Inclusive Environments (including the environment)

Colin Clark, Lead Software Architect, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University

The Future and the Past

When I first saw that I was billed as a "technology futurist" for this talk, I have to admit that I was a little worried. I thought, is that me? How can I presume to speak for a future? Which future will it be? And who is welcome in it? 

There are so many aspects of technology's past that are easily forgotten in our rush to the future. I love to dream of the future, of different futures. But part of that means I'm as interested in looking to technology's past, its apparent failures, obsolete curiosities, and dead ends, as the source of its possible futures. For example, the participatory engagement of workers in the early '70s UTOPIA Project. The DynaBook's vision of personal, creative learning. Logo's proprioceptive real-world turtles.

In particular, I'm interested in the ways that we can change the game of the future, change the criteria, change our metrics for success. To measure the success of new technologies not by how much money they make, how popular they are, or how familiar they seems, but by their value to our communities and their support for diversity and creativity.

Technology's Weather

I've been thinking about this metaphor of "forecasting," the conference's theme this year. And weather seems like an apt connection to make with technology—they are both best understood as complex, adaptive systems. I'm a sailor, and over the last ten years or so of sailing, I've tried to learn as much about weather as I can. Weather, just like our future, isn't something you can expect to master or control. It's something that you have to be sensitive to, and to attune yourself to it. Its patterns, possibilities, and, once in a while, its startling unpredictability. With time and sensitivity, you can learn to see and hear and feel the weather, locally, close to you. When I sail, I can hear the waves lapping on the hull, see the wind's approach from a distance by watching the cats paws or the clouds build up overhead. Weather is different everywhere, and local knowledge is essential to navigating it safely. But weather exists, at the very same time, at a global level. There, there are prevailing trends and interrelated systems in motion. Local actions have global systemic consequences. So too with technology. As creators of technology, as I am, we need to be aware of our impacts on the "climate" of technology; of our impacts on other peoples' lives and communities, which may be very different from our own.

Technology As Practice

Technology is practice; “the way things are done around here.” -Ursula Franklin, The Real World Of Technology, 1989

Technology, as Ursula Franklin defined it so simply and clearly, is a practice; it's "how we do things around here." 

This is to say, and this is perhaps pointing out the obvious, that the ways in which we create our technologies—the techniques and values and social dynamics that we practice with, and invest within them—will have fundamental shaping effects on the kinds of technologies we can create, and on what people will end up being able to do and to express with them. So much of today's extractive "innovations," I feel, are being formed from a myopic design culture, one which too often assumes there is a norm—a typical, an average user—who looks and acts and has needs that are just like those of the, frankly, wealthy young white men of silicon valley. 

We Aren't Typical or Average

But we all know, from our own personal experience, and from working closely with others in our communities, that this just isn't the case. None of us, I think, would identify as typical or average, or perhaps even as "normal." We're all different, we're always in motion and changing, and we each need different things at different times and we depend on each other in different ways. This, for me, is the promise of a different kind of future for technology; one which allow us to refigure disability into something that is not just a individual barrier that we experience alone, or a medical formalism, but as part of a larger context or system. Disability and accessibility are an opportunity for creating community and recognizing identity, for negotiating the mismatches that we all experience at different times and in different situations, between our needs and the experience that the environment or system offers to us. We need to measure a technology by its ability to adapt itself to suit our differing needs. This, then, is the essential challenge of inclusive design: to create the environment and the means to make technologies that are reflective of, and adaptive to, the full range of human diversity.

Co-Design

One of the strategies that we've been exploring for a couple of years now at the Inclusive Design Research Centre, where I work, is called co-design. This means that we strive to design with people, rather than just for them. Co-design can sometimes be challenging or uncomfortable. As designers, it means that we can't always take on that distancing role of "expert," of the person who knows best. Instead we have to be participants, not just managers or facilitators of a prescribed process. We have to invite people into our design practice from the start and throughout, to negotiate roles and relationships, and to remember ask, "what role would you like me to play in this process?" and "how would you like to participate?"

Design Mysticism and Abstraction

Design culture today, I fear, is too often steeped in a strange combination of mysticism and condescension. Mysticism, because we still often subscribe to the cult of the "great visionary"—you know the kinds of CEOs I mean, who we love to idolize and treat as a kind of stand-in for a whole invisible network of people who inevitably worked together to design a technology. This, to me, is a kind of fascinating neo-Romanticism, a look back to that period of art history where it was the "great genius" who single-handedly channelled the power of nature into their work, yet always stood at a distance from it. So too with designers of today, who stand off at a distance from the communities who live with their technologies. Design when it is practiced inclusively, should be understood as a primarily collaborative and participatory effort. 

On the other hand, I've noticed that most formalized design methods that are practiced in industry (and often in academia, too) tend to adopt certain outmoded anthropological and ethnographic strategies without question. Like the idea that a design researcher can be an objective, impassive observer of real-world practice, and that their primary role then is to expertly synthesize, extract, essentialize, and then model the people they observed into "personas," or fictional characters. And this is what many design teams tend to do today. But what kind of clarity can be really gained by taking many people—people in motion, in different environments, people with different needs and perspectives and stories, and trying to boil them down into a quick, fictional snapshot?—a homogenous, static persona, who in fact just serves to blur away the uniqueness and difference of all the individuals who comprise this persona.

Users DO Know

“There is a large and growing body of evidence that users don’t know what they want, don’t know what the medium is capable of… [and are] quite incapable of imagining something new, useful, desirable, or innovative. What’s more, there is ample evidence that the users are entirely ignorant of their inabilities…” - Alan Cooper, "If users could lead innovation, they wouldn’t be users", 2011

This kind of design is driven by a mistaken belief, as Alan Cooper claims here, that people don't know what they need, and can't be articulate advocates for themselves and their communities. And yet, people with disabilities in particular, along with their families and caregivers, are singularly aware of the barriers and mismatches they face every day with today's technologies, and are often profoundly ingenious and creative at coming up with workarounds and "hacks" that allow them to make do with technologies that were designed for the "mythical typical" user.

“All people have something to offer to the design process… they can be both articulate and creative when given appropriate tools with which to express themselves.” -Elizabeth Sanders, "From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches", 2002

The future of technology design, as I see it, must make room for the creativity of the people who use it, who make themselves at home in our technology environments every day. As Elizabeth Sanders points out, everyone can be a creative contributor to the design process if they want to be and are allowed to be. It takes some new and different ways of doing things. 

Storytelling

We have to listen to and reflect on the stories of the people who will use our technologies, and those who may be at risk of being excluded from them. In a project we've just started, called the Social Justice Repair Kit, we are creating storytelling tools for the Web, in which people can tell their stories in their own way and their own languages—through written or spoken words, pictures, or videos. Different modes of expression, and of reception, are built in from the beginning, along with the scaffolds and supports—text to speech, simplification, magnification—that help people with learning differences engage more easily with other stories and storytellers in their communities. We're doing this with a group of youth activist communities in Colombia, Rwanda, and Canada's North, conceptualizing and co-designing these tools jointly. 

I see storytelling in general, and the creation of living story archives—compiled by users themselves, in their own voices—as being an essential component to an inclusive future for design practice, and an excellent alternative to traditional design hierarchies and models.

Play and Improvisation

Another way to effectively engage people in the design process is through play and improvisation—to have them make and build things. This picture shows a "create-a-thon" event, where group of users and designers creating "marble runs"—like a skateboard park or roller coaster for marbles to go through—as a way of drawing out new tactile and spatial metaphors for the software-based physics simulations we're working on with the PhET team here at CU Boulder. We brought together students, teachers, designers, and people with visual impairments to jointly build these physical apparatuses, and then to explore ways in which they'd describe them, draw them, and interact with them in two-dimensional screen spaces. I'll talk more about other co-design activities we've been exploring, and ways you can get more involved in them, in my break out session later today.

Community

Another important aspect of the "co-" in co-design is community. I think it's important to situate a design and research practice within the context of  communities, especially those in which the participants have an opportunity to continue to be involved in the process, to feel a sense of autonomy and stewardship over the work they've contributed to. Fluid, an open source community that Jutta Treviranus and I started in 2007, has evolved as a community to support the engagement of the "outliers," the people who might not feel that they belong, or would be welcomed, in the traditionally technocratic environment of open source software development. Fluid has, over the years, attracted a small and dedicated group of designers, developers, artists, users, people with disabilities, and others who are dedicated to inventing new ways to design collaboratively, and new software frameworks to support what I call "material systems," or "continued design."

Material Systems

Imagine if you could take a piece of software off the shelf, and freely change it or redesign it to suit your needs or those of your friends and family. And to do so without needing to be expert programmers with access to the source code of the software. Imagine that when you find a software user interface to be too complicated—like, it overwhelms you with too much information on one screen—that you could easily choose to hide away major parts of it so that you could focus better.  Or imagine that any piece of software could automatically read words out loud to you, highlighting the words, and making them big so that it was easier to read them, but without having to deal with all the conflicts and incompatibility that plagues today's bolt-on, after-the-fact assistive technologies. Imagine sharing the little customizations and adaptations that work so well for you with others who might benefit from them, or with the people you care for, or with your elderly parents and their friends.

My favourite metaphor for this is the knitting practice of Amy Twigger-Holroyd, which she calls re-knitting. In this picture, there is one example of re-knitting, where Amy has taken a mass-produced, machine-manufactured sweater, and turned it into a completely different kind of sweater—a cardigan. She was able, using her reknitting techniques, to cut, splice in, and pick up stitches from the original sweater, and to add her own features, embellishments, and aesthetic personalizations. And in turn, the owner of Amy's re-knitted cardigan is able to make his own changes and modifications too.

But software today doesn't work like this. It's brittle, and once it is released and is "shipped" by a designer, it often no longer has the capacity for change. This is often due to the ways we write software—the programming languages and frameworks that have become the norm in the industry today. Material software will, in short, take a long time to achieve. It will require completely different tools and programming languages. Within the Fluid community, we are creating software development tools that aim to support this kind of materiality, by changing the nature of how we write code so that it is expressed as "data," a form more amenable to being changed, customized, and remixed on the fly.

Summing up, since I think I'm nearly out of time, technology, like weather, is complex and hard to forecast. But it is also something that is clearly influenced by our local actions and practices. If we dream of a future in which software doesn't perpetuate the precarity and exclusion of many of the most unique, most creative, and most experienced and wise members of our societies, we need to also envision and to enact new, more reciprocal design and technological practices. To find ways to co-design with others who aren't so much like us, and to create opportunities for more material, more convivial technologies.

Thank you very much!