“Good design is invisible” is a fairly smug cliché among designers. Affordance It is based on the idea of Affordance. The idea that some design can be so intuitive, so obvious that people just use the product or service. They do not notice it as they benefit from it. However, there is a flip side […]
Posts with the accessibility tag
3 ways of thinking about accessibility
3 concepts There are multiple ways of thinking about designing for accessibility from a person-centred perspective. This post is about 3 of them. There is this slidedeck on Dropbox for a workshop to discuss them. All the images in this post are from it. I’ll use examples from a workshop this week about communication impairments. […]
Making Tactile Maps Together
Maps help people both create a sense of anticipation and reduce a sense of anxiety about going to a new place. Offering different maps to people with differing physical and cognitive capabilities is offering a better welcome to more people. Acuity Design creates a lot of tactile maps for blind people to use in transport […]
Modeling spaces of Accessibility
Agency And Autonomy User Experience, and design more generally, is interested in enabling the individual to do the thing they want to do. However, this can be unhelpful when discussing accessibility because it ignores much wider social and poltical ideas of personal independence and autonomy. “Doing the thing I want to do…” is a tightly […]
EasyJet and the inconvenience of travellers with disabilities
I ran a workshop at UX Bristol on designing forgettable experiences and used the EasyJet airline ticket booking system as a core element in workshop exercise.I asked people to consider: How to redesign the system to enable people to make ethical choices during the booking. Particularly in terms of ecological sustainability. How to redesign the […]
Accessibility is where you start
Accessibility is where all design projects need to start because it is the only way of avoiding huge mistakes and huge costs. Accessibility is how you recognise the vast breadth of human capacities and needs. Without it, the design space may seem small and manageable but that’s a trick you play upon yourself in the […]
Empathy exercises don’t work
Eyeware is a new immersive app, just released by RNIB and the UK’s Transport Systems Catapult. It simulates different types of visual impairment. Microsoft Design tweeted (later deleted) that it enabled you to feel like what it is to live with a serious eye condition. This is very, very wrong. It is at the core […]
The problem of ‘Looks good’ inclusive design
This post will seem cruel but it is about an important issue in the space between accessible and inclusive design. Tokyo 2020 The Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 offer the possibility of some great new design for inclusion. Japan, due to its ageing population, has been ahead of most countries in public and urban design […]
Innovating inaccessibility: designing novel forms of disability
I was at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London yesterday. They have a new entrance plaza. It looks lovely.It does however, include a new form of textured paving that is quite awesomely bad for accessibility.For a museum that is proud about design and actually has exhibitions about design and disability on at the moment, […]