Designing a World for Everyone: 30 Years of Inclusive Design

The way we experience the world is largely through the design of the places, products, communications, services and systems we encounter every day. Design determines how difficult or easy it is to achieve certain things – whether taking a bath, cooking a meal, crossing the street or making a call, we all want a world that works for us all the time. However, some people are excluded from the simplest and most basic everyday experiences. Why? This is because the act of designing has given insufficient consideration to their level of physical ability or cognitive difference or cultural background or economic circumstance.

Over the past 30 years, however, there has been a shift in designing to become more empathic and inclusive of different human needs. The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art first pioneered the concept of inclusive design in the early 1990s and it has gone on to build an extensive portfolio of collaborative projects over a long period, developing new methods, coaching designers at all levels in the approach and bringing a more inclusive way of thinking about design to international attention. 

This book shows the parameters of inclusive design through the lens of the centre’s own projects in the field. It therefore maps a movement and, at the same time, marks a milestone: the 30th anniversary of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design in 2021. 30 everyday artefacts and environments are explored. These vary in scale: some are simple, hand-held objects, while others form part of large and complex environments or systems. Some have reached the market, others we can file under ‘ideas for the future’. All reflect an approach which could be described as designing with people as opposed to designing for people.

Jeremy Myerson is a design writer and academic, and Helen Hamlyn Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art. After a career in journalism, during which he was the founder-editor of Design Week magazine in 1986, he moved into academia to focus on design research, publishing extensively in the field. He co-founded the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and was its Director for 16 years. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing at the University of Oxford, and Director of WORKTECH Academy, a global knowledge platform on the future of work.