Designing Inclusive Futures

“Designing Inclusive Futures” reflects the need to explore, in a coherent way, the issues and practicalities that lie behind design that is intended to extend our active future lives. This encompasses design for inclusion in daily life at home but also extends to the workplace and for products within these contexts. For example, given trends in employment sector growth, skills requirements, labour supply and demographic change, there is a need to predict the critical areas where individual capabilities are mismatched with the physical, social and organisational demands of work. This mismatch, which can be addressed within the domain of inclusive design, is pervasively linked to real artefacts in workspaces and their intersection with the health factors that relate to ageing. This book is the result of the fourth CWUAAT workshop held in Cambridge, England in April 2008.

Designing Inclusive Futures reflects the need to explore, in a coherent way, the issues and practicalities that lie behind design that is intended to extend our active future lives. This encompasses design for inclusion in daily life at home but also extends to the workplace and for products within these contexts. For example, given trends in employment sector growth, skills requirements, labour supply and demographic change, there is a need to predict the critical areas where individual capabilities are mismatched with the physical, social and organisational demands of work. This mismatch, which can be addressed within the domain of inclusive design, is pervasively linked to real artefacts in workspaces and their intersection with the health factors that relate to ageing. This book is the result of the fourth CWUAAT workshop held in Cambridge, England in April 2008.

Contributions address the following themes:

• Understanding Users
• Inclusive Design
• Computer Access and New Technologies
• Assistive Technology for Working and Daily Living Environments
• Inclusive Environments

The nature of the contributions reflect a sample of the work of leading national and international researchers in the fields of Inclusive Design, Ergonomics, Universal Access, and Assistive and Rehabilitative Technology. There have been significant contributions from researchers in architecture, social housing provision, and apparel and fashion design, reflecting the need to understand the wider social and economic context of inclusive and assistive technology design.