STBY recently returned to Heartlands, reprising our role as inclusive design consultants at this large-scale regeneration project in Cornwall. This time we were asked to help design a collaborative workshop to help provoke new thinking on what the future should hold for the project. Organised along the themes of Art, Culture and Society, the event brought together academics, designers, and local stakeholders to look how arts and culture can help include local communities in the design process – and even help strengthen these communities in doing so.

Several conclusions were drawn from this, including the positive role Performance, Storytelling, and Film can all play in facilitating more effective engagement. These were then applied to the next question to be addressed: what can Heartlands learn from prior experience when planning for the future?

Here, the focus was placed upon whether arts and culture could – or even should – continue to make active and forceful contributions to Heartland’s future development. Discussions evolved from the starting point of whether culture is becoming more inherently democratic, moving on to first establish exactly how arts and culture could contribute to the management and programming of Heartlands, before subsequently attempting to frame exactly what such contributions would entail.

These focused, in-depth discussions were designed to provide the Heartlands leadership team with workable opportunities to develop a more democratic approach to their engagement with the public. By generating focused opportunities in an inherently democratic way, it was moreover demonstrated that inclusive design techniques can both facilitate and ideate community involvement.

A more in-depth account of the Creative Conversations event can be found in the final report documenting its findings, a PDF copy of which can be downloaded here. 

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STBY was invited by David Hamers, who works for the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and has recently been appointed as Lector Stad & Land at the Design Academy in Eindhoven.

The keynote lecture at the conference was by Caroline Steel. She is the author of the book ‘Hungry City. How food shapes our lives‘. In the keynote and the book she points to the feeding of cities as one of the great challenges of our time. It has a strong social and physical impact on us and our planet, yet few of us are fully aware of it. In respons to this challenge she introduces the concept of ‘Sitopia’ of ‘Food place’ (based on the ancient Greek; sitos = food and topos = place). A very interesting talk, and surely a fascinating book.

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In a two day training programme we presented our reflections on examples of community involvement methods we have used in a range of  projects. We specifically discussed the benefits of methods such as co-creation and design documentaries. We then explored these methods further together with the participants, in relation to a case study project one of them is currently working on. They had brought materials such as photos to illustrate the context of this project. The main issue for deliberation was how these methods could be used to effectively improve the social cohesion in the local area. As a result of the training programme we developed two potential project activities for this specific case-study.

You can download a more detailed description of STBY’s contribution to the Heartlands project by clicking here. Alternatively, get in contact with Bas, the Project Manager, by emailing bas@stby.eu.

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Overall, looking back on the conference today, my personal take away message is that the inclusive design community seems to be moving to a new and exciting stage. We now know what inclusive design is, we know how to do it, and we know how to explain to others how to do it, but we also realise that simply following ‘the maximum inclusivity route’ does not necessarily lead to the most interesting design. We certainly don’t want ‘bland design for all’, we want ‘great design for all’. On the one hand this design needs to offer everyone the respect and dignity they deserve, and on the other hand it needs to stimulate and challenge people to actively engage and explore the product, service or environment they are interacting with. Only then design will lead to experiences that really enrich our daily lifes.

The discussions on this topic during the conference reminded me of a concept I once picked up from  Stuart Hall, one of my heroes from the field of Cultural Studies. He made a plea for ‘risky stories’ in relation to culture and society, rather than ‘safe stories’. Risky stories  invite us to engage with and reflect on the complexities of daily life. They are far more interesting and challenging than safe stories. Risky stories don’t ignore the contradiction and tensions in daily life, they are engrained in it.  Maybe this is a concept that would be useful in the context of inclusive design as well? I think I would certainly prefer ‘risky inclusive design’ to ‘safe inclusive design’ any day.

Some of my personal highlights from the conference:

The keynote by Amar Latif, who kicked off day 2 of the conference, was very inspiring, refreshing and witty.  He is a remarkably vibrant, young and innovative entrepreneur, with a sharp vision and a deep personal understanding of inclusivity (being visually impaired himelf). Amar certainly seems to accept risks as part of normal daily life. He is all for inclusive design and the underlying quest for independence, dignity and respect, but he stressed that life’s solutions need to be practical and colourful too. He has no patience for people who see inequality as a big conspiracy, he rather addresses the ignorance and/or indifference that supports this inequality. In this respect Amar seems to be quite open for risky stories rather than safe ones.

One of the project-based presentations that stood out for me was given by Liesbeth Huybrechts and Sanne Jansen from the Media & Design Academie in Genk Belgium. They reported on an experience design project around the theme of ‘carefree living in elderly care’. They worked with students, residents of a local elderly home and also a theather group. The theather group immersed themselves for a few days in the daily life in the home, and then blended in during a lengthy visit by the students. Some actors performed roles as residents, others as carers and staff. The students did not know who of the people they interacted with were ‘real’ and who were acting. Based on this experience the students worked on design proposals that were later presented back to the residents in an in-house exhibition. I was pleasantly surprised by the playfulness and yet serious empathic and sensitive approach by the organisers. They seemed ready to take some considered risks in order to get better and more challenging results than just plain safe ones.

One of the more theoretical papers that stood out was by Graham Pullin from Dundee University. On the previous Include conference (in 2007) he had already made a strong plea for ‘good design’ (this may well have set us all in the right direction for this year’s conference). This year he presented a few glimpses of the contents of his new book ‘Design meets disability’. In the book he addresses some of the key issues in inclusive design (e.g. why can hearing aids not be as fashionable as eyewear?) and describes his conversations with leading designers about their views on these issues. I am very curious to read the book.

The workshop I appreciated most during the conference was the one on Design for Patient Safety. In this project an impressive line up of experts from various universities and the health care sector are collaborating on innovations for new mobile treatment solutions (smart pods) and the prevention of medical error. They were very open in sharing their experiences and learnings from developing this collaboration. They have all put in considerable effort to find common ground between their expertises, and did not hide that this is not always an easy ride. But they were keen to point out how much added value their collaboration has given to the project and to the results so far. Hearing this, and benefiting from their generously guided group exercises in the workshop, was very encouraging. In terms of safe and risky stories I would say that they were realistic in pointing out that the biggest barrier to innovation may be the implementation of the innovations within the large organisations.

Finally, a few last comments related to my personal interest in the area of (inclusive) design: the actual involvement of the people for whom the design is for in the development process. I am always curious for new insights on how to facilitate empathic conversations between designers and people, so I tend to keep my ears open for any interesting remarks on this subject. I was very surprised to hear one of the speakers say that although most design students are nowadays trained to do user research as part of the project preparations, they seldom use the outcomes of these studies to inform their designs. I was even more surprised to notice that several people around me nodded and said “that is so true”. Apparently the user research these students do is just to thick a box and then conveniently ignore the results. This is bad news for inclusive design education.

Another remark I noted during one of the morning debates was that studying market trends is not the same as doing research on user needs. This is indeed a confusion you sometimes hear from people in the industry. They may proudly announce that they are ‘studying users’, but if these studies are based on large scale market analysis rather than talking to and observing real people in their daily lifes, then it is questionable if you can really speak of user centered design. But, having said that, these were just some very minor afterthoughts on what was alltogether a very succesful and enjoyable conference.

The work in progress presentations by the research associates of the Helen Hamlyn Centre were quite impressive this year. I am already looking forward to the exhibition of their final results in September!

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We recently organised our last co-creative workshop for Heartlands, the regeneration project around an old tin mine in Pool, Cornwall. This time we had three aims. First we wanted to collect some stories that could be relevant to Heartlands, to inspire the architects, designers and artists that are involved in creating Heartlands. Second we wanted to explore with storytellers and architects, designers and artists together how Cornish stories could become an integral part of Heartlands, in the built environment and artworks but also the virtual presence of Heartlands, and how this could evolve over time. Finally, as with all our workshops we wanted to create connections between local creatives and others, and the design team.

We spent a full day at Cornwall College Library recording stories and working with stories. The result is a series of audio and video recordings that are now on a blog and podcast for the design team and all people involved. The recordings include many stories and also a wide range of ideas to built on in the future.

Our work at Heartlands has come to an end for now, after a full year of design research and workshops (12 activities all together). The site is starting to change from now on, as the builders have moved in. Opening is planned for Spring 2010. Early 2009 a new Heartlands website will be lounged where progress can be followed.

You can download a more detailed description of STBY’s contribution to the Heartlands project by clicking here. Alternatively, get in contact with Bas, the Project Manager, by emailing bas@stby.eu.

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We organised five User Forums for Heartlands, the regeneration project in Cornwall we work for as Inclusive Design facilitators all year in 2008, together with Yanki Lee of the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the RCA. The User Forums are aimed at testing some ideas that have been developed by the design teams. One of the Forums focused on navigating Heartlands. We worked with ‘extreme users,’ here people with a disability (from being blind to having difficulties with walking or learning), because we expected their needs and ideas to be extra demanding regarding navigation affordances and aids. We used the fruit because we didn’t want to use a very detailed and fixed model of the site. That would have suggested everything is already decided and fixed, and people would probably have hesitated to add trails of nuts to a fancy model.. Unfinished models, call them prototypes, are often best to work with we find.

All User Forums were documented in a highly visual and narrative way to ensure optimal communication of results. Each responsible design team had at least one member participating and they used the documentation to tell the stories to their colleagues.

You can download a more detailed description of STBY’s contribution to the Heartlands project by clicking here. Alternatively, get in contact with Bas, the Project Manager, by emailing bas@stby.eu.

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