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Inclusive design - products that are easy for everybody to use (view report contents)

The changing market place

The social case

A case for inclusive design can be made for reasons of social justice. Increasingly we rely on a greater range of products in our daily lives. These products can be liberating and life enhancing for everybody, but for some of us they make independent living possible. When bad design is widespread it can mean that a succession of ordinary activities cannot be carried out with ease or dignity. There is an awful irony in the situation where a microwave oven which has the features prized by visually impaired people also has controls which cannot be used by them.

Design is a social issue because it is poor design which turns an impairment into a disability. Having limited grip only becomes disabling when controls are too small, for example. It is unjust that some people have a restricted choice of products or are compelled to buy expensive attachments because of deficiencies in basic design. The Design Council (see reference 2) argue that inclusive design should be considered as a mainstream corporate responsibility.

The commercial case

While the social case is compelling, the central argument of this paper is that inclusive design makes good business sense. The commercial arguments for inclusive design are nearly all based on the fact that the population is getting older. This will bring about profound and permanent changes to the market place.

In the past, many companies, particularly those whose products are marketed across the full spectrum of the population, tended to consider disabled customers as niche market at best, and as an unwanted intrusion at worst. However, companies are increasingly taking the view that, when properly managed, programmes which address the needs of people with disabilities can open up new market opportunities and be profit generators rather than cost enhancers.

Taken from: Towards a barrier free Europe, Commission of the European Communities

It is a well known and obvious point that the difficulty of carrying out everyday tasks increases with age (see reference 3). Yet statistics on disability have not always taken account of the huge numbers of people who experience some difficulty with everyday tasks as they get older. This omission has led to the belief that disabled people are a small marginal group, with very specialised needs. Designers of mainstream products thought – consciously or unconsciously – that they could be ignored because they would somehow be catered for separately, probably by a government agency. However the majority of these people found that their needs had not been considered by designers of disability equipment either (see reference 4).

Nearly seven in ten disabled people are elderly, and their impairments are no more or less than part of the normal process of ageing. This is not a marginal market. Most of us will experience some form of disability permanently or temporarily at some time in our lives. And as life expectancy continues to go up (people born now can expect to live 30 years longer than their great grandparents) our experience of reduced abilities will be over an increasingly long period.

It follows that inclusive design is an issue that affects us all very directly. The fact that we will have reduced abilities to see, grip or reach as we get older needs to be accepted by designers and those who commission design merely as the normal and predictable part of life that it is.

There has been a limited response to these statistics. A Design Council poll of the FTSE 100 (see reference 5) companies found that only 29% of them considered that the ageing population would significantly affect their businesses. Under a third considered age as a major part of their design strategy. Interviews with car manufacturers carried out by Ricability suggested that while marketing departments were quick to identify the growing numbers of older customers as an opportunity, these statistics were not used to provide a brief for designers (see reference 6). As the Netherlands Design Institute put it ‘the appetite for the market is bigger than its insight’ (see reference 7).

Some European statistics

  • Even a conservative estimate shows that between nine and fifteen per cent of people in Europe have a disability 8 – some 37 million people.

  • In most parts of Europe the number of people aged 60 or more will double in the next thirty years (see reference 9).

  • The number of people aged 80 or more will soar – by 2050 ten per cent of us will have reached this age (see reference 9).

  • Nearly a fifth of the population of the EU will be aged 65 or more by 2015 (see reference 10).

Consumer power

The ageing of the population means that consumer power is shifting, and this change will be permanent and radical (see reference 11).

New generations of older people will be more demanding because their expectations, shaped by an affluent consumerist society, will be higher. They will not be at all tolerant of products which do not meet their needs. These expectations will apply to the range of products on the market. While the stereotypes of age have never been entirely true, they apply less and less with each succeeding generation. It has never been true that older people were a single, separate and homogeneous market. Older people will increasingly be doing the things once thought of as the province of the young. And as larger numbers of them will have higher disposable incomes their diversity will become more obvious in the market place. The challenge to designers is to meet the demand for products which are not only easy to use but meet all the other aspirations of individual groups of consumers in a stylish way.

Increasing importance of convenience

In recent years, products have moved closer together in terms of their performance. Most work to at least an acceptable level and are reasonably reliable. This means that style and ease of use will become increasingly dominant in consumer choice.
There must be a huge market for a video recorder which can be used more intuitively and which does not require pages of instructions.

Inclusive design is better for everybody

Designs which meet the needs of people with reduced abilities are easier for everyone else. Automatically opening doors and dropped kerbs are often quoted as examples of this. In testing products, Ricability has consistently found that features which are easier for disabled people are easier for all. Conflicts of interest are comparatively few and can usually be resolved with some thought. It follows that taking account of the needs of older people should lead to innovative products which have features which appeal to everybody.

Equally, products which do not have these features will be at a competitive disadvantage.

 

Report Contents

Summary
Introduction
What is inclusive design?
The changing market place

Extent of the problem
Misunderstandings and barriers

Discussion and full recommendations

Pictures of example products
References

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