Matt kicks off the series with an interview with his mentor and advisor, Jutta Treviranus. Jutta is the director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre and a professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University.

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This is InEx, a show about inclusive design.

I'm your host, Matt May.

In this episode:

It's such hubris to think that we can ever know

exactly what somebody else is feeling and how they're going to react.

And anything that we do to persuade ourselves that's the

case I think is really dangerous.

We need to come at this with humility, with a recognition that

the only person that has expertise about their own experience is the

person that's experiencing it.

A conversation with Jutta Treviranus.

Welcome to InEx.

I'd like to start by introducing myself and what this is all about.

A little over two years ago, I applied to the master's program in

inclusive design at OCAD University.

The reason I made this decision to go back to school is my first guest,

my mentor of two decades, and my master's advisor, Jutta Treviranus.

Without her guidance and support, I would never have made my way to OCAD,

where I've had the chance to approach inclusive design from the side of

academia, to compliment my experience working in accessibility and inclusive

design in the technology field.

And, full disclosure.

In 2017, I started the inclusive design practice at Adobe, where I've

been working for the last 15 years.

But this podcast is not sponsored, endorsed, reviewed, or edited by Adobe.

And I do my best not to talk about my work life during these interviews.

This podcast is my major research project, in partial completion of

the Master of Design in Inclusive Design at OCAD University.

I've chosen a podcast is my format for a series of interviews with people I respect

in and around the field of inclusion.

I named this series InEx, because it's made up of interviews with

experts about inclusion and exclusion.

I've worked to make these interviews as inclusive as possible for my

interviewees and for you, the audience.

If you prefer to read your podcasts rather than listen to them, full

transcripts are available at inex.show.

That's I-N-E-X dot show.

I worked with my interviewees to make the interviews available under

the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

So you're free to share this podcast in any way you like.

Please credit InEx and the guest, if you do.

Now, let me introduce you to Jutta.

It is my great pleasure to get to sit down with my friend and my

mentor of 20 years, Jutta Treviranus.

Jutta is the director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre and professor in

the faculty of design at OCAD University.

Jutta established the IDRC in 1993, as the nexus of a global growing community

that proactively works to ensure that our digitally transformed and globally

connected society is designed inclusively.

Dr.

Treviranus has also founded an innovative graduate program in inclusive

design at OCAD University where I am a student and Jutta is my advisor.

Jutta is credited with developing an inclusive design methodology that

has been adopted by large enterprise companies, as well as public sector

organizations internationally.

And thank you, Jutta, for coming and joining me for this interview.

Oh, it's a pleasure.

First I want to start with the land acknowledgement: OCAD University

acknowledges the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of

the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Huron-Wendat, and

I am presently on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Duwamish

and Coast Salish Peoples, who are the original owners and custodians of the

land on which we stand and create.

So apart from the bio introduction, I want to get a little bit more

into sort of how this came to you.

How your career unfolded, if you will.

How did I get into this?

And I've told a number of different introductions to that.

And I keep reflecting on, when did this all start?

And every time I tell it, I go further back.

But...

I have the same problem, actually.

Because there's so many different original commitments

to ideas that are somewhat counter to what is happening at the moment.

Periods where I think, oh my goodness, this isn't right.

And we have to do something about it or is this really how we want to proceed?

And isn't there a better way.

And then also, oh my, I look at the opportunity or the

possibility that this brings about.

So I think I've been always enthralled with the opportunity about that

difference brings, and diversity.

And variety and flux and change.

I have a farmer background.

My father was a horticulturalist.

I have within my family someone that first coined the term botany.

And so our entire family has always thought about just how wonderful

diversity is and what a differentiation and the serendipity and dynamic

resilience within diversity.

But at what point did this become part of my career, and a very different part

of my career than my dad or, my great grandparents, et cetera, was, I guess

when I first graduated from my undergrad and I was working with, or had the

opportunity to work with 12 people who had various constraints and disabilities

that would make it difficult to participate in post-secondary education.

And I was told, figure out how these 12 students could participate

in post-secondary education.

And by coincidence, it happened to be also the emergence of personal computers.

So this was late seventies, early eighties, and there had been these massive

things, but all of a sudden computers were things that could be personal.

That could be about you, that could be devices that you would use yourself.

And so I saw them as an amazing translation device.

What look at how we could use these things to take something that's visual, turn it

into auditory, take an action that you can control and turn it into a whole range of

things that you need to control something.

Take something that is in audio and turn it into visual, et cetera.

And so I started to play with these personal computers and it was a very

sort of skunkworks time because you could basically just unplug the motherboard,

the display, you could unplug the keyboard and you could mess with it.

And we did things that even to this day, I don't think have been replicated.

And in that is the story of how this excitement and opportunity became

also an understanding of the risk and how things go the wrong way.

And don't turn out the way that you wanted.

So that's been the story since that time is just, wow.

Look at the amazing possibilities and opportunities that the stuff brings.

And then also, oh my, look at the risks and, oh dear, look at how it's

completely gone off course, and we haven't taken it where we want to take

it, or we think it should be taken.

We're going to get into where it's going later on.

I think that's going to be fascinating, but I want to talk

about the formation of the IDRC.

I think it was the ATRC, what it started in the University of Toronto.

And I think that connects with what you were talking about with the

capabilities of the technology evolving.

Yeah.

So I was recruited to the University of Toronto and what I was asked to do,

or the job that I took was supposed to create a accessible computer lab

and they had dozens of computer labs.

And so they wanted one accessible one, which, and this was in 1993

and I thought this is all wrong.

So I took the job, but then I went to the VP of academic computing or

computing at the time, and said, no, this is not what I want to do.

I want to create a research lab that would ensure that all labs

are going to be accessible.

I don't want the students within U of T to have to come to one place just because

they require an alternative access system.

But the right at the beginning, I wanted to call it the Inclusive Design

Research Centre, but because the university had already come up with the

name, the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, because it was intended to

be a resource center, not a research center, we had to stick with that

name, but we right from the beginning, were calling it inclusive design.

But under the name of the center, the ATRC.

And so this is actually where our paths cross, because at the time

you're working at U of T, I had just gotten a job at the World Wide Web

Consortium, in the Web Accessibility Initiative as a specialist there.

And I was the staff contact for your working group.

So we were working on the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, and

you had already done the 1.0 version.

And so anyway, I come to Toronto for my first trip as I don't

even remember how young I was.

It was in my twenties.

And we just start talking about the task at hand, and then you, one day took me

over to Ryerson University and showed me a demo of PEBBLES, I think it was.

It was a robot that was for tele learning or distance learning.

So if you had a student that couldn't physically attend class, they could

have an avatar presence, like a rolling robot with a picture of their face.

And it just, it stuns me because here we are 20 years later and it actually

is happening, that there's this idea of remote presence, not just Zoom

meetings, but of there being a physical presence for people in the room.

And so what that taught me is that these things actually do

happen, but they do take time.

What else do you think that you've seen over the last 20 years in just terms of

the evolution of inclusive design, and maybe going from it being an engineering

driven thing to a design driven thing.

Yeah.

And I've always been somewhat troubled by the thought of applying engineering

here because engineering is so much about complicated systems and

this idea of building blocks, which you stack one on top of the other.

It's very, it's a very linear thinking process.

I've been much more enamored of an organic process, where you

can't predict the whole thing, you can't make it happen and build it.

You are basically growing it to some extent, but the other

thing to your point about things happening, taking time to happen.

I've seen things go in waves.

Not only did we have that early exploration and tele presence and it's

a technology we were working with.

This was pre-internet video conferencing right before internet audio.

We were dealing with these crazy difficult clunky networks that took

so much more fiddling and working with and were not ubiquitous.

So the explorations, it wasn't the field wasn't ready yet at the time,

but certainly the ideas stuck.

And we had, I think, in that pre time when the reality isn't yet

there, you can imagine more, you're not as constrained by the reality.

That there is a fresh field.

So we thought about a whole range of things that, although the field has

advanced so tremendously and so many more things are possible, we played with

things like actually navigating your avatar or your physical robot through

the environment raising your hand and physically within the representative

of your presence within the classroom actually having an embodiment of yourself.

Yeah.

And in the remote space and how you would project your identity and

your character upon that embodiment.

We also.

We're really cognizant of the diversity of representations that you would want,

so that the robot for the kids, that it was this yellow blob, this cute yellow

blob, the same height as the kids.

For the high school students, it was a hanger that you could hang your clothes

on and that you could move your face.

We were really concerned about eye contact.

How do you create that sense of eye contact, and that still

hasn't really been addressed.

But we're not concerned with that anymore for some reason, but I still think it's

a really critical piece of actually feeling like you're next to somebody

and you're actually talking to somebody.

So that was telepresence, but similarly, we played with early versions of AR, VR.

And I wrote a very naive, very sort of optimistic article for MIT telepresence

way back then, where I imagined all sorts of things in AR and VR.

And then we had this project called "Adding feeling, touch and equal

access to distance education", where we created a haptic experience, a

haptic audio speech experience that really hasn't been replicated either.

We took a grade 4 geography text, and we added haptic artifacts,

all sorts of haptic effects.

Real world sounds, three-dimensional real world sounds, and then speech audio to

provide the information that you would get in a grade 4 text, if you could see it.

And we had things like latitude and longitude lines were

elastics, felt like elastics.

Cities had a particular artifact that you could feel.

And as you got closer to them, the sound, the ambient sound

of a city would increase.

When you got to it, there would be a gravity well around these artifacts.

When you got to it, you could hit a key and find out the population

and a whole bunch of other things.

You could feel the direction of the river by the waves.

We played with all sorts of possibilities.

And it's funny to think that haptics is actually one of the last things, now that

we're at a place where AR, VR, XR are so prevalent and so much more possible, that

it's not something that's being explored.

Or if it is really the same territory, dredged back up again.

And probably the classic example of that is the sign language gloves.

Right?

And the evolution of that thing where the, there, it used to

be, I think the first example that I saw was an old Nintendo Power

Glove, like something built in 1985.

And there was this idea of that doing this let you do finger spelling.

It's always fresh territory for somebody that discovers this, that

they're convinced that they're the first people that have ever done it.

And then comes the BuzzFeed or the Now This story about it.

And everybody that's been working in this space for all of this time,

including, especially deaf activists, deaf designers that have been in this

space, are like, this has been done.

This doesn't meet our needs at all.

It's just an annoyance, and it draws so much attention for this.

And then it becomes called inclusive design, right?

Yeah, or the exoskeleton.

And this is going to, that walking, some sort of semblance of walking

is really what you want rather than getting from place to place.

Or the other one that is every PhD in engineering.

I don't know how many hours the EEG, the, we're going to read your brainwaves and

that's how well, if you can't communicate this, how you're going to communicate.

Yeah.

We talked about this demo that I saw at a CSUN many years ago,

the CSUN conference, a big accessibility industry conference, where there was a

demo where you put pads on your forehead and then tried to make a ball bounce up.

And they made a game about that called Mind Flex.

It's the same idea.

But like you keep coming back to these ideas of, if we could only do this.

Yeah.

If we could make exoskeletons or wheelchairs that

can climb stairs or whatever, that suddenly the world would open up.

Yeah.

And the myth behind that, the craziness behind that, is that if we could fix

the person then this whole thing, and which is why I insist that inclusive

design is not about fixing the person.

It's about fixing the environment.

And in fact, that diversity that we find amongst people is actually

really valuable and something that we shouldn't get rid of.

Because there, going down that path, we end up in monocultures.

We end up with the designer baby.

We end up with all the scary things that is going to be our demise

as a society, as a human species.

Yeah, and it, there are so many threads to tug at here.

So I actually want to take a break here and then we can get back into this in

the next segment, because there are so many ideas with this terminology that

I want to unpack a little bit so that people really understand what it is that

the IDRC, that OCAD U talks about when they're talking about inclusive design.

So we'll take a short break and we'll come back with Jutta Treviranus.

Great.

InEx is a major research project by me, Matt May, as part of the

master of design degree program at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Episodes and transcripts of this podcast can be found at inex.show.

That's I-N-E-X dot show.

Follow InEx on Twitter at @inexpodcast.

And we're back with Jutta Treviranus.

And I wanted to get into sort of the defining concepts, if not terms behind

inclusive design and the capital I capital letter inclusive design, and and

I think now we'll be going to just use it to call as a term of art inclusive

design has this as this definition.

First, I want to talk about universal design.

So there's this, this movement that came out of architecture.

Ron Mace was a professor at North Carolina State had this concept with seven

principles of universal design that was applied in the field of architecture,

and was adapted, has evolved out of that.

I wrote a book with Wendy Chisholm called Universal Design for Web Applications

that tried to associate the two concepts.

And I've distanced myself a little bit from universal design, but I want

you to, I want you to talk about your perceptions about this and we can see

where these two concepts differ or how they contrast against one another.

Sure.

So I'm very much in support of the concepts of universal design.

It came out of architecture and it came out of industrial design.

And so I, when digital systems and networks and less static structures

came about, I thought, oh, here's an opportunity to go further.

Because the thing that troubled me about universal design was this need

for a one size fits all approach.

Within architecture, within industrial design, there are constraints that make

it very difficult to address the real diversity and difference that we have and

the variability within the person as well.

So I thought, oh, with digital systems, with networks, with the resource pooling

that we have, here's an opportunity to actually create one size fits one, not

to deny our diversity, not to create compromises for people that are not

addressed or who can't be addressed with a one size fits all design.

The other thing that always worried me was that universal design, if we

have to find a system, or if we have to land upon a single design, then

who's going to make the compromises?

It's the people that are in the minority that are the outliers.

Because there's so many rational reasons why someone will say does

this deserve the cost investment?

Does this deserve the time that we take?

If you do it this way, then what about all these other people

who needed a different way?

That is why I was so optimistic about digital systems.

And still, one of the problems that, that evolved with me about it, about

universal design as a term, what ended up happening was that there was this race

to the singularity, that there was this one thing that everybody is going to use.

And one of the things that we talk about in the program was

the bell curve, of here's this distribution standard distribution

of human capability, if you will.

And that we're only really focused on this level and up.

And so therefore, if you need to adapt, then you like, this is

something that's bestowed upon you.

Be grateful that this is something that was made for you, rather than

there being a dialogue between somebody who's being left out and what they

consider quote unquote, the core user.

And that inclusive design kind of flips that around, right?

It requires the participation and the consent of the people

that are most marginalized.

It centers the needs of the people, instead of just assuming that everyone

is by default accommodated and anybody else is quote unquote extra work.

Yeah.

And you talk about the bell curve, but the bell curve is such a

flattening of requirements and its primary use is within education.

And what it seems to promote is this notion as well, that

everything is on the same scale.

So in my use of data, I've been more looking at it in three dimensions as

the normal distribution and what I call the human starburst, because there

are so many facets in which we differ and so many facets that need to be

considered when we consider a design.

But you're right.

There are these completely unconscious, completely entrenched ways of thinking.

About these spectrum of people and how we make decisions and how we make choices,

and who needs to be considered, and the hierarchy of that consideration.

I've been talking recently about this idea of ending the hierarchy of compromise.

You were just talking about the notion to say be happy with what you get,

that in fact the people that should be compromising are the people that

currently are excluded as opposed to the people that are currently

well served by the current designs.

And I also talk about the hierarchy of justification, that individuals

that are currently excluded are, have such a burden of justifying

why they need to be included.

The individuals that are currently included or who are well-served by

the designs, can rely on saying things like, that's just the way we do things.

This is our standard procedure.

This is the way things are done.

All of those tropes that don't allow thoughtfulness and a realization

that we are in fact, creating systems that are not good for anybody,

but that's another part of this.

Who should we be considering if we want to create systems that benefit everyone.

Okay.

You said systems, and now I want to dig into that piece of this, because

one thing that I've, that I found them on the people that I think really

inclusive design has resonated with is this idea of systems and system theory.

That especially if you came up as an advocate, and you've seen how

difficult it is to make even the smallest amount of progress, that

you do one thing, and you get to this destination, and I've talked about this

as sand castles, you do this thing, you turn around, it gets washed away.

And to think about how.

Exclusive mindset establishes itself in a system, not just in the creation

of a company or something like that, but the culture from which

the people come from that create the company, all of those things are

factors in the design of a product.

And what do you think about the, how inclusive design sort of

juxtaposes with the systems thinking?

Inclusive design is intervention in a complex adaptive system.

It's all about culture change.

It isn't about solutions or fixes.

Most of what we work on, or we consider the challenges we're

trying to address cannot be fixed.

They can't be solved.

People change, the environment changes.

If you create something that is supposedly an inclusive design or that you see as

an inclusive design and you've changed the culture sufficiently that it can

be adapted by whoever is the intended beneficiary, if you don't think about

what it's nested in, then there will be a friction point at whatever point

you haven't actually considered the relation with people around you.

The simple way I try to talk about it is, say you create a wonderful

inclusive curriculum for a student.

It's not going to work unless the teacher's familiar with it,

supports it, understands why the teacher's going to be in difficulty.

If the principal or the school as a whole doesn't understand, the principal

and the school is going to be in trouble if the school board, et cetera.

And then the department of ed, those are all nested.

The parents have an influence, the funders, the commercial entities that

provide the products, people, all of those need to be taken into consideration

before that child that requires something that is more inclusive than what is

generally offered, can actually realize the benefits and before the benefit

of what they're using can be seen by the rest of the class, and the rest

of the system that they're nested in.

So that's the negative part of it.

The positive part about it is that initial inclusive design, that small intervention

and culture change, can create this ripple effect where it doesn't only benefit the

students, that was the originator of the challenge, but it can ripple throughout an

entire school system and then perhaps even an entire country and around the world.

So, yes, we're intervening in complex adaptive systems.

And therein is the huge challenge and difficulty, but therein is also the

opportunity and the amazing benefit that we can derive from inclusive design.

So this is kind of where I contrast that idea of inclusive design

as the term of art that we're talking about and inclusive design, meaning

anything that someone can conceive of that is part inclusion and part design.

A lot of these are what gets the most attention because it's usually

people that, that are thinking about these home run swings, if you will.

The one big thing that's going to solve everything.

That everything will now go through this one solution.

I think one of the hallmarks of that is what I call the one and done, right?

You have this one project and we're going to do this.

And I see this in so many different products.

We're going to do an accessibility sprint.

We're going to talk about this one specific issue, and then we're going

to solve it and it's going to be done.

And it's hard to say, this is a marathon.

This is something that you would need to keep doing.

But when all the attention is going to these big moonshot things that you

look six months later at the thing that was on Buzzfeed, or Now This or

something like that, and it turns out it was just somebody's master's project.

It was somebody's PhD.

And now they just work at some big company doing something completely unrelated.

You have so much potential in this system to do dramatic change, but obviously

those superficial kinds of works are going to be maximized for marketing

value, but aren't going to do anything meaningful in the greater context.

Yeah.

And I so agree with that.

We've dropped solution and fix from our language because

these are not fixable problems.

Frequently inclusive design is seen as just a version of Design Thinking

because it's design for good.

And there are a whole bunch of virtuous design sprints related to design thinking,

but design thinking is still in the thralls of that competitive, majority

rules, winning, best solution process.

So the design squiggle, it iterates towards this one winning design

based upon a whole set of iterations of competitive processes, where

people supposedly reach consensus.

And I'm not attempting to denigrate design thinking, but

inclusive design is not about that.

It's about creating a system that can address as a continuously expand diversity

of requirements that are out there.

So creating a system that is adaptive, and also within that is embedded

this recognition that we always need to act ask, "who is missing?"

That people's needs change.

That what we need is a system that can react, can be dynamically resilient

to the things that reveal themselves, the way that people change, the

people we realize have not been part of, or have not been included.

So just as there is no fix, and there's no solution, there is also

not a final sort of certified, accessible for all inclusive design.

The one thing that really bugs me about those moonshots that are

supposedly inclusive designs, is that there's also this conception that you

can scale by formulaic replication.

You've created this wonderful life-transforming solution to all of our

accessibility challenges or whatever.

And now we scale it.

And scaling means that you follow exactly these steps.

Again, we are then not recognizing diversity.

We're not recognizing human difference and variability, and we're not

preparing ourselves for the changes that are happening in our environment.

It's the opposite of what I see as inclusive design.

There is a huge difference between some of the popular conceptions of what is

inclusive design or what people see as the same as inclusive design and our notion

of inclusive design being designing for difference, variability, complexity.

Designing with the people that have the greatest difficulty or are

currently excluded from the designs.

And in fact, frequently, design by those individuals, supporting those

individuals in designing and in arriving at the systems that will best serve them.

Which of course, that's another piece of inclusive design.

We're not experts, we're not professionals in that sense that we know better,

that we know what people need, that we understand exactly what will

work and what will not work for you.

It's a process of enabling people to understand their own diversity

and difference and become experts in their own requirements.

And to constantly recognize that the expertise is with lived experience.

And I think that's the part that ends up being missing in a lot of

these, because that idea of reaching out to somebody whose lived experiences,

you don't know, you don't understand who may be using technology in a

completely different way from you, is an expression of you not knowing, right?

You're unaware, you're ignorant of this difference.

And that tends to be a cause for people to close up.

And I've found so many times that when you pull out of people why they're not doing

these processes, it's that they don't want to feel ignorant about the situation.

They're uncomfortable about it.

And so they might even raise process points, rather than acknowledge that

they have things to learn about the thing that they spend their entire lives doing.

And I think what happens with design thinking is that it papers over that,

that the designer is still is the actor in this scenario, the doer.

And then the users are the done to, right?

They're the receivers of this thing that you bestow upon them.

And I blame empathy training for that.

The idea of marketing and commoditizing the concept of empathy.

Cognitive empathy, in a clinical term, I think is a beneficial thing,

but it's also in the eye of the beholder, and the idea that you can

think for, or on behalf of somebody without actually participating with

them, ends up being a blocker to this.

And it ends up creating a lot of the, Liz Jackson has termed them disability

dongles, this idea of the tool that adapts a person to the environment

and not the other way around.

And I kind of wonder, is there any use for that concept of empathy in this, or do we

have to throw that away and go onto some to some other framing in order for this to

start from a fair, more equitable place?

Yeah.

And in addition to the empathy exercises, they, the notion of persona as well,

and even edge personas and simulation.

Another thing that comes up a lot.

It's such hubris to think that we can ever know exactly what somebody else is

feeling and how they're going to react.

And anything that we do to persuade ourselves that's the

case I think is really dangerous.

We need to come at this with humility, with a recognition that

the only person that has expertise about their own experience is the

person that's experiencing it.

Even if there were huge similarities, I have the same disability,

or I come from the same place.

I speak the same language.

It's not going to be the same.

You were asking, is there something, is there value in empathy?

And yes, of course there is.

There's value in recognizing the common needs, the common or the commonality,

the humanness, within each of us.

But we need to do that with humility and with the recognition that we don't know.

And what we feel, what we know, what we expect is not the same thing.

The reading that is clicking with me is the idea of agonist design.

That you're building something, as people are basically chipping away at

it, like trying to do the opposite, particularly in like political situations.

Yeah.

But this speaks to empathy.

So if you're going to design a country, a regime, then you should

design it, not knowing whether you're going to be the pauper, or the least

powerful, or the most powerful.

But I think there is definitely a value in empathy, as long as

that empathy comes with humility.

And if we can use empathy and the stories, the real stories of people who are facing

challenges at the moment to unseat people from their presumptions and assumptions.

Whatever we can do to extend somebody's imagination of what the possibilities

are for life and possibilities of people's existence is good.

The minute people think that actually gives them expertise or knowledge

about what somebody else is feeling, what somebody else is experiencing

is dangerous to a large extent.

Yeah.

There's also this idea of, experiencing one aspect of exclusion is transferable,

that there's a piece of it.

This is something that over my career, just pieces of the

rest of my life come into me.

And I understand that I experienced exclusion in the educational

environment that was related to my ADHD.

That I was always kicked out of classes.

I was put in detention.

I was always in academic trouble in one sense or another.

That was actually my first experience in accessibility spaces, which

was, why don't you adapt to us?

Why don't we change the way that you that you do things

in order to fit the situation.

But then I come into accessibility and think that it was just out

of the goodness of my heart.

That was how it resonated with me.

It took a while to put the pieces together of, I have experienced what it's like to

not be a participant in this ecosystem.

But that only goes so far.

There are lots of great self advocates who can push for

inclusion only for themselves, but at the expense of other people.

And I think that there's this other level of advocacy where it's, okay,

you understand what this is because you have been in a situation that

doesn't that doesn't make you feel like you're participating equitably.

But you use that, with the skills that you have to help to amplify

others that are in the same situation.

Yeah.

We're at a point at the moment, within the evolution of the field

where there is cachet in having lived experience, which is lovely.

It's lovely that we've come to this point, that we recognize that, oh,

our own lived experience is something of value, and lived experience of

having gone through the challenges and struggles that exclusion has created.

But I, I don't want people to think that's the only reason or the

value within inclusive design, or that that's the only motivation.

Because, you have experience of struggle, of exclusion, of systems that don't work.

I truly believe that many of the crises that we have at the moment, and many

of the ways in which our society seems to have gone sideways and is quickly

accelerating towards some sort of major extinction or disaster has to

do with not attending to difference diversity, not understanding complexity

and that moving forward with the type of version or disruption or ending

that inclusive design proposes is something that will benefit everybody.

It's not just about a group of individuals who have been wronged,

where things need to be righted.

Much deeper than that, it is about how are we as a society going to live, survive,

and in wronging, in the wrong that we've done, and in the practices of the wrongs,

lies everybody's demise, to some extent.

It is a complex adaptive system by virtue of doing these wrongs of excluding

people about not valuing our differences.

In the xenophobia, in the disparities that are there in the sort of linear thinking,

the monocausality, all of those things that are not part of inclusive design, but

that inclusive design is trying to unseat.

There also lie many of the crises and the troubles that we have got ourselves into.

All right.

I'm going to pause here.

We're going to get into the troubles and then probably in the last 15, 20

minutes, we're going to solve them all, but we'll take a pause right here and

then we'll just jump right into it.

On the next episode of InEx:

Graphics were something that I received.

They were not something that I requested or chose.

They were curated for me by textbook publishers and other sighted folks.

There was never a direct path from my curiosity to an

image being under my fingers.

A conversation with Chancey Fleet.

Okay.

We're back.

And we want to get into the part of the discussion, as you were talking

about, the forms of exclusion and the history that we work with,

that's an important aspect of this.

And to start from that, I think that it's entirely fair to say that in

terms of design as a practice, that the history of it is shaped, just

even in the last century, it's shaped enormously by upper-class white

men in North America and Europe.

Those have been the traditional defaults.

And we can add in abled, heterosexual, cisgender to the mix.

A part of the idea of why inclusive design.

And this is one of the things that I think is evolving more recently.

Inclusive design is a how, it's a technique, it's a

methodology, but you need a why.

You need a reason to be doing that.

And that to me is equity.

Of establishing a place where everybody has has a stake,

and everybody has contributed equally to the outcome of that.

And going back to the adaptation of your program into the IDRC that you had moved

from the idea of moved from disability into, in the definition, all forms of

human difference, and that kind of opens up multiple sets of exclusion to discuss.

And there are, including some of the people that were talking within this

series, experts from other lived experiences, that also have needs that are

not themselves expressed in the products.

And thinking about LGBTQ community, things like deadnaming people in

software applications, of gender identity, of the representation by

race and gender in the workplace, in leadership, in imagery that we create.

This idea of inclusive design is not just limited to disability.

And I want to talk about how does that expand?

How do design practitioners start to understand where they came from, where

the things that they learned are, and what the biases are that are already entrenched

in the work that they've created, the artifacts that they use on a regular basis

so that they can start disassembling them.

Yeah, there's so much I can say about that.

The premise that I've always throughout my career, that has grounded me,

that I am persuaded of, is that diversity is our greatest asset.

We're not using diversity here.

I don't know why we missed it in terms of the human realm.

We as economists, despite capitalism, think about diversification of markets,

biologists, and most people that think about animals at all or the

ecosystem think about diversification.

We fight against extinction.

Every child knows which animals are threatened with extinction.

And yet exactly those same people are the people who are in essence promoting

what can be called epistemicide, or the killing of ways of knowing.

We're winnowing down the diversity within our society, within our systems.

So the premise is that diversity is our greatest asset and

inclusion is our biggest challenge.

And that's what has been driving me for the longest time.

And diversity, I hate actually the categories or boundaries of that

diversity, because it is so entangled and there are so many different forms,

and it's that lovely mix of things, as opposed to, I belong in this box here.

And by belonging in the box, these are the assumptions,

presumptions you can make about me.

When I think about what is diversity or what's human difference, I think

it's this rich interplay of so many different facets of everybody's identity.

And it's that interplay that is something that is, I think we'll reap the

greatest rewards in terms of this asset.

Disability too.

What is disability that the difficulty, but also the beauty of it is that

there is really no real definition.

People keep trying to capture it, but it's just different.

It's sufficient difference from the norm that things aren't designed for you.

And it can be seen as a strength, and it can be seen as a problem.

I think in terms of disability as something that is a problem, there are

far greater things than we see that are a problem than the things that we classify

as within the formal classification of disability, if there are such things.

So the fact that disability is not really defined that we cannot create

boundaries to it, that we can't box it in, I think is one of the reasons why it

is frequently what I go to when I talk about the need for inclusion and the

benefits of inclusion because the other I guess justice seeking groups have very

well-defined, here's who belongs here.

Here's who's in the club.

Here's who's not in the club.

Or here is the distinction between someone that has this identity

and somebody that doesn't.

But that can't be there in terms of disability, unless it's self

identification as having a disability, but the problems and the exclusions

that come with it are many people, experiences who don't identify.

And the benefits extend well beyond the group.

Yes.

The entrenched thinking that we have that the white male cisgender dilemma,

that is who has authored this mess that we're currently in and who for

whatever reason continues to be in power and still has the ability to make the

decisions and influence the decisions.

What is so infuriating about that is that it's associated with innovation,

it's associated with progress, it's associated with all of these

sort of powerful influences still.

But in fact, those same mindsets that are promoted by the people in

power are so ancient and so old.

And so damaging.

We're still under the influence of the industrial revolution, the idea of the

average person and the sacredness of being within a particular norm the notion

of survival of the fittest, the Dewey decimal system with categorization, the

80/20 rule with the quick wins and the quick profit that needs to be there.

And even the things that are supposed to be these Inclusion sprints or

designs for good are all about competing and survival of the fittest still.

Yeah.

Since you were talking about the Dewey decimal system, the thing that

just blew my mind about this was the discussion of categorization of LGBTQ

content in the context of a system that was designed by a virulent homophobe.

You don't expect that there are going to be a lot of really progressive

voices in the early 20th century, but this was a disorder to Dewey and the

work that it took just for it to be in different sections from a medical

disorder of either homosexuality or transgender issues, even the fiction

content there had to be reclassified.

And so the Dewey decimal system, I think, is a great example of codifying the way

things are to one specific perspective.

And in this case, an American perspective, which is then how all

of this information is organized.

Yeah.

Dewey was homophobic, he was racist, he was sexist, he was everything, and his

particular classification finds his way into all these taxonomies and ontologies

of metadata of coding still in the digital world, in the library world.

And he of course created these hierarchies.

What is at the top and what is trivial, what is important and what isn't, and

assigned a codified place for everything.

That also shows the history or the lifespan, the evolution of these complex

adaptive systems and our unconsciousness of where does some of this come from?

It is a great example of why we need diverse perspectives.

And especially now.

One of the things that's so distressing is when I talk about edge perspectives,

people think that I'm talking about extremism or that I'm talking about,

the individuals that are have extremist right-wing or left-wing views.

And that's not what I'm talking about.

And I think the one myth that I keep trying to get rid of is the notion

that inclusion of edge perspectives is going to cause a greater extremism.

When in fact what we found again and again, is if you make room for

a diversity of perspectives, then you actually achieve a much greater

equilibrium because you don't have these two polarities, which push against each

other and become more and more extreme.

You can look at this from the perspective of physics.

If you have a pendulum that is pushed in two directions, it's

going to keep swinging higher and higher in both directions.

But if you add other forces, the other perspectives, then

it will find an equilibrium.

I'm going to take you on a tangent because I'm quite distressed with some

of the practices that we have at the moment in terms of inclusion and equity.

And I don't think that a lot of what is happening right now is or it's not getting

us where we want to go, necessarily.

And that includes the polarization that is happening within the equity

versus non-equity or equity versus whatever's not for equity movement.

There is this sacredness in certain rituals and performative examples

of doing equity or doing inclusion, and that is quite distressing.

I think that the minute that there is a stasis or there is something that cannot

be questioned, the minute we abandon self-critique, then we are going to

ossify and we are going to become static.

And that will be the end.

The minute we say something is certified as accessible or inclusive

or ethical than and that we have had success in arriving at something,

that's our end, that's our demise.

So...

Or as soon as we create the checklist for doing inclusive design,

or we take down one well-defined structure and replace it with an

identical well-defined structure, where there is no variation or variability

to the way that you do things.

Right.

Exactly, yeah.

So let's talk about how not to do that.

What are the things that if you had to give a class on them cause of

design in five minutes, what are the things that you would want to do?

This is a great I've known you for long enough.

I know that you can do it, but I want to get into the, like how, what

are the things that people are doing wrong that you see and how would

you reframe the mistakes that you see people making over your career?

Okay.

So you've just triggered one of my allergies, and one of the

things I think we're doing wrong.

But not as a critique.

I think one of the things that's distressing is the

shallowness, the need for speed.

The, you have to do something within 140 characters.

You need to tell us everything, of great depth, within a certain period of time.

You have 10 minutes to do your TED talk, et cetera, whatever.

So the distressing thing about that is, that means that we cannot take people

far from where they currently are.

It's going to take somebody a while to understand and to see the steps that they

have to move from their current position.

But that isn't to say that you can't say something fairly profound

within a short period of time.

That you can give people the foundations of what is needed, but for them to

really understand them and for it not to be just simply these words, it takes

more time, and there's a succession.

You have to take quite a few steps away from where you are.

So if I had to compress or get at some of the fundamental things without actually

talking a little bit more about what that actually means, not your assumed

understanding of a particular word, because of course, words are also such a

slippery, strange thing, what a word means to you is not what a word means to me, is

not what a word means to somebody else.

What is fundamental to inclusive design?

I think one of the first things, okay.

When an image I can use to illustrate inclusive design, I'll use two things.

I'll talk about that human starburst.

And I'll talk about what we call the virtuous tornado.

So the reason for the human starburst is not because of process.

Basically how I came up with this notion of a human starburst is because

of 40 years of gathering data on the diversity of needs that people have.

And the only way to actually represent that, because of course

we all want data, we're obsessed with data at the moment, and data

analytics and data is the only form of evidence that seems to be accepted.

And we equate evidence with truth, and that's the only truth that's there.

Trying to come up with something that is much more true to diversity.

I plot it in a three-dimensional multi-variate scatterplot, which

looks like a human starburst.

And that the truth that I gained from that is that there is this huge space, and most

of us occupy only 20% of it in the middle.

And the people that actually have some understanding and knowledge and

experience of the rest of the space are the people that we're currently

excluding in our design, excluding in our assertions of knowledge and truth.

And if we want to innovate, if we want to be creative, if we want

to find the weak signals and the things that we've missed out on.

And that we've forgotten about or have excluded, then it's the individuals

that are out at that and the experience and the needs that are out there.

How do we do that?

The way that we do that is through what I call the virtuous tornado,

which is recognizing that we're never going to get it perfectly.

And in fact, it's the imperfect, the impermanent and incomplete

that are the things that we should value that have the potential.

And it's that idea of potential that we need to keep seeking.

So the virtuous tornado starts with what we know at the moment as being

the individuals, the experiences and the individuals that are currently

excluded and have the greatest difficulty, and attempting to work

with those individuals to create a design that is inclusive of them.

And that includes the creating the process that they feel is inclusive of them.

And then going through the full cycle and iterating at the end of this cycle,

where there has been an opportunity to try out the design, to evaluate,

to determine is this addressing these challenges, asking again who then now

is missing and what are the challenges that are, that the system that we've

created as not addressed and going further out and further out at each iteration.

So it's a process without end, and it's creating a system or a structure that

expands, and that includes more and more.

Inclusive design is not about stasis.

It's not about completion.

It's not about reaching a success.

It isn't about winning.

In essence, it is actually quite counter to the fundamental way in which we

make decisions that we plan, that we solve problems, that we think about

education, that we think about work, that we think about value and valuation.

It contests all of that.

And so it's a massive culture change.

And at any point where we think we have landed on a dogma, or something

that's sacred, or something that you know is a performance of inclusive

design, then that's the wrong term.

That isn't inclusive design.

So I want to ask a tactical question here, because this is

something that I'm asked a lot.

Let's say you have a researcher that says, okay, this is what I want to do.

I really care about this space.

What do I do next?

How do I reach out?

Who do I reach out to?

What changes do I need to make to the way that I do research, or anything

like that with a designer or an engineer, anybody that's involved

in the process because they start out and they built a head of steam.

And then you get to the practical pieces of this, and then it gets

substantially harder, and that's where people start to hedge their bets.

What's the next step for people, once they have decided that they

want to undertake this work?

So it completely depends on where they're starting, and I

think they need to start where they are.

Say it's a researcher, a data researcher.

Say they're into quantitative statistics.

The advice I would give there is, let's look at that and query that and

question why you're doing this this way.

And who is it that you're excluding with that?

And who is it that can't use whatever you're doing, or that your assertions

are not actually addressing?

Do you proclaim this finding or conclusion based upon this statistical significance?

Or do you look at, well, look at the spread here and look at the variability.

You remove the outliers, et cetera.

Almost any discipline, any field, any place where somebody is at, there

is a reason for, or a process that they can use to say, wait, what is

it that I'm doing that's excluding?

What is it that I'm doing that is causing someone to be harmed by what I'm

doing and excluded from what I'm doing?

There are so many issues with this idea of engineering.

The denial, actually, within engineering is that the world is

changing, that it's predictable.

Engineers assume a predictability that yes, the world is complicated

and we can work out the complication.

That the risk mitigation or planning process, that there's some way

in which we can predict things.

When in fact, it isn't linear process.

It's the black swans that get us.

In terms of engineering, there's the hubris that you can plan for

anything that is going to come.

And that of course, causes you to create these boundaries and linear

processes, which are going to exclude.

So that's the conversation with the engineer.

For the clinician, or the medical professional, it's, how can you in

fact have expertise in these things?

How can you tell people what's good for them when you don't know

the full extent of their life?

When you're seeing somebody and diagnosing them when you have

medicalized these things and fit them into prognostic categories.

So for every person that intends to get into inclusive design, and

I think inclusive design needs that range of disciplines, that

range of perspectives, there's a different set of questions to ask.

Great.

So I have one question that is all ranging.

You can go in any direction that you choose with it, but who do you think

is worth following in this space?

Who do you think is doing good work?

Who do you think is meeting the bar that you had set for

practicing inclusive design, or has a critical view of inclusive

design that you think is important?

Anything that people can grab onto to further their own understanding?

That's a hard question because I think there's

a growing group of people.

And so my sense is too, that is always changing.

I don't like identifying just one person.

But there are these nuggets that arise and people that come up

with new things because I think inclusive design is a field that

needs to, be continuously refreshed.

I think back though on people that I think we haven't listened to, people

like Donella Meadows and the primer in systems thinking, or Ursula Franklin,

who was talking about the real world of technology and rethinking technology as

a mindset, this notion of acting like earthworms, the importance of earthworms.

The preparing the ground.

I think what we need to do is to continuously search for people who

are adding fresh perspectives, who are expanding the field, just like

that virtuous tornado, who can give us some more information that is true

to our human difference, true to the idea that we all have value, true

to an understanding of complexity.

Sorry that-- I can name off a whole slew of people that are currently

there, but I think the point that I want to make is that everybody has

the potential to add to this field.

And what it's about is adding those diverse views, those

diverse perspectives to the whole.

I'm going to, rather than the narrow you down to people, I think

fields of study, because it's the confluence of a bunch of different

there's research, there's design, there's things like feminist STS, there

are all of these other influences that come in and where academically would

one branch out on inclusive design?

I like to ask the same question.

Who are we missing?

What are we missing?

So what are the fields or the areas of study that we have

not paid adequate attention to?

So the other ways of knowing, I think the pushing out of indigeneity and

Indigenous ways of knowing is really promising the ideas of other groups

or other non-Western views of history of culture, of what has value, the

perspectives that we've denigrated are, I think there's a lot to learn there.

There's a field, which I think is really interesting and

it's this notion of wisdom.

We've been caught up in smart and intelligence and those sorts of things.

But can we balance that with the ideas of wisdom, and what is wisdom?

What we need to reach is an equilibrium, a balance, and that comes about by

diverse perspectives and we can't go too far in any one direction.

There isn't an answer per se.

And the reason or the way that we understand that and realize that is in

bringing in that diversity of fields, of perspectives, of ideas, of experiences.

All right.

I think that is a great place to stop.

I want to thank you for doing this again, and we'll have show notes and we can put

links to some of the things that you were talking about, like the virtuous tornado.

And, yeah, I'm really grateful that we had this chance to talk.

Thank you!

It's been a pleasure.

That's our show.

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