Equity Over Equality

The advances in technology have a huge impact on society, and life in general. And as such, we should focus on harnessing this power to positively affect the lives of people, especially those who tend to be marginalised, forgotten, or underrepresented.

I realised how important and impact full it is to consider the needs of people with disabilities, and how much it would benefit society as a whole by creating products to help them. By researching and empathising with those who are disabled, it becomes not only possible, but pragmatic to uplift them.

Starting from the beginning, when designers began considering how to include an even broader range of people in their designs, they called it “Universal Design,” which is the process of creating one product for users with the widest range of abilities and in the wide set of situations. 

Think of it as a one-size-fits-all approach. Designers propose one solution for everyone. The problem is that when you focus on creating one solution for everyone, the designs lose their effectiveness, and it’s often difficult to achieve any goals with your product when you have so many intended users. 

Even though it had the intention of being inclusive, it excluded a lot of people. One-size-fits-all isn’t all that great of an approach, it turns out.

As designers realised that Universal Design didn’t meet the needs of every user, the approach to including people began to change. Designers started thinking about the concept of inclusive design, which focuses on finding solutions to meet different needs.

Inclusive Designs means making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like:

• Ability
• Race
• Economic status
• Language 
• Age
• Gender

Inclusive Design includes researchers and designers from traditionally excluded populations in the process, so they can provide their unique perspectives during all phases of the design process. If Universal Design is a one-size-fits-all solution, then Inclusive Design can be described as - solve for one, extend to many.

With Inclusive Design, you solve for one type of user, and the benefits of that solution can extend to many other types of users. Our goal as designers is to build experiences that are accessible to users with the widest range of abilities. In other words, no one should be excluded form using a product that we built because we didn’t consider their needs when building it.

In Inclusive Design, there’s no such thing as normal. There’s no average person or target audience that we should design for.

For example, when designing we focus on the needs of people who are blind and deaf even more than we consider the needs of those who rely on their sight and hearing to communicate. Then, as we build more variations of a product, we design for additional excluded groups, like those with physical or cognitive disabilities. Accessibility is just one aspect of inclusive design.

But keep in mind that the idea of, “build for one, extend to many,” only benefits the group the design was created for and existing users. Many groups are still left out. Over time, designers realised that Inclusive Design wasn’t always enough, and that’s where we find ourselves today as Equity-Focused Design becomes a new industry goal.

Equity-Focused Design takes the idea of Inclusive Design one step further. It asks designers to focus on designing for groups that have been excluded historically. 

In order to design with equity as the goal, we need to know the difference between Equity and Equality. 

Equality means providing the same amount of opportunity and support to all segments of society. In other words, everyone gets the same thing. Equity means providing different levels of opportunity and support for each person in order to achieve fair outcomes.

According to the Equity Design Collaborative, “Equity design is a creative process to dismantle systems of oppression and (re)design towards liberation and healing by cantering the proper of communities historically impacted by the oppressive systems being (re)designed.” 

Equity-Focused Design uses this targeted approach to achieve change. Designers are taking it upon themselves to help tear down systems of oppression and redesign these systems with the communities that are most oppressed. 

It’s important to keep in mind that Equity-Focused Design doesn’t solve all problems, just like Inclusive Design and Universal Design don’t either. The key point is that these are all different approaches to solving issues of underrepresentation and designing for a more equitable future.