If Philippe Starck met bottom wipers
Graham Pullin, School of Design and School of Computing, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HT, United Kingdom, , +44 1382 386531
Abstract
At Include 2007, two of the first three speakers used Philippe Starck's work to represent the antithesis of inclusive design and to illustrate how superficial and irresponsible designers, in general, could be. This paper challenges that attitude, arguing for more of the sensibilities of designers not currently involved in inclusive design, not less. The book Design meets disability examines this controversy. It identifies and explores seven tensions between a traditionally clinical and technical culture dominant in medical engineering—and much of inclusive design—and the art school culture of design in general: tensions that need not be resolved, rather harnessed. This paper includes extracts from conversations with three designers whose work is inspired by preoccupations other than disability: inspiring unexpected, even counterintuitive trains of thought about new directions in inclusive design. And it explains why Starck himself might be well-suited to design a particularly unglamorous but practical aid for daily living. So instead of deriding his work for its oversights, inclusive design should become more receptive to its depths. Not that this is really about Starck: Include 2011 should embrace a greater diversity of complementary and even contradictory design approaches, blurring the boundaries between inclusive design and any design.
Keywords
Inclusive design; design; design education; design methods; design values
The antithesis of inclusive design
In the very first session of Include 2007 [1], one of the speakers showed an image of Juicy Salif, the lemon squeezer designed by Philippe Starck [2] in 1990, as an illustration of how impractical and superficial design could be. Soon afterwards, another speaker used Starck's Hot Bertaa kettle to represent the antithesis of inclusive design.
At a conference defining the cutting edge of inclusive design, this analysis feels disappointingly out of touch with design in general: very few designers or critics would claim these products as exemplars of design today. But neither should they be dismissed so easily as the antithesis, a view which overlooks qualities and sensibilities which are still conspicuous by their absence in the field of inclusive design.
Design meets disability
The deeper issues behind this controversy are explored in far more detail than this paper will allow in Design meets disability [3]. This book identifies and examines seven 'tensions' between the current priorities of design for disability and design in general. There are fundamental differences in the education, methods and values of teams typically engaged in each at the moment: experts in design for disability usually have a clinical or technical background, whereas designers with an art school education are less likely to be involved at all. Inclusive design lies somewhere between these extremes, but often (as above) exhibits attitudes more akin to traditional medical design. For example, design for disability is engaged with as an exercise in problem solving, whereas design can also involve more playfully and open-endedly exploring. Design for disability may focus on a user group with a particular ability, whereas design is more often inspired by a shared identity. Design for disability is understandably careful to be sensitive, whereas design may otherwise be deliberately provocative. And so on: other pairings include testing and feeling, universal and simple, information and expression, discretion and fashion [4]. These pairs are not opposites or even mutually exclusive, but the tension occurs because both cannot be the absolute priority at once. Often something has to give. Neither do they necessarily have to be resolved: a degree of controversy—in an atmosphere of mutual respect—can be harnessed as a healthy, creative tension.
Meetings with designers
The book then features seven conversations with designers who may previously had no involvement with disability or inclusive design, but whose fresh, often idiosyncratic perspectives might open up radical new approaches to inclusive design.
Short extracts from three of these follow in this paper. Each is a conversation with a particular designer about a particular brief involving disability. The conversations are not about the same brief, but I hope that the diversity of thought processes will come across anyway, because there is no such thing as a definitive design process (even the assumption that problem definition should precede concept generation, taken for granted in many engineering methodologies, is subverted by many designers who use exploratory design to gain a deeper understanding of the issues behind a project and sometimes to challenge assumptions written into the initial brief).
Instead, the very different briefs allow designers from different disciplines to be involved: graphics, fashion, furniture and product or industrial design (and in the book interaction design as well). And finally, we return to Starck and to thoughts of a brief that it might be particularly interesting to have a conversation with him about.
Graphic Thought Facility meets braille signage
The work of the graphic design consultancy GTF ranges from information graphics for London’s Science Museum to printed books with exquisitely perforated details. In a café interior, a map of the world covering an entire wall resolves into a floral pattern as you approach it and each flower is then further revealed to be made of sprinkled chocolate on the top of a cappuccino.
This range of scale and their attention to both visual and tactile qualities [5] suggested that GTF might be inspired by braille and take an unconventional approach to it. Braille has dimensions of a few millimetres, and needs to be read within arm’s length (having first been found) but can be seen from further away, so using it within interiors requires thinking about the design at different distances, by different people and through different senses.
Figure 1a: work by Graphic Thought Facility
The presence of braille in a public space sets up some intriguing contradictions. It is only ever one part of making a space accessible to a wide range of visually impaired people. At the same time, its very illegibility to sighted people can make it more conspicuous, and more evocative of disability than many other accessibility measures that may go unnoticed: braille has an iconic presence. Yet although GTF has been involved with signage for public spaces like museums in which accessibility was part of the overall program, braille has never formed part of its brief, but something that a different team was responsible for on an entirely separate project. GTF directors Andy Stevens and Huw Morgan both say that they would have relished being asked to think about braille and other accessibility: they have actually been intrigued by braille for a while.
Braille as a material
GTF has hundreds of samples of different materials and takes pleasure in rediscovering techniques or materials that have been passed over or forgotten. In the studio, Morgan locates a tactile map of the British Isles produced by the RNIB. “It’s got a ticker-tape aesthetic. It’s Space Writing. It has a futuristic system-ness but at the same time is old-fashioned" enthuses Stevens about embossed braille. "On one level it is so stark, so ‘crude,’ as a piece of graphic design, if it can be called that. It is lovely to touch and hold, but the way that it is laid out is not elegant for sighted people.” [6] He wonders whether elegance, and in what sense, is an issue for the blind people who read it. That takes us into a discussion of what is seen and not seen, and the thought that braille could be decorative for sighted people.
In an illustration of how GTF thought progresses, Stevens reaches for another box under his desk, this time containing a selection of beautiful ceramic tiles created by Lubna Chowdhary. These tiles were photographed to complement a new range of phones in a book that GTF designed for Nokia.
Blowing up braille
Stevens and Morgan lay the tiles out on a bench and start to play with them. They imagine combining them in a grid to make a frieze. Their counterintuitive leap is to begin to think of the tiles as individual dots on a blown up—and therefore illegible—braille wall. Raised bumps could be represented by highly textured, patterned, and coloured tiles; 'empty' braille cells could be smooth, plain, and paler tiles. From a distance a visual representation of braille could be perceived, if not deciphered. The textures would also reflect light differently, so might be revealed with changes in illumination. These are the games that graphic designers play with type after all, using it sometimes for decoration rather than information, and not always for both at once.
Close up, to a sighted or non-sighted audience, the contrast in textures between the rough and smooth tiles could be intriguing. The smooth tiles could actually carry information in braille, and lots of it—potentially far more than basic signage. What else might they say? This opens up the unusual question of how visible type might relate to braille at different scales. How strange to be thinking about braille first and visible text second for a change. This is just a train of thought, of course, and would need grounding in a specific brief before it could go much further, but perhaps it might even inspire thinking about visible text in a new way.
Figure 1b: a detail of GTF's train of thought about blowing up braille
Vexed meets wheelchair capes
Fashion company Vexed Design, founded by Adam Thorpe and Joe Hunter, has brought an edgy, urban perspective to highly practical and technical clothing. Its coats are made from waterproof and even knife-proof fabrics—Vexed clothing often has a political dimension. Vexed has created clothing that offers “cycling utility without being defined by a cycling aesthetic.” Urban commuters may cycle five kilometres to work and back, but spend the majority of their day off their bike without wishing to look like cycle couriers. Vexed’s SABS coat has vents that open as the wearer leans forward to hold bicycle handlebars to reveal flashes of reflective material, providing visibility when cycling at night that can go unseen when walking around during the day. Might this sensibility be brought to the design of clothing for disabled people which defines its wearer in terms other than their disability?
Figure 2a: Vexed clothing
It can be difficult keeping dry whilst sitting in the rain, as anyone who has ridden a bicycle or sat on a bench during a storm knows. In a wheelchair, the need for easy access whilst retaining arm mobility have meant the persistence of voluminous capes.
Add a hood, and the result can have the look of a shapeless anorak, practical and pragmatic, but hardly fashionable. If there could be said to be an aesthetic at all, it is inherited from rural outdoor pursuits, rambling, or hiking. Yet these may not be the most appropriate associations in an urban context, especially among young people wanting the respect of their peers within an urban street culture.
How might Vexed reinvent the wheelchair cape—practically, fashionably, provocatively, and politically? Vexed has explored the topology of clothing, through garments that look constraining yet allow full body movement. Vexed’s Wrap Liberation appears to be restrictive, but is in fact quite practical. So wheelchair garments that allow movement need not look ill fitting (they could even deliberately look confining). In the past Vexed has taken the vents in a riding coat that open up to let it drape over the back of the horse and applied these to the foreleg of a coat for cyclists, allowing movement for pedalling. This leads on to paddling and canoes: perhaps if part of the waterproof cape were a skirt, built into and seen as being part of the wheelchair, the wearer could put on a shorter, more conventional jacket that could be zipped into this.
When they talk through any brief, sometimes the direction will be articulated in words and sometimes it will come out of the details. They are sceptical of some conceptual design, which has the danger of just being “pub talk with illustrations,” and would not want to approach a brief of this nature without an understanding of the engineering involved, including engineers as well as wheelchair users, but also spending a rainy week in a wheelchair themselves.
The urban mobility cape
Thorpe and Hunter wonder whether it would be possible to design an urban mobility cape, a garment that would have an appeal across cyclists, wheelchair users, and scooter riders. This brings together design for the object with design for the person, requiring a deep understanding of the technicalities of bicycles, wheelchairs, and scooters, but also the sensibilities of who is being designed for. These sensibilities would for once not be defined by ability, perhaps not even by age group, but by some other, more complex measure of culture.
Figure 2b: a detail from Vexed's train of thought about an urban mobility cape
They may not yet have designed specifically for disability, but Thorpe thinks “our clothes are assistive technology.” [7] They are conscious of the need to learn more from disabled people, yet their years of experience makes them, like many other designers, experts in many of the issues that could redefine design against disability. Most of all, talking about wheelchair capes Vexed is passionate yet down-to-earth, challenging yet respectful. “Ask a different question and you get a different answer,” says Hunter. This is true for both cultures: just as disability could inspire fashion design, so urban culture could inspire design for disability.
Tomoko Azumi meets step stools
Tomoko Azumi is a furniture and product designer [8,9]. One of her early pieces, Table=Chest, was a three drawer chest that transformed into a low table. In other hands, this might have been a technical tour de force, an exercise in mechanism design, yet Table=Chest wears its ingenuity so lightly: as a chest it is quietly and beautifully resolved; as a table also–yet there is an understated delight in the unexpected transformation. More recently, her own studio’s work has included nested tables for the Japanese manufacturer Maruni. Her work is characterized by its simplicity, but warmth, and has been described as “minimalist yet sensual pieces that invite interaction.” [10]