Should the host of this session be able to be present?

A session hosted by Marijn Meijles and Vasilis van Gemert

Introduction

Marijn and Vasilis were asked to host a small breakout session at the Social Design Showdown during Dutch Design Week 2021 in Eindhoven. The theme of this event was inclusivity.

One of the interesting things about this event was that it was organised in a part of a building that is inaccessible to people in a wheelchair. Marijn depends on his wheelchair to get around. And so the main question of our breakout session was easy to find: should the host of this session be able to be present at this session?

We started the session by showing a few pictures of the effort it took to get Marijn into the event.

Marijn sits in his chair while another visitor walks up the stairs. — While it is easy for most people to just walk up the stairs, Marijn had to sit and watch them. Here he’s waiting for some sort of help.

Two people are placing guiding rails onto the stairs — At first we tried guiding rails. We laid them over the stairs, but the stairs turned out to be too steep.

Three people are lifting Marijn up the stairs — Finally we had to lift Marijn.

Marijn in the middle, lifted by two people. — Marijn doesn’t mind a theatrical and dramatic entrance. But being lifted by two unknown people to get into an event would be a problem for many people.

What do you think?

The first thing we did is ask our guests what they think of the question. We gave them a simple paper form and asked them to quickly write down their first thoughts. We had four guests, and as expected, we received four different answers to the question Should the host of this session be able to be present?.

The answers are in Dutch, so I am paraphrasing here. Here’s the literal transcript of each answer in Dutch.

I didn’t understand the question

One of the guests didn’t understand the question. They wondered if it would be appropriate to attend a session if they didn’t understand the question it was trying to answer. Being able to be present is such a normal thing for them, it is not really a question. During the sessions before, they came up with a few more questions:

What is the question about?
How was your journey to get here? Where did it start? Today or years ago?
What if the host was not present?
Who is responsible for the fact that someone is present? And for the fact that this session is being held?

Yes, and …

Yes, if it happens in a dignified manner. But to get there we need frontrunners who will stand on the barricades and point at the things that are uncomfortable

And yes, if people listen to the tips to improve things and really act on them.

Locations should be rejected …

The host should be able to be present. The fact that he is unable to attend independently, and that a grave violation of personal space is needed to get him into the venue, is inappropriate. A location should be rejected if it is inaccessible.

It should be clear, and …

Up front it should be clear if the venue is accessible so that you know what can be expected.
During the event all means should be present so the responsibility is not solely with the person.

We discussed these answers briefly. We quickly moved onto the next phase in the session, where we introduced some stakeholders, and some ethical approaches to design.

Ethical approaches to design

Marijn knows the building where the event was held very well. So he knows that parts of it are inaccessible. And he also wonders if it is worth the investment to make them accessible to all. And Vasilis is probably more the idealist of the two: he thinks that events should be accessible to all. So if part of a building is used for events, everybody should be able to get there independently.

This difference in design attitude is the basis of our workshop. We chose three common ethical philosophical approaches, oversimplified them, and asked our guests to work with them.

Make it usable for the majority

The first approach is often seen in businesses. It is very common in online projects as well. Simply said, it says that if most people, let’s say 80%, are able to use your website, or your product, or your event, then it is good enough. From a short term business perspective this may make sense. The idea in this approach is that it is extremely hard to optimise for the 20% that don’t fit in the chosen majority. Too costly in other words.

Design based on intentions

Another common approach is to use the best intentions. Simply said, if the intentions are good, then the result is good enough. So for instance, there are all kinds of regulations and guidelines when it comes to making buildings or digital products accessible. If you follow these guidelines, this means that you have done your best, and you can assume your product can be used by everyone. This approach is often used in buildings and websites that have to be accessible by law. The intentions are tested and ticked off, but not necessarily the usability of the end product.

Result based design

And finally we picked an approach based on result, which argues that it is the final result that matters, and that the final result should be tested. This could mean that it does not follow regulations, if it turns out that these are not good enough.

As said before, these are oversimplifications. The philosophical theory is of course much more complex. Yet these are three common approaches we encounter when it comes to making things accessible. And it seemed like a good idea to offer these to our guests so they can better understand the different arguments used by different stakeholders in design projects.

Second assignment

We asked our guests to pretend they are one of these four stakeholders: the owner of the building, the organiser of the Dutch Design Week, the organiser of the social design session, or the host of this breakout session. And then we asked them to imagine what their stance on our question would be if they lived by one of our three ethical approaches.

Conclusion

Isn’t it a bit too soon to draw a conclusion, you might wonder? And yes, I agree. But the 45 minutes were gone while our guests were working on this second assignment. Which of course is a pity, because I believe here the session was about to become really interesting. We almost got to the point where we would investigate the different stakeholders, look at them from different philosophical angles, and then, maybe, understand better how to deal with the different forces at hand. But alas, we never got that far.

It turns out the hosts, Marijn and Vasilis were not very good at time management. Not good at all. We weren’t even able to finish one assignment. Yet we had prepared five more questions for our guests:

Should blind people be able to use your website?, with owner of site, designer of site, tax payer or user of site as stakeholders.
Should every café have toilets for everyone?, where we thought of these stakeholders: owner of café, visitor of café and visitor with special needs.
Should there be help to check in at the train station?, where we would look at the owner of stations, politicians, tourists, regular travellers and persons with needs.
Should everybody help Marijn (when he was still in school)? where the stakeholders were the school’s principal, Marijn’s teacher, Marijn’s classmates and of course Marijn himself.
And finally a very nerdy question: Are normal elevators good enough for smart people? which needs a lot more explanations than I care to give.

We did ask our guests what they thought of this very short session. They all liked it, and they all want to dive deeper into it. And they all thought that it was a pity that we didn’t have all day to take a look at all the questions we prepared. And so if there is one thing we can conclude it is that we should organise another event, with much more time, where we will take a look at all these questions from the different philosophical angles, and see if it helps us in creating a more inclusive world..

—Vasilis and Marijn, 19 October, 2021