Can design make the world better? Yes – think sculptures that double as safety features and DIY tools the elderly can operate
- Jeremy Myerson explains why older travellers go to airport toilets frequently – being small and ceramic-tiled, these areas make announcements easy to hear
- Inclusion used to be narrowly defined. In a book, Myerson shows how design can address the needs of many more, such as the left-handed, pregnant, colour-blind
If you’re looking for an example of inclusive design, the very text of Jeremy Myerson’s new book is a good place to start. Designing a World for Everyone: 30 Years of Inclusive Design is packed with richly illustrated examples of architecture, products and systems that were conceived to work for as many people as possible, regardless of age or ability.
It’s written in a lively and familiar way, no doubt informed by Myerson’s previous career as a journalist.
“People won’t read an academic text, but they will leaf through a book of case studies with a lot of pictures,” he says. “I guess you could say the book was based on inclusive design principles.”
Eight years later, he became the founding director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. At the time, it was unprecedented, its focus on making things for people who had long been overlooked by designers.
Myerson’s interest had been sparked by an exhibition, “New Design for Old”, at the Boilerhouse Gallery of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1986. “They asked 14 product designers – really famous people – to take an item in the home and redesign it for an older person,” says Myerson.
Inclusive fashion: the label that’s making waves in China
There were things like glow-in-the-dark light switches and sit-down showers – “all kinds of very basic ideas but beautifully realised. I thought about how design, instead of just a marketing tool, could be a real social agent of change,” he says.
That stood in contrast to the prevailing attitude at the time. “Design for ageing and design for disability did exist, but it existed outside the mainstream,” says Myerson. “These groups were pulled away from the mass market and subjected to a special needs ghetto of gadgets.
In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 tried to change that by setting out legal requirements for accessibility in many areas of public life. But the kind of inclusive design promoted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre went beyond setting minimum requirements. Instead, it aims to fundamentally change the design process.
Just as in the advertising world, designers traditionally geared their work towards a set of personas that were meant to represent end users. “You had prejudices and assumptions baked right into the process,” says Myerson. “We instead encouraged designers to go out and do ethnographic research.”
The fruits of that labour in many of the projects are described in Myerson’s book.
In 2000, the Helen Hamlyn Centre was approached by British hardware giant B&Q with a problem. Despite market research showing that elderly people were interested in carrying out basic maintenance in their homes, people over 60 rarely bought DIY equipment.
Designers staged user workshops and discovered why: older people found most hardware too heavy, cumbersome and complicated to use. In response, they worked with B&Q to make a series of power tools that are lighter and more straightforward to use.
“That was the first big hit we had, commercially, with inclusive design – something completely reimagined,” says Myerson.
How hard is it to get around Hong Kong in a wheelchair? We find out
In Britain, designers worked with paramedics, doctors, patients and engineers to completely rethink the interior of the standard British ambulance, making it easier to clean, restock and update through modular components, as well as creating a space that offers more front-line care rather than simply transport to hospital.
“Well, I said, do you want to know why they go so often? They go to the loo to hear flight announcements.” It turned out that the small, ceramic-tiled environment of the toilets was the perfect place to clearly hear announcements that tended to be muffled in the rest of the terminal, so designers came up with the concept of ceramic “acoustic arches” that serve as information pods scattered throughout the airport.
One of Myerson’s favourite projects is featured on the cover of the book: Foyle Reeds, an interactive sculptural installation designed for a new bridge in the Northern Ireland city of Derry, known as Londonderry. In a place riven by sectarian divides, the bridge is meant to offer both symbolic and physical connection, but it also needed to account for the city’s high suicide rate. The sculpture is both an artwork and a safety feature.
“People did not want barbed wire and floodlighting,” says Myerson. “They wanted something that would magically transform the environment from a bleak place to a place of hope.”
“As a demonstration of the lack of inclusivity in the way we design our systems, the pandemic is terrifyingly vivid,” says Myerson. “When we started, we didn’t know where we fit in. We were in some uncomfortable place between industry and education. But now we know that inclusive design needs to be part of everything.”
