What is inclusive design?

At some point in their lives, activities that many people will have taken for granted begin to present problems that they may not previously have thought about. However, the fault does not lie with the user but with the poor design of products and services.

All products exclude some users, often unnecessarily, and Inclusive Design (an umbrella term for the broad collection of approaches, methods and practices for designing inclusively) aims to highlight and reduce such exclusion.

Research has shown that, while many companies agree with the principles of designing inclusively, they consider it impractical for them to adopt such practices - and certain companies persist in the view that people with functional impairments are in some way undesirable customers. Also, designers are either unaware of the needs of users with different capabilities or do not know how to accommodate them into the design cycle.

An understanding of inclusive design is therefore necessary in order to promote it, as is an appreciation of the causes of design exclusion before looking at methods of countering it.

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