Design tailor-made solutions for real people with special needs

Hosted by University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam, Communication and Multimedia Design

We’re very good at designing things that work fine for people like ourselves. Things get harder when the people who will use our products have different abilities and different needs. The common, and friendly way to design things that work for everybody is by using the inclusive design approach. The idea is that you can create things that work equally well for someone who is blind, for someone who has a motor impairment, or for anybody else

Format
In order to create truly inclusive products, we need to be as good in designing things for people with disabilities, as we are in designing things for ourselves. So, in this Exclusive Design Challenge we are not going to design for everyone. And we are not going to design for average personas with 2.4 kids. And we are not going to design things for ourselves. We are going to design tailor made solutions, exclusively for real people. In small teams you will design a tailor-made solution for a real person with a real disability. These people will be present, so you can ask them all your questions, and you can test your ideas and assumptions with them.

Take-away
You will learn about some of the issues that real people (well, three of them) have to face in daily life. And hopefully you will leave with insights to make your own practice more inclusive. The Exclusive Design Method that we’ll work with is a fine brainstorming tool that will, ironically, help you to make your own practice more inclusive.

This workshop will be moderated by Vasilis van Gemert, lecturer at Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD) in Amsterdam. CMD is a human-centred and context-sensitive bachelor-level design education in the field of interactive digital products and services.

Read more about the Exclusive Design Challenge on the site of CMD

Read more about CMD Amsterdam

THIS WORKSHOP will TAKE PLACE ON May 24 AT 11.30 – 13.00 IN THE BALIE SALON