To begin, could you kindly share with us three words or adjectives that in your opinion best describe inclusive design?

“Welcoming, all-inclusive, and I guess my third word would have to be variety. So, I think when we think about diversity, it’s about having different people in the workspace, but what we’re really striving for is inclusivity, which means we’re making people feel welcome, right? So it’s not necessarily about just inviting people in, it’s once they’re there, are we creating an environment where they actually will stay, where we’re setting them up for success? And to do that, I think what we need to understand is that we are different.
We’re not all the same, and so we need options and choices, we need variety in spaces, and we need to go just beyond inclusive, we need to think broader. We need to be all-inclusive because it’s not just about one aspect of ourselves. As an individual, you might be a trans female, older, neurodivergent. We are multiple things, not just one.”

You’re always involved in this kind of discussions. Actually, you’re always at the forefront of discussions on inclusive design at numerous conferences and events worldwide. We could say that your voice is basically driving the change in the field. But what’s the trickiest part of explaining and promoting this new approach to design?

“I think once you break through that shell—it’s like cracking an egg. Okay, sometimes it’s hard, but once you’ve done it, then all of a sudden it just comes out. And I think when we talk about this, you can almost see people have that “aha moment” where they realize, “Oh my gosh.” And in many cases, when we start to talk about this, it’s to an audience that thinks, “Yeah, but you’re talking about somebody else, this isn’t me, we don’t have these kind of individuals in our workplace.” But they start to realize that they do. And it can be very emotional, and it can be very moving in many cases. You can almost literally see when that wall breaks or that egg cracks and people start to all of a sudden realize it and they have that “aha moment.” It’s like unveiling the elephant in the room and all of a sudden everybody becomes a believer that yes, there really is an elephant in the room.”

Well, inclusive design definitely covers a lot of ground with its many facets, and implementing it it’s not simple at all. So, what are the essential factors to consider when moving towards this more socially responsible approach?

“I think one of the challenges that we have is that we’re not taking an all-inclusive approach. We’re taking this one area at a time. You know, so thirty years ago we really addressed physical disability. And now we’re talking a lot about neuro-inclusion. But we need to think more holistically about whether it’s socio-economic issues, gender, ethnic, religion—religious differences, age differences. And if we don’t consider all of those things at once, we take them one at a time, it will take us forever to really truly address this more systemically and holistically.”

This is actually really interesting, so I would like to dive a bit deeper here. Because these days the word “neurodivergent” is gaining more and more recognition. Even the World Health Organization, for example, is analyzing and researching this unique neurological state. But could you please tell us more about it and how inclusive design might help these individuals in their everyday life?

“Yes, so we started researching this probably about eight years ago when a client asked us, “How do you design for someone that is ADHD?” And I am a mother of five, I’ve designed a lot of different types of spaces including educational spaces, so I had an okay answer but not a great answer. So we started to do a lot of research, and at that time it was considered that one in eight individuals were likely to be neurodivergent and very few people knew what that term meant. Now, it’s one in five and I think our latest research is actually showing it’s far more prevalent than that.
So what’s happening is there’s an awareness and the stigmatization is starting to go away. And I would say that we are all neurodiverse. We all process information differently. But there are some individuals that would fall outside of what is considered kind of those—the “norm” parameter of ranges, right? They tend to be either hyper- or hypo-sensitive to things of the built environment and they truly—it’s like they have a different operating system. They process and they think about things very differently. And so those individuals or neurodivergents might be more acutely aware of things that are happening in the built environment compared to someone who might be considered neurotypical, right? So for instance, for someone who is neurotypical, noise might be an annoyance, but for someone that is neurodivergent, it can be overwhelming.”

Yeah, actually, to end our conversation, I would like to stress this last point. So, in one of your most recent projects, you worked closely with PBA and Econyl brand to develop the Tocco collection, which is a handle series that is both inclusive and environmentally conscious. It also received two important awards at the NeoCon conference this year, I want to highlight that, so congratulations again. But how do you perceive the connection between inclusivity and environmental sustainability?

“I think we have to, again, this is when I go back to all-inclusive design—we can’t just solve one problem and then create another. We—and often what we’re doing is we’re ignoring those things. And I think we need to really think about how do we take all of those things, which makes it far more complicated and far more difficult, but if we’re solving a problem about inclusivity while our planet is on fire, you know, we’re ignoring one massive issue but solving another. And we need to—to really leverage lateral thinking where we’re applying things across the spectrum.
So when we were asked to help develop that project—product, initially it was really about how do we design a hardware to be more welcoming in the built environment and to be help with inclusivity. But we identified and feel very passionate about sustainability, and so we absolutely brought that into the conversation and we said why don’t we address that as well at the same time and start thinking about, you know, age and, you know, where an older person and a younger person might have differences, etc. So it actually addresses a variety of things in the solution that went well beyond what the initial brief really was. And that’s what we talk about when we think about more lateral thinking and more all-inclusive design.”