[community] Response regarding cost of Inclusive Design for Daniel Ura OCAD

[John W (personal)]

I love having this discussion!

I want to add one thread to Jutta's great exposition, which is to urge that
we take care to be nuanced in our characterization of 'traditional' or
'mainstream' product development and marketing.

Most markets are iterative, by which I mean that they have repeated
sequences of identifying customers and then normalizing them on a
distribution plot of some kind. So, for example,

- Market A is optimized for the largest number of customers for a product
(a single bell curve (distribution of needs or preferences). When a
customer's needs fall along the tails of the curve they are deemed
'marginal' or too costly to engage with firms in  the market, so they are
left out.
- the tails of Market A, however, are the target market for Market B, which
creates its own bell curve that also has tails of excluded customers, and
so on - Market C targets the tails of Market B as its customers, Market D
targets the tails of Market C, etc. etc.

Market development is, currently, precisely this process of seeking
marginal customers of an existing market, understanding their needs and
then meeting those needs through new product or service innovations. It has
a repeated and continuous focus on marginal customers, trying to re-situate
them as the dense core of a new market.

This is more feasible now due to digital control and mass customization.
Think of all the start-ups you know of - many of them are identifying
marginals and seeking to make them into customers of a new product or
service offering. This was much more difficult pre-internet and WWW.

Unfortunately, the dynamism of open markets still fails in many instances
to capture the needs of many people. Those unmet needs are not random,
though - the various modes of social exclusion such as radialization,
disability, low income, gender, etc - explain to a large degree (in my
view) why marginalization continues despite growth and increasing
sophistication in markets. More than ever, niche markets are feasible - a
gay men's wine cruise of the Rhine, for example - but the underlying logic
is still that you need money to play, and to get money you need work.

I think we still must accept that certain aspects of inclusion will only
come through social policy. As a society, we should insist (legislate) that
individuals with significant differences be accomodated in the labour
market, which means in firms and businesses. It's simply another form of
tithe or taxation - you want to do business in our community, you must
absorb costs of accomodating workers who are ready and skilled to do the
work, even if you can't imediately figure out how to profit from diversity.

To me what is so unique about inclusive design is that we now have, at this
very point in history, tools to make every market more inclusive, including
labour markets (along the lines Jutta outlines) - but this should not be a
theory that replaces our existing understanding of why it is that
marginalization is not random. Critical theory + inclusive design = greater
potential than ever before to make a peaceful, inclusive, green society.

j


On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 9:45 AM, Treviranus, Jutta <jtreviranus at ocadu.ca>
wrote:

> Hi Daniel,
> With inclusive design, rather than designing for the largest customer base
> or the average or typical customer, and rather than designing to find the
> one best solution for the largest number of people, your goal is to create
> a design that stretches to encompass the largest range of diverse needs.
>
> If you were to take any population and plot their needs on a three
> dimensional scatterplot it would look like a starburst with a denser
> cluster in the middle and points emanating out from that denser centre. The
> dots at the periphery are individuals whose needs are not met by the
> standard designs and current markets. They are people with disabilities,
> people who are marginalized and people who are in very small minorities.
> They are not considered in traditional design processes. Their needs are
> more diverse or more different from each other than the needs in the denser
> centre which are more homogenous but also diverse. Collectively the dots at
> the periphery usually outnumber the dots in the denser centre.
>
> If you design for only that denser centre, especially as an entity like
> the government or a public entity that nominally needs to be available to
> all citizens or customers you will be repeatedly asked to modify your
> design or to provide additional alternatives. You will also find that for
> many contexts those individuals that had needs represented by the denser
> centre will stray to the edges and ask for adjustments. Taking software for
> example, each modification will likely be a bolt-on or hack. This will
> degrade your design and make it more difficult to maintain. It will look
> something like a house with all manner of things added on but not fully
> integrated. Eventually it will no longer work but not before the costs of
> maintaining and modifying it have steadily increased.
>
> If you inclusively design, you design for the largest number of those
> peripheral and edge needs. Because those needs are so diverse, this means
> you need to enable personalization, or one-size-fits-one. For interfaces
> this is attained through a flexible, transformable interface. For
> industrial design it can be achieved through an inherent and interoperable
> modularity or adjustability that enables extensibility.
>
> The inclusive design will be more sustainable, more updatable and also
> more transferable to initially unplanned new uses.
>
> The cost of the design for only the denser centre is initially less
> expensive but far more costly over time. It’s life span is also limited.
> The cost for the inclusively designed system that stretches to the edges is
> more expensive to begin with but it is less costly in the long run and will
> have a much longer life span. The inclusive design will likely take more
> time at the start but pay off in less time to retrofit, maintain and train
> and in longevity.
>
> Does that make sense to you?
>
> Good examples of this phenomenon include the Web. Anytime edge
> requirements were included the systems lasted longer and were put to more
> uses. Think of the brittleness of things like Flash and Flex and then the
> longevity of CSS. Open APIs and open standards help with interoperability
> and inclusive design.
>
> I’d love to amass good examples of this phenomenon, I’m sure people can
> think of new examples.
>
> Jutta
>
>
>
> > On Sep 7, 2017, at 5:52 PM, Daniel Ura <danielura73 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > My name is Daniel Ura and I'm a graduate student at OCAD studying
> Strategic
> > Foresight and Innovation. I'm starting my Major Research Project these
> > days, which is about how businesses could integrate Inclusive Design and
> > Frugal Innovation principles as a strategy.
> >
> > Felipe Sarmiento once mentioned to me that Inclusive Design is expensive
> in
> > the short term yet cost-effective in the long term.
> >
> > I ask the community if there are any links (articles, research, essays,
> > etc) that substantiates that claim. My hope is that by combining these
> two
> > concepts, businesses can utilize Frugal Inclusive Design.
> >
> > I look forward to your responses. Thank you.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Daniel Ura
> > ________________________________________
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-- 
*John D. Willis | *
*CMRP, MDes *Inclusive design, strategy and research
Toronto CANADA

Web: www.jdwillis.ca
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