What You Need to Know

• By designing with the disabled in mind, we can create products that are better for everyone else.
• Dubbed inclusive design, it begins with studying overlooked communities, ranging from dyslexics to the deaf. By learning about how they adapt to their world, the hope is that you can actually build better new products for everyone else.
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• Holmes believes that inclusive design, by bringing a diverse set of users into a design process that typically strips away differences and abstracts them into what seems user-friendly to the maximum number of people, can actually help with the fact that our capabilities change throughout the day. 

Excerpt

From fastcodesign.com | Fast Company & Inc © 2016 Mansueto Ventures, LLC

CLIFF KUANG

February 17, 2016

You could describe this in that old cliche that necessity breeds invention. But a more accurate interpretation is that in empathizing with others, we create things that we might never have created ourselves. We see past the specifics of what we know, to experiences that might actually be universal. So it’s all the more puzzling that design, as a discipline, has so often tended to focus on a mythical idea of the average consumer.

Go to Source

A version of this article appeared in the February 2016 issue of Fast Company magazine.