Applied Ergonomics xxx (2013) 1e5

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Applied Ergonomics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apergo

Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design e The Challenge

Workshops model
Julia Cassim a, *, Hua Dong b
a
Helen Hamlyn Centre, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom
b
Brunel University, United Kingdom

a b s t r a c t
Keywords: The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge and the Challenge Workshops organised by the lead author has
Inclusive design exposed numerous design teams to the benefit of working with extreme users e this paper will analyse
User engagement
the challenges and benefits of this approach to inclusive design and suggest how the lessons learned
Participatory methodologies
from competition can be transferred into design practice.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd and The Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction internally to the Centre’s role as inclusive design educators and

Since its inception in 2000, the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge
has exposed numerous design teams to the benefits of working
with critical users as a route to product and service innovation.
The nine DBA Inclusive Design Challenges held to date have
resulted in 47 beacon projects of inclusive design across the design
disciplines and involved an estimated 400 professional designers
(HHRC, 2009).
The Challenge and variations based on its template have been
trialled in different cultural, corporate and academic contexts, na-
tionally and internationally, allowing an understanding of the core
elements necessary for effective inclusive design knowledge
transfer.
2. Evolution of the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge
The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge is an annual competition for
the professional design community organised by the Royal College
of Art (RCA) Helen Hamlyn Centre (HHC) in collaboration with the
Design Business Association (DBA), the UK’s largest trade associa-
tion for design firms. It was inspired by the model of the Product
Challenges organised under the DesignAge programme at the RCA,
the forerunner of the Helen Hamlyn Centre.
It began as a response to the publication in 2000 of ‘Fully
Equipped’, the report of the Audit Commission (2000) on poor
levels of design endemic to disability aids and services related to
them. For the Helen Hamlyn Centre, it embodied two challenges e
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: julia.cassim@rca.ac.uk (J. Cassim).
externally in relation to the professional design community.
There was a need to understand what designers required in
terms of information about inclusive design and how this could be
delivered to suit their learning styles, the restraints of the context in
which they worked as well as to address the issue of their negative
perceptions of inclusive design.
In business terms, designers needed to understand how to
respond to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) that was having
an increasing impact on those working in the service, visual com-
munications, interaction and spatial design disciplines. However,
there was an insufficient number of realised case studies across
design disciplines which could be used as exemplars. By organising
an inclusive design competition, it was possible to kill two birds
with one stone.
The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge is not a competition in the
usual sense of the word but more a five-month long mentored
inclusive design tutorial with a competition attached, the time
period chosen to reflect the average span of a commercial design
project.
The Challenge aimed to shift designers’ negative perceptions of
disability as a set of creative handcuffs that significantly restricted
their ability to design as they wished, to one which could take them
out of their comfort zones into a terrain full of innovative possi-
bilities that they would otherwise not have considered. In addition,
it aimed to help designers understand the importance of the
business case for inclusive design and steer them away from the
aesthetic no-man’s land and niche markets of ‘design for disability.’
Thus, the brief was positioned within a mainstream design agenda,
so that they understood the need to combine aesthetics and inbuilt
functionality and frame their design responses within multiple
rather than single user scenarios.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.005

Please cite this article in press as: Cassim, J., Dong, H., Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design e The Challenge Workshops model,
Applied Ergonomics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.005
2 J. Cassim, H. Dong / Applied Ergonomics xxx (2013) 1e5
2.1. The framework
The framework for the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge has
remained relatively unchanged since 2000. Then a challenge in the
form of an open brief was disseminated to DBA member firms who
were invited to an evening launch of the event at the RCA. A
briefing on inclusive design was given and they were encouraged to
submit a short response outlining their main area of interest or
focus. The shortlist of five to six firms was decided on that basis as
well as on their existing portfolio as a design firm.
In the first seven years of the Challenge, the shortlisted teams
were visited by Cassim who discussed the scope and focus of the
project with the teams and gave each a resource pack containing
the names of experts in the subject area as well pertinent websites
and publications. Since 2007, in response to post-Challenge feed-
back by the design teams, a joint workshop has been organized
where they are briefed collectively by experts on the subject of the
brief and individually by Cassim on their project approach.
This is followed by a project-specific user forum at the RCA,
facilitated by Cassim in which each team has the chance to brain-
storm with critical users (i.e. people with severe disabilities) over a
two-hour period. Where the projects relate to product design, it is
also used as an opportunity for critical evaluation of existing
products (Cassim and Dong, 2005). The teams are encouraged to
contact selected users from the group at a later stage in the design
process for further evaluation of their design concepts or pro-
totypes. A final visit from Cassim takes place before the teams
submit their completed projects for judging in the form of a six-
minute presentation in any media.
Fig. 1. ClevernameÔ by Pearson Matthews.
Please cite this article in press as: Cassim, J., Dong, H., Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design e The Challenge Workshops model,
Applied Ergonomics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.005
The judging is followed by an Awards Event and exhibition held
at the RCA featuring a high-profile keynote speaker where the
design teams present and exhibit their final ideas to their design
industry peers as well as to representatives of the business, public
and voluntary sectors. An annual publication.
Challenge (formerly Innovate) edited by Cassim (2000e2008)
documents the projects in detail.
2.2. The user dimension
The selection of users has always been strategic. An average of
five users with different disabilities is selected to ensure that the
final design idea is not weighted to a single disability to the
detriment of other points of view.
Sometimes individual users with extreme disabilities (‘wild card
users’) are selected since they embody radical questions for creative
brainstorming on the subject at hand that are unlikely to be asked.
“How do you put on a band aid when you have no arms?” was the
question that Tom Yendell of the UK Mouth and Foot Painting
Artist’s Association, implicitly posed to the team from Pearson
Matthews that won the 2005 Challenge.
ClevernameÔ (Fig. 1) their revolutionary reinterpretation of the
standard sticking plaster resolved this issue and the prototype they
developed constituted Yendell’s first experience of being able to
apply one on his own.
For the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge, there has been a ten-
dency to focus on younger users with severe disabilities, i.e. critical
users. The reasons are:
 J. Cassim, H. Dong / Applied Ergonomics xxx (2013) 1e5 3

1. The older users involved in the DesignAge Product Challenges
displayed the incremental multiple minor impairments char-
acteristic of ageing for which the adjustment process is gradual
unless triggered by major trauma such as a stroke. Their in-
sights were invaluable but they were less likely to have
developed the range of radical strategies that young disabled
people routinely adopt to overcome the daily failure of the
designed world. Many of these coping strategies are highly
creative and the lateral thinking and problem-solving ability
engendered by this process were seen as having the potential
to be a rich source of new design ideas.
2. The young users’ mode of communication relies heavily upon
highly sophisticated assistive technology. They are acutely
aware of and can highlight the shortcomings of interfaces and
technology products with a specificity of detail that is not
possible for general users. Importantly they can posit new
scenarios for interactive products and online services to the
participating designers who are often unaware of the potential
for this area of interaction design particularly in the area of
hands-free devices and speech-delivered, haptic or gesturee
driven interaction.
3. The very severity of disability ensures that the designers ex-
ercise a level of rigour that eliminates any tendency to resort to
superficial aesthetic restyling alone. It allows designers to un-
derstand the outer limits of the usability spectrum and thereby
adopt a ‘back to first principles’ stance where the redesign or
reconfiguration of products and services is concerned.
4. Younger users are contemporaries of the participating designers.
As a result, empathy can quickly be built between both parties
which in turn removes the generational “them and us” feeling of
older lives which bear little relation to their own (Cassim, 2005).
Both share common cultural and social attitudes, tastes and as-
pirations and for the designers a mirror is held up to an alter-
native set of scenarios, which nevertheless has immediate
relevance and congruence to their own situation.
Where the project is non-commercial in nature, users are asked
to take part as volunteers but their out-of-pocket expenses are
covered and refreshments provided. If the project is commercial,
participants are paid a fixed fee in addition to their travel expenses.
Whatever the nature of the project, all users are asked to give their
informed consent to participation and to the use of their images for
publications, website or exhibition purposes.
Consequently, the design teams were able to talk to people with
dementia and their carers, observe their living environments and
daily context of their lives e an opportunity that would not have
been afforded by a user forum alone.
2.4. The Challenge Workshops
As the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge gained profile, requests
came from universities and companies for internal workshops based
on the Challenge framework or for the organisation of user forums
relating to current projects by design firms who had participated.
Collectively, they are called the Challenge Workshops and are
documented on the HHC website and in the Challenge publication.
They can be classified into three main types:
1. Three day immersive inclusive design workshops for design/
engineering students (Japan, Israel)
2. Two or three day interdisciplinary workshops for companies
(UK, Japan, Finland, Denmark, Belgium).
3. Themed challenges of 24 or 48 h in duration (UK, Japan,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Scandinavia).
Unlike the flagship DBA Inclusive Design Challenge, which has
remained relatively static in format, the Challenge Workshops have
presented an opportunity to tailor the basic framework to suit
different contexts and aims. It has also been possible to trial new
iterations such as the All Inclusive Sarajevo in May 2009 whose focus
was more on inclusive process than inclusive product result and
where the disabled participants were more actively involved in the
co-design process (Fig. 2).
In Challenge Workshops, teams are created from an interdisci-
plinary mix of participants that includes designers from different
disciplines (visual communications, product and interaction
design), engineers and marketing personnel. In company work-
shops where there has been a shortage of designers, visualisers
have been drafted in to ensure that the intense brainstorming at the
heart of the process is captured in a visual language rather than just

2.3. Role of the sponsor

It took several years before the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge

gained sponsorship from an outside body allowing a second design
brief to be added to the more open one.
The sponsor since 2007 has been Sanctuary Care, a division of
Sanctuary Housing, a leading provider of social housing in the UK.
Their support has been invaluable inways that are more than financial.
As a specialist provider of care services across the board to different
vulnerable groups in the population, Sanctuary Care has willingly put
its expertise at the service of the teams by facilitating interaction with
its service users and providing the input of experts in the subject area.
“Thanks for the Memory,” the theme of the 2008 Challenge,
centred on dementia. A user forum of carers and experts was
organized. Having the direct input of people at different stages of
dementia living in the wide variety of supported living and care
schemes run by Sanctuary Care meant that an extra dimension was
added. In addition, the ethical dilemma was overcome since
Sanctuary Care facilitated the process of securing informed consent
from participants via their relatives or carers. Fig. 2. Co-design in the All Inclusive Sarajevo workshop.

Please cite this article in press as: Cassim, J., Dong, H., Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design e The Challenge Workshops model,
Applied Ergonomics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.005
4 J. Cassim, H. Dong / Applied Ergonomics xxx (2013) 1e5
a set of textual bullet points on a whiteboard. This allows for a
negotiated visual language that transcends disciplines and is vital
where participants may have a very different interpretation of what
constitutes design, inclusivity and so on. The visualized concepts
can then be used, refined and shown to others outside the work-
shops as a basis for further discussion.
In Challenge Workshops, a single lead user with a different disability
is assigned to work with each team and is present throughout the
process. This gives a key focus to the design direction of the team and
allows intensive ethnographic research with the user outside the
workshop venue whose role is transformed from user to design partner
and team member.
This shift from lead user to design partner was evident in the 48
Hour Challenges organized in 2007 and 2008 in collaboration with
Nikkei Design, Japan’s leading design magazine and the Engineer-
ing Department of the University of Tokyo as part of Nikkei Design’s
annual Design Innovation Forum. In each, two of the three users
were trained designers and served a dual role as lead users and
active designers.
The ‘users as co-designers’ scenario was fully embodied in the
five-day All Inclusive Sarajevo workshop (Fig. 2) in May 2009 where
a group of highly-skilled deaf craftspeople worked alongside de-
signers from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia in four teams led by UK
design professionals. Prototypes were fabricated for products that
utilised their skills, design guidelines built around the prototypes
and a design-led business plan created that would provide their
workshops with the means for long-term economic survival. Con-
tinuity was ensured through the linkage of the deaf craftspeople to
this local and regional network of designers with whom they had
previously had no contact.
3. Discussion
The DBA Inclusive Design Challenge and the various Challenge
Workshops have become an effective mechanism for engaging
businesses with inclusive design. The immersive nature of the
workshops and the fact that they are facilitated by Cassim
throughout has allowed for close observation of both the partici-
pants and the design process. As such, it has been possible to un-
derstand what constitutes the key elements for success irrespective
of the context.
3.1. Benefits to business
Typically companies see the role of the workshop as being to
generate new design ideas, train staff and build in-house consensus
for inclusive design practice.
The in-house workshop can bypass internal politics and provide
the opportunity to create the ‘dream team’ that is necessary for new
product concepts to move from inception to market through any
corporate structure. This deus ex machina effect enables communi-
cation between people in different divisions of a company, partic-
ularly those that are too large to allow this to routinely happen. The
fact that it takes place through the medium of a model design
project based on skill-sharing provides an alternative best practice
methodology to existing company processes and promotes the
creation of an internal network of inclusive design champions who
can put the case for a more inclusive approach to product or service
development.
For example, two Challenge Workshops were run in succeeding
years for a major Japanese bathroom and kitchen manufacturer. On
each occasion, the four teams were composed of engineers, de-
signers and marketing personnel. In companies such as this that
have been at the forefront of technical innovation in their field, the
structure of the new product development process is weighted
Please cite this article in press as: Cassim, J., Dong, H., Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design e The Challenge Workshops model,
Applied Ergonomics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.005
towards engineers rather than designers whose role is commonly
viewed as being to provide a new set of aesthetic clothes for
technical innovation and not innovators in their own right.
It was evident during the workshop that the designers on the
teams had a greater ability to conceptualise new inclusive product
scenarios than the engineers who were tied by a more traditional
understanding of the mechanics of things and could not envisage
visualised product ideas for the technical firepower they possessed.
As a result the power balance in the brainstorming and visual-
isation process shifted from the engineers to the designers, one of
whom remarked that he was grateful that the conceptual skills of
the designers on the team had at last been recognised. Thus,
workshops on the Challenge model allow firms with little or
underrated design capacity to gain a holistic understanding of the
whole process and the role, limitations and possibilities of different
in-house disciplines.
In addition, for large companies where much of the design ac-
tivity takes place in-house, designers can become stale through lack
of stimuli or because they have control of only a small part of the
design process. The Challenge Workshops have provided a stimu-
lating shot in the arm.
3.2. Benefits to designers
After each DBA Challenge, the design teams are debriefed on its
impact, benefits and their reasons for taking part. The major ones
they cite are:
 creative stimulus
 new expertise gained not only in inclusive design but in pre-
sentation skills since the major output is a 6 min presentation.
 delivery of a best practice demonstration project of how the
firm works in a difficult area to showcase to clients and develop
new business.
 ability to work on a project unaffected by creative compromise
or client approval
 experience helps build spirit, morale and teamwork
 enables management to spot and develop new design talent
and young designers to demonstrate their abilities to man-
agement in larger firms
 develops skills to innovate within the framework of the DDA
 brings national profile to smaller firms and allows them to
work with a larger entity e as was the case for the 2009 winner
Matter who worked with Herman Miller
 allows HHC expertise to be brought to an existing project.
3.3. User input
In the early days of the Challenge, young disabled people from
the creative industries notably, textile designers, visually
impaired artists, composers and performers were asked to take
part in the user forums. They relished the brainstorming process,
could argue on conceptual grounds, and crucially had a realistic
understanding of the need to negotiate differing viewpoints. They
also brought to the discussion a technical understanding of as-
sistive technology particularly in relation to mobile, and hands-
free and computer related communications, and how ideas
could be expressed across the range of new media that they
routinely used in their own creative work. The impact of the
designers was great but given the structure of the Challenge, their
involvement was as expert advisors alone. But in later Challenge
Workshops, a shift from the ‘user’ to ‘design partner’ started to
emerge.
For example, in the 2008 24-hour Challenge in Oslo, a Finnish
textile designer with brittle bone disease commented: “It has been
a great empowering experience for me because in most cases when
people are designing products for me they are not interested in my
 J. Cassim, H. Dong / Applied Ergonomics xxx (2013) 1e5
knowledge they only want information based on my weak bones
not based on what interests me.”
Generally speaking, user input is vital at three key points e
initial brainstorming, prototyping and product evaluation and
testing. Some users may be excellent at evaluating or testing an
existing product or one that is under development e they may not
however be as good or comfortable with the initial brainstorming
process where design concepts are envisaged and debated, which
requires confidence and an ability to think conceptually and
speculatively.
Since 2000 a HHC database has been created of disabled
people of all ages who are willing to participate, providing a pool
of people who can be matched both to the project and project
stage. A useful observation is that the temperament and per-
sonality of the lead user are crucial in forming the right chemistry
in the team.
3.4. Leadership in the teams
The abbreviated time format of the Challenge Workshops de-
mands care in the selection of the team leader and lead user and
the way the team is structured. This is particularly the case where
the teams are interdisciplinary, made up of participants from
different countries as in the 48 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge
in Hong Kong 2008 which had participants from across Asia or
where there is a discrepancy in terms of experience or ability
particularly where the participants are students or company
employees.
Ideally, the team leader should be an experienced design
professional with project planning/creative director skills who
can quickly and effectively evaluate the skill set of the team,
assign roles to its members, structure the time available to
ensure that essential targets are hit and an effective and inno-
vative design solution delivered within the given time period.
The best examples of leadership are those where the team
leader has negotiated the skills and ideas of the team members
and maintained a balance between their own creative will and
the ideas of the other team members so that the result is owned
by all and not an expression of the single dominant voice of the
team leader. For this reason the selection of team leaders is in
many ways the most crucial decision to be taken in the planning
of any workshop.
For the international 48 Hour Challenges where UK design
professionals lead the teams, a regional leader in the form of a
bilingual senior designer is also assigned alongside an interpreter
to assist them logistically in managing the team and to help
interpret cultural differences.
Please cite this article in press as: Cassim, J., Dong, H., Interdisciplinary engagement with inclusive design e The Challenge Workshops model,
Applied Ergonomics (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2013.03.005
5
3.5. The impact of the workshops
The intensity of a three-day inter-disciplinary workshop or 24 or
28 h Challenge where extreme disability is used as a stimulus for
creative thought and where participants must come up with an
innovative design solution within an abbreviated time frame and
then present it effectively changes perceptions, repositions inclu-
sive design away from being a ‘tick the box exercise’ and presents a
model for a more productive relationship between users and de-
signers. One in which their value transcends that of the standard
“ergonomic guinea pig” whose role is limited to highlighting design
failure. Instead their importance to the iterative brainstorming at
the concept stage of development is underscored.
4. Conclusions
The DBA Challenge and Challenge Workshops have proved
effective in engaging businesses with inclusive design. Both design
consultancies and large in-house companies appreciate working
through interdisciplinary collaboration where extreme disability is
used as a stimulus for design innovation.
Successful workshops have been achieved primarily through
structuring the teams to ensure a balance of skills, strategic selec-
tion of team leaders and lead users based on extensive background
knowledge, careful pacing of the workshop to the time available
and framing the design brief within an ‘inclusive’ context.
Although the workshops are logistically complex to organize
and require the building of an initial network of participants, often
where none has existed before, they provide an intense learning
experience that suits the learning styles of designers and leave the
legacy of a network of future collaborators and disabled design
partners with a new vision of how they can effectively participate in
design processes from which they have so long been excluded.
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