion, this article only opens up the idea of cultural sensitivity within a design project. More time and resources can be allocated to produce a genuinely interesting and useful tool/research that can be employed by interested parties. In theory, this should make the design process more streamlined and accurate to the needs of the users. This study has the potential to make projects viable from an economic standpoint rather than a vague concept that fail to actually implement into a system.
ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVE DESIGN CASE STUDIES 
