Delft Inclusive Design: A platform to grow awareness and provide resources for IDE faculty in order to promote an inclusive design perspective

Abstract

Today many products exclude users from different sociodemographic groups such as ethnicity and race. Examples of these in physical products are automatic soap dispensers and airport body scanners. The digital era has appeared and there are still digital products excluding users of different ethnicities and race, for example, dating apps and algorithms used to find racism and discrimination on social media. Therefore, both physical and digital products continue to cause exclusion among users, mainly caused by the designer’s implicit biases. Yet, the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) at TU Delft has a scarcity of resources and courses available to integrate an inclusive design perspective for its students and staff. This project aims to raise awareness for inclusivity and set an example for the type of tools needed to carry out an inclusive design perspective in the IDE faculty.

The Delft Inclusive Design (DID) platform was designed to bring together inclusivity resources available in the IDE faculty. To learn how to carry out an inclusive design approach, the DID platform offers resources and guidelines created by the IDE faculty members. These resources focus on creating awareness about inclusivity and how personal experiences shape our designs and guidelines, to carry out inclusive design practices. With a questionnaire among 13 students and interviews with 2 staff members, the DID platform proved the significance of the topic and contents of the DID platform. It also proved the student and staff interest in the topic of inclusivity, the effectiveness of the platform and its envisioned content, and the willingness of students and staff to contribute to the platform. As part of the DID platform, an awareness activity was designed for students to reflect on the influence of implicit biases in their design work. This awareness activity was tested in 3 sessions to grasp the knowledge acquired in short-term, medium-term, and long-term effect. Each session was carried out by 6 student participants and took place every 2 weeks. The outcomes show that a 3-session process is essential when creating awareness as session 1 creates new knowledge that students need to grasp, session 2 ‘reminds’ students of their learnings and by session 3 students are able to recall the information learned in session 1. Additionally, a guideline to inclusive imagery was created to aid students and staff when selecting inclusive imagery. These guidelines proved useful and provided knowledge to all 6 student participants and 4 staff participants. The awareness activity and image guideline set an example to how these can take form, in order to promote inclusive design perspectives at the IDE faculty.