Bassel Deeb explores this tragic reality in his piece — Please let me fail: failure, vulnerability and creativity. In it

Inclusive Design is 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 at OCAD U in Toronto

It doesn’t help that, as an industry, we glorify individual designers more than the work they produce. With so much emphasis on personal advancement, our view is distorted, and it leads to us obsessing about the designer’s success instead of learning from successful outcomes. We then elevate a select few successful designers from an unlevel playing field to rockstar status for all to emulate.

You live in a society whose institutions shame failure, from the educational to the parental ones. You are saturated with a culture that only glorify the small percentage of exceptional achievers and their successes, while you are left alone to deal with the blame of not pushing enough. Yet they still ask you to step outside and be creative.

Accessibility in the broadest sense is the goal to ensure that products support a user’s needed accommodations and preferences. It is outcome-focused and often defined by specific standards, whereas inclusive design is process-oriented and considered throughout the design lifecycle from day one. A fully inclusive process should lead to fully accessible products, but just accounting and designing for accessibility does not mean your design is fully inclusive.

So what now, you ask? How do we address these issues? Well, the first step is agreeing that they are, in fact, issues. Then it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do something.

Yet, this is what happens over and over again. We see it at conferences, when those design leaders release books, and online when they share their thoughts and expertise. It’s perfectly fine to learn from someone highly experienced and be inspired by what they’ve achieved, but that’s where the adulation should end. They are just another resource for your ongoing education. Take it all in from as many sources as possible, then forge your own path with your own ideas. Following any ideology without question is antithetical to what it truly means to be a good designer.

For many, work-life is an endless series of compromises on the practice of design. We’re encouraged to do this — to adapt to the environment, to work within the constraints. Rarely though, do I see any practical advice on how to do that and maintain the integrity of the process or how to recognize when the standard process does not apply. So designers (and user researchers) often default to dogmatic, methodical recipes, with or without enough understanding of the principles that informed those methods to adapt them to the work at hand. This, unfortunately, results in designers cutting corners where it matters because they don’t know how not to. No one taught them how to properly scale their work. The knowledge is out there, but it’s not getting to the practitioners who need it the most.

We wield this tremendous power and still have not yet incorporated ethics as required coursework for foundational design education, nor have we set any standards for how to do our work in a consistently ethical way. With the incredible rising potential for misuse of design applied newer technologies, such as those driven by AI/ML, the urgency becomes evident. We can no longer afford to keep pretending that we don’t have an obligation to do much, much more than we’re doing now.

As creatives responsible for mass communication and millions of audience impressions per minute, we’ve got a lot of power to make an impact. For better or worse, we creative types deeply affect the way information is interpreted, how brands and products are consumed, and the ways that people experience the mediated and artificial world.

Inclusive Design should just be Design. Careful consideration of all the various types of folks who will use what we make and accommodating their needs should already be how we work on every project, every time. But it’s not. Why isn’t it? Because despite how much we talk about it, most of us have no clue how to really conduct the necessary activities and methods in a way that will fit into our existing workflows, nor are we being encouraged to find out by those we work for (and remember, we’ve been conditioned not to fail — see point #4). So we defer learning how to incorporate it into practice for another time on another day, just as we do with ethics. Every time we do this, what we’re really saying is that it’s fine to release a product that may not work for a significant portion of the population — real people who are already being shortchanged daily by the design of everyday things. It’s well beyond time that we stop letting this be the norm.

At least not in any formal “designer’s code” kind of way. It is up to individuals to make highly subjective, ethical decisions in the moment, often without leadership support and almost always by putting their employment status at risk.

http://team.vidrio.org/xpy/video-norge-v-hviterussland-v-no-no-1iau-8.php

http://old.cocir.org/media/qas/Video-motor-ceske-budejovice-v-olomouc-v-cs-cs-1gea-29.php

http://molos.bodasturias.com/qxz/video-TOP-Oss-Jong-Ajax-v-en-gb-cds-.php

http://startup.munich.es/dyn/video-torpedo-nn-v-neftekhimik-v-ru-ru-1emw-21.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/Video-avangard-v-salavat-iulaev-v-ru-ru-1nvo-23.php

http://molos.bodasturias.com/qxz/videos-TOP-Oss-Jong-Ajax-v-en-gb-cyi-.php

http://www.ectp.org/kzz/video-colchagua-v-colina-v-es-cl-1wwr-13.php

http://www.ectp.org/kzz/video-colchagua-v-colina-v-es-cl-1vss-4.php

http://team.vidrio.org/xpy/videos-norge-v-hviterussland-v-no-no-1jrr-16.php

http://old.cocir.org/media/qas/v-ideos-motor-ceske-budejovice-v-olomouc-v-cs-cs-1npg-25.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/video-avangard-v-salavat-iulaev-v-ru-ru-1lco-12.php

http://startup.munich.es/dyn/video-torpedo-nn-v-neftekhimik-v-ru-ru-1ysb-25.php

http://team.vidrio.org/xpy/video-France-Serbia-v-en-gb-1mtv-.php

http://old.cocir.org/media/qas/Video-motor-ceske-budejovice-v-olomouc-v-cs-cs-1fmg-1.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/videos-avangard-v-salavat-iulaev-v-ru-ru-1hst-11.php

http://startup.munich.es/dyn/videos-torpedo-nn-v-neftekhimik-v-ru-ru-1byv-4.php

http://team.vidrio.org/xpy/Video-France-Serbia-v-en-gb-1cau30122020-23.php

http://www.ectp.org/kzz/videos-Colchagua-CD-Ac-Colina-v-en-gb-1pns30122020-.php

http://main.ruicasa.com/tgq/videos-avangard-v-salavat-iulaev-v-ru-ru-1ava-10.php

http://startup.munich.es/dyn/videos-torpedo-nn-v-neftekhimik-v-ru-ru-1cdr-2.php

k, we took the decision to leave behind our Ansible based configuration management setup for deploying applications on EC2 and move towards containerisation and orchestration of applications using Kubernetes. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to Kubernetes. It was a big undertaking and had its own challenges — from technical challenges of running a hybrid infrastructure until most of the migration is done to training the entire team on a completely new paradigm of operations to name a few.

The results are often final designs iterated from a single initial concept that miss the mark on multiple fronts. Designs that don’t work for everyone. Designs that the designers aren’t able to feel good about. Afterward, we pick them up and tell them it’s okay because they “did their best under the circumstances.” But each time, that uneasy feeling creeps in — those unsettling thoughts in the back of their minds that tell them that it’s not true, that they could have done better using a different approach if they’d only known which one, felt empowered to try again, or had more time. These are the thoughts that sow the seeds for early burnout and feed the imposter syndrome beast that I reference in point #1.

We’ve normalized this. The business says anyone outside the “primary” set of personas is an edge case. So those representing other demographics — race, age, ethnicity, and ability — well, they fall off the radar to hopefully be included in later releases. I even put this topic last on my list to drive home that point. These issues were not even on the radar for far too many of you before this last incredibly tumultuous year. This is why the “percentage of potential users” is a shit way to prioritize features when building software. We can no longer allow ourselves to determine whether to make a design fully inclusive based solely on the number of people affected.

To be a designer is to be brave, to be bold. It requires the ability to take risks, to explore ideas without fear of failure, or at the very least, the ability to continue forward regardless of fear. It is to be an advocate who can represent those who can’t represent themselves in the process of building products. It is a noble pursuit with heavy responsibilities. It is simply not possible to do that work well while engaging in sycophantic adoration of design icons or “more successful” peers as if basking in their trajectory will lead to success of one’s own.