MYP Design Social, Cultural and Ethical Impact of Design Notes

Every Design Includes Some People and Shuts Others Out

1. Every design decision quietly picks a body size, a language, a budget and a set of habits, and anyone outside those is left on the wrong side of the product.
2. A door handle set at 1.1 metres suits an average standing adult and defeats a wheelchair user, a five year old and anyone carrying a box.
3. Pulse oximeters, which read blood oxygen by shining light through a fingertip, were calibrated mostly on lighter skin and give less accurate readings on darker skin.
4. Voice recognition trained mainly on one accent fails speakers of another, which turns a convenience for some people into a barrier for others.
5. A product sold only on a monthly subscription with a bank card excludes anyone paid in cash week to week.
6. Exclusion is hardly ever deliberate, and it usually comes from a designer treating themselves as the average user.

Inclusive Design Widens the Door Instead of Adding a Side Entrance

1. Inclusive design means making one product work for the widest possible range of people rather than making a separate special version for the ones it failed.
2. Universal design states the same idea as principles: equitable use, flexibility, simple operation, information you can perceive, tolerance for error, low physical effort and enough space to approach.
3. Kitchen tools with thick soft grips were designed for arthritic hands in the 1990s and turned out to be more comfortable for everybody, which is the usual outcome.
4. Lever door handles, dropped kerbs, video captions and step free entrances all started as access features and became the default everyone now expects.
5. Anthropometric data gives the body measurements you design to, and working to the 5th to 95th percentile range covers most adults while deliberately leaving out one in ten.
6. Decide on purpose who falls outside your range and write it into your specification, so the exclusion is a choice you can defend rather than an accident.

Cultural Meaning Travels With a Design, and It Does Not Survive the Trip

1. Objects carry meanings that a culture assigned to them, not meanings the material contains, so the meaning changes as the object crosses a border.
2. Colour is the clearest case, since red signals luck and celebration across much of China and signals danger or a loss on a UK spreadsheet.
3. Symbols travel badly too, because a hand gesture printed on packaging can be cheerful in one country and a serious insult in the next one over.
4. Form carries status, so a shape read as light and modern in one market reads as cheap and flimsy in another where weight is what signals quality.
5. Products built for a single market fail abroad in specific, checkable ways, like a kettle handle shaped for right handers or a fridge sized for a kitchen layout nobody there has.
6. This is the global context personal and cultural expression, and it enters your project the moment your user is somebody other than you.

Appreciation and Appropriation: Credit, Consent and Who Gets Paid

1. Cultural appropriation is taking an element from a culture that is not yours and using it without credit, without permission and without benefit flowing back.
2. Cultural appreciation means learning what the element means first, naming where it came from, and usually working with or paying people from that culture.
3. Meaning matters more than shape, because a pattern that marks a particular family, rank or ceremony is not available as a decorative option.
4. Power matters as much, since a large company copying a small community's design and selling it worldwide takes the market that community was already serving.
5. Sacred and ceremonial designs sit outside the argument altogether, and printing a Maori ta moko pattern on a phone case is not a decision worth defending.
6. The working test is three questions: do I know what this means, have I named where it comes from, and does anybody from there gain anything?

The Supply Chain Is Full of People You Will Never Meet

1. A supply chain is every step between raw material and shop shelf, and a mid price trainer can pass through a dozen countries before it is boxed.
2. Each step is usually a separate company, which is how a brand can truthfully say it does not own the factory where its product was cut and sewn.
3. That distance is the whole problem, because nothing printed on the label tells a buyer the hours worked, the wage paid or the state of the building.
4. The Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed in April 2013 and killed more than 1100 garment workers, after cracks had been reported the previous day.
5. Price pressure travels down the chain, so a 2 pound cut at the till becomes a cut in the piece rate paid to a machinist at the far end.
6. Child labour, forced overtime work and unprotected chemical handling concentrate in exactly the steps that sit furthest from the brand's name.

Fair Trade and Ethical Sourcing Put Conditions Into the Contract

1. Ethical sourcing means choosing suppliers on how they treat their employees and land as well as on price per unit.
2. It works through written supplier codes of conduct, factory audits, and published supplier lists that let outsiders check the claims.
3. Fairtrade certification guarantees producers a minimum price plus an additional premium that the community decides how to spend, often on a school, a clinic or a well.
4. It covers commodities such as cocoa, coffee, bananas, cotton and gold, and the mark on the pack means that chain was audited rather than simply described.
5. Other schemes handle other risks, with FSC covering timber from managed forests, GOTS covering organic textiles and the Responsible Jewellery Council covering gold.
6. None of them is complete, because audits are often announced in advance, work gets quietly sub-contracted onwards, and certification costs money the smallest producers do not have.
7. A designer moves this by naming the certification in the material list, since writing FSC certified birch plywood on a drawing is a purchasing instruction, not a wish.

Designing for a Community You Are Not Part Of

1. Designing for people unlike you is ordinary professional work, and the way it goes wrong is assuming you already understand the problem.
2. Participatory design brings those users in as contributors who shape the idea, rather than as test subjects handed a finished prototype at the end.
3. Start by asking what they already do about the problem, because an existing workaround contains most of the requirements you were about to guess.
4. The PlayPump, rolled out across southern Africa in the 2000s, turned a playground roundabout into a water pump and largely failed, because children stopped playing and women ended up pushing it for hours.
5. Check that the thing can be maintained locally, since a design needing a spare part shipped from another continent stops working within about a year.
6. Give credit and ownership where you can, naming collaborators in your design folder as contributors rather than listing them as research data.
7. When you come to judge the impact of your own solution, follow the guidance in the evaluation article instead of repeating this thinking there.