“For better or worse, the people who design the touch-points of society determine who can participate and who’s left out. Often unwittingly.” Mismatch, Kat Holmes
Technology can often can be excluding, as we are seeing with the game of booking of vaccination slots; those not adept at using technology or not having access to fast internet are being left behind. The greatest tool we have, not just as designers, but as human beings, is simply to be able to listen, understand and put ourself in other people’s shoes to create solutions that are inclusive of as many perspectives as possible.
Annie Zaidi talks about her experience spending a day in a wheelchair for a project to write about the rights of the differently abled; apart from the initial “Oh no i can’t use a staircase” she says how it opened her up to think about disability in other situations like how a folded wheelchair doesn’t fit in a taxi or it’s not possible to get on a train because of the gap and lack of time even with help from others. These issues of mobility are extremely important not just because they could be the difference between life and death in cases of emergency, they limit mobility in everyday use as well as leisurely activities like going to the cinema or a restaurant.
However, it’s not just wheelchairs, we have to be able to use this lens for other disabilities; for example, understanding the importance of material and tactile experiences for the blind. Chris Downey, who was an architect for nearly two decades before losing his vision, shares his insights on designing architecture you can’t see:
Something I often talked about is sort of the touch of the building where you actually reach out and grab the building. Whether it’s a door handle, or railing, or place to lean against, or a place to sit down. If those places offer the warmth of a comfortable touch, something that acknowledges the presence of the body besides the agenda of the eyes. You know, how can you think the material or the form in a way that it gives you that penshake. Just like you give somebody a handshake. There’s a lot that’s communicated through a handshake. And so what’s the handshake of the building? What are you saying in that handshake?
People who are blind might also develop better hearing, being able to hear as fast as 25 syllables per second!; hence, providing faster listening speeds, say at ATMs or other services along with braille provides better accessibility.
Stark is a great tool to make software more accessible if you’re a designer, developer or product manager with the help of tools like tools like the colourblind generator and contrast checker; they have plugins for Figma, AdobeXD, Sketch and Chrome! There are endless resources if you want to deep dive into it but the point is to always to keep that lens in mind; it can be as simple as having the right resolution for images which can be very important in developing countries where people might have small data plans.
What does this mean in an Indian context?
With a country as diverse as India and so many stakeholders in any given situation we can’t only design niche things in English for the top 10%, there’s ample opportunities for creative problem solving. It also means accessibility is not just about disabilities because many apps, like financial ones, will be used by so many people with different backgrounds that can’t be generalised into a few user personas.
Blackbuck, bringing offline trucking online, is an inspiring example of this because they’re tapping into a huge, highly unorganised sector by matching shippers with truckers as well as facilitating payments, insurance, and financial services. To understand the user they travelled thousands of kilometres to many states and interviewed them; there broadly emerged two types of users: one who has never used any app before and the other who was exposed to WhatsApp/Facebook. One of the main principles of good UI is that it should be familiar and that is exactly what they did by taking elements familiar to the user from Whatsapp/Facebook. They also help their users in other ways by setting up a FASTag, making sure money goes to their bank account because even though most of them do have bank accounts they don’t use it, having a blackbox in the truck and many more things.
This app was made for a certain group of people but what about when we have to design for something everyone will see? A symbol that people from all areas and languages can understand? Tarun Deep Girdher shares some incredibly insightful insights from working with the government to make the RTI and NOTA symbols for which they did a lot of field work like how to understand how people perceive different symbols; people who can’t read English thought the ‘i’ looked like a person; another aspect was medium because the RTI symbol would also exist in a medium that would be neither digital nor print; what colours would a local painter in a village have? Would they be able to recreate the design?
Design is not just about users; who are the ones making? Design in itself can be elitist simply because of the cost of education. Sudheer Rajbhar founded Chamar Studio, a luxury brand making bags from reycled rubber, after befriending a cobbler with whom he did a public project that involved printing the word Chamar, a slur used against those from the Dalit caste, on canvas bags; the brand expanded and he started working with tanneries in Dharavi where he met leather craftsmen affected by the beef ban, 6 months after which came the first products. Rajbhar is not a Dalit himself but belongs to the Bhar caste which comes under Other Backward Class; though he grew up in the slums of Kandivali East where he faced no discrimination, whenever he would visit Khetasarai, his native village in Uttar Pradesh’s Jaunpur district, he would hear the words bhar and chamar being used interchangeably — thrown around derogatorily or as abuse.
Though trained in drawing and painting at the Vasai Vikasini College of Visual Arts, Rajbhar has no formal education in fashion design. He first worked as an artist’s assistant, and his “experiences…in the elitist art field” became the catalyst for his label. “In the art world, they prefer good [spoken] English and a certain kind of presence,” he said. “I struggled and couldn’t learn much from the artists because they look at you through that lens.”
This line of thought can also be extended to other fields like textile design, graphic design, architecture and so much more but the larger aim here is to simply question, observe and understand.
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