Chapter 5. Design Can Exclude
IN INNOVATING CONTINUOUSLY AND making our technologies more powerful, we risk making them more complex and more expensive. Unfortunately, this results in excluding a lot of people from them. As we said before, design is a bridge into technology, and itâs up to us to define how practicable this bridge will be. We do this by making sure we follow these rules:
It is accessible by everyone.
Everyone feels welcome and safe to cross it.
Its access is just.
Designing a technology that doesnât follow these three rules will cause hurt in a very different manner from that described in the previous chapters. If a group of people are unable to cross the bridge, then they are excluded: they get left behind socially, politically, economically, and creatively. They miss out on all the things technology can enable for them.
In this chapter, we will look at how bad design can exclude people from these three angles: accessibility, diversity or inclusion, and justice. We will give best practices and tangible arguments to build a case in your company or to a client. We will learn from examples where design played a central role in creating an unjust situation and come up with ways we can help. As with all the examples in this book, we look at these design mistakes with a critical perspective in order to learn from them, not to blame the organizations, companies, or designers behind these decisions.
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