Making the Museum

TRANSCRIPT

Making the Museum Podcast Episode:
Inclusive Design Will Save the World, with Sina Bahram & Corey Timpson

INTRO

Jonathan Alger:
Hello and welcome to Making the Museum. I'm Jonathan Alger, and this is a project of C&G Partners, the exhibition and experience design studio. Today I am joined by Sina Bahram and Corey Timpson. Sina and Corey, welcome to the show.

Sina Bahram:
Thanks for having us.

Jonathan:
So, to get started, for those who don't already know your names and your fames like I do, could you each tell our listeners who you are and what you do? Maybe we'll start with you, Sina.

Sina:
Sure. I am a blind computer scientist. I'm one of the principals here at PAC, Prime Access Consulting, along with my good friend and business partner, Corey Timpson. And I spend a lot of my time trying to think of creative ways and work with amazing partners, for example, such as yourself, Jonathan, to create inclusive experiences and welcome the widest possible audience.

Jonathan:
And Corey, what's your deal?

Corey Timpson:
I'm Canadian. I'm based out of Ottawa, Canada, when not on a United Airlines flight every second week. And I'm a designer. I've worked in the cultural sector since the year 2000. Before joining Sina in partnership, we were working together on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights design-build project, where we really started to meddle and establish our inclusive design methodology and practice.

Since then, we’re very fortunate to spend our time working on all kinds of projects together with a lovely team where, as Sina mentioned, we try to welcome the widest possible audience, where we try to ensure as storytellers, as inclusive storytellers, that we live up to the stories that we are trying to tell. We hold a lot of responsibility in our job.

Jonathan:
Great. Perfect. One question I always like to ask, one of my favorites is superhero origin story. How did you each get into this business that you're doing now? I’ll toss that one first to Sina again. What's your superhero origin story?

Sina:
I spent a lot of time trying not to be in this work. I didn't want to be the blind guy in accessibility, so I did everything else. Computer graphics data visualization, security, law, you name it. But I needed to invent a lot of solutions for myself that I just needed, to access stuff. Papers, simulations, coding, software.

And so because those things were not only helpful to myself, they were helpful to many other folks—for example, like how do you read mathematics online if you're blind, that kind of thing—I got into accessibility and more formally something called human-computer interaction. And so I spend a lot of my time doing those kinds of things to this day.

Jonathan:
Wow. Now I am wondering how do you look at mathematics… Interesting. I've got a lot of notes I take here. I'm going to follow up later.

And Corey, over to you. What is your superhero origin story? How did you start doing what you do?

Corey:
I love this question. I have a law degree, and apologies to all the lawyers listening, but I found it a tedious prospect as future employment. So I went back to school and I took graphic design and production. I did my post grad in digital and interactive media. And I started working for an amazing design studio in Ottawa—but as the junior designer, I got all of the lower-paying projects, which were the cultural nonprofit gigs.

So as you know, the senior designers were working on Absolut Vodka campaigns. I was getting to use my design superpowers, if you will, for informal learning, experiential learning. And then I quickly just fell in love with this area and have dedicated my career to being a designer that tries to ensure that meaning happens through experiential learning.

Jonathan:
Wow, that's terrific. If I had been in that studio as a junior designer, I would've done exactly the same thing. My entire design studio is only doing those things, and that is how we three know each other. We're working on a big project together among other things. Terrific. It's great to have you both here.

1. WHAT IS INCLUSIVE DESIGN?

Great to hear your stories, let's get right into our topic for today. It's a doozy and I love it. Here we go. Today's episode is called “Inclusive Design Will Change the World, with Sina Bahram and Corey Timpson.” As always, I have the list, but only the list, and my guests have the rest. Today we have seven points on your list, Sina and Corey, and let's just get right into it.

Point number one. Definition time since we were talking about inclusive design. Point number one: “What is inclusive design?” What does that word mean? That is not a phrase that, that everybody out there knows, and they may assume there's a different phrase that they're supposed to use, but they shouldn't.

Sina, take it away. Tell us, give us a little jargon police here.

Sina:
Sure. And we won't spend too much time on definitions, but just to get us all on the same page, there's a couple of concepts that keep rattling around when we talk about this stuff. Words like accessibility, disability, universal design, inclusive design, othering. These are just some things that keep coming up.

In brief, accessibility are those things that we do specifically for persons with disabilities or people who use access technologies like a wheelchair or a screen reader or a cane or crutches or something like this. So it's specific to disability. So then that logically spurs the question, what's disability? Disability is the consequence of some type of difference. This can be a sensory difference. For example, I'm blind. That's a sensory difference. It could be an emotional difference. It could be a combination of these things. Disabilities can be perceivable or non-perceivable.

Somebody may have a hearing difference, but have a hidden hearing aid behind their ear. You may not be able to know they're not carrying that identity publicly, visually with them. For example, myself, that's a discernible disability. You see me walking with a cane or a friend who uses a guide dog.

And so when we think about disability, we want to think about how do we as humans. As a society, interact and treat disability and people who are disabled. And there's a couple of different ways of doing that. One way of doing or thinking about that is the medical model. So, the medical model is very straightforward.

You break your arm. Maybe go to the doctor and you're like what can we do about this? And hopefully they can fix it. And if not, then let's say you don't have use of that arm. You don't have use of vision, you don't have use of some sense in the medical model.

We stop there, we put the burden on the disabled person. It's your fault for not being able to enter the building because you use crutches and or a wheelchair. Can't actuate the door. Let's just say we put that burden on the disabled person. Another way of looking at it a more, in my opinion, enlightened way of looking at it is the social or environmental model of a disability.

So, what does that tell us? That tells us that it's society and it is the environments that are disabling, and we need to spend less time concentrating on the disabled person and more on how the environment is disabling. So, the fact that there was no door open button, there was the issue on why somebody couldn't enter the building, not because they were a crutches or wheelchair user.

The fact that there's no braille on something is the reason why it is disabling to somebody, let's say, who is blind, not the fact that they can't see. So, if we take this notion to be true, that helps us. Rethink how we approach things like design and engineering and architecture and all these other things that we do.

There's one related concept to this. It's called othering. So, othering is the consequence of making an individual or group of individuals feel distinctly different. So, you may do this in inadvertently when you're trying to help somebody. For example, you may have stairs and an elevator. And okay, it's accessible. If you can't take the stairs, take the elevator, but you're splitting the group. Those who can take the stairs, those who you know can't take the elevator, you're segregating the audience based on disability and ability, which is not what we want to do.

Whereas everybody can take a ramp. So, you haven't segregated the group. So that's othering. Another example of othering to bring this back to that thing I mentioned about und discernible disabilities is what if you have assistive listening devices, it goes around your neck, it communicates with your hearing aids, but if you do it that way, then you're outing somebody.

You have to force them to identify and carry that disabled identity into that space in order to gain access to that information provided by the assisted listening device. It doesn't mean it's bad to provide that, it doesn't mean that the intention is bad, that somebody was trying to make their program more accessible.

These are all good things. We should celebrate those things. It's just that the way it's done can inadvertently other somebody. And we think of these concepts, we think of accessibility, we think of disability, we think of models of disability, all of these things, othering. And we take a step back and we go, how can we not do that?

How can we build and create things for humans to experience digital, physical, doesn't matter, such that we can welcome the widest possible audience. So, inclusive design is this design methodology. It is a process and a way of thinking whereby you remove barriers for people to either adjust the environment to their comfort, or you make sure the environment is adjustable either automatically or through some other means for them.

So, what's an example of this: many websites. One silly thing they do is they put one line, it's literally a single line of code at the top of the website to prevent you from zooming in on your phone. They're very particular about their design. They want to put that restriction in and what have they done?

They've excluded millions of people from being able to then access that website comfortably. Because they can't pinch to zoom. So, this is an example of not doing inclusive design. And this is a really great example because what's the solution? The solution is to delete a single line of code.

And so sometimes there's very easy things we can do. To layer inclusive design into our practices. And you may have heard, you mentioned, universal design. Universal and inclusive design are very related to one another. But the difference is that universal design started from Ronald L. Mace's work, really focused on architecture and welcoming older audiences.

Things like curb cuts came from universal design. It's just that inclusive design, it tends to center this notion that it's an iterative notion and that you're constantly working towards a multifaceted approach. Universal design gives this impression that you design one thing that in its static state is usable by all.

And that sort of devolves to an average sort of thing. And we try not to do that. So, it's a subtle difference between universal and inclusive design. But we have always chosen, Corey and I, to subscribe to inclusive design for the last 15 years.

Corey:
We have this expression that we use a lot, which is strategic redundancies. So, we want to have our offerings be multimodal and be available in multiple modalities, and have those offerings be strategically redundant with one another. And that way we can ensure a full plurality of individuals can participate as opposed to, persona-based solutions like the wheelchair user or the blind person, or so on and so forth.

If we were to target things from an accessibility point of view, we would be working in these narrower bands and creating opportunity gaps, which then would risk leaving people out. So that's just another way of coming about this as well.

And when we put it into very tangible project terms: imagine going through your project, and you've got a design idea. You've done community engagement, you've got the idea bought into by all kinds of stakeholders, and then you're like, okay, we're at the later phase of the project. Let's make it accessible. Now you're talking about remediating that idea.

You're talking about going back to your stakeholder groups trying to get buy-in on how you've changed the thing they've already bought into, whereas taking the inclusive design approach, we never end up in that scenario. We're always designing and iterating forward. So just some very sort of tangible ways of thinking about these concepts as well.

Sina:
There's one additional thing that Corey mentioned there. He casually said, multimodal. And I just wanted to zero in on that because a lot of folks are familiar with the term multisensory. Something has audio, something has visuals, something has tactiles, something like that, multisensory.

And you may think, oh, that's great. Multisensory makes things more accessible. This is patently false. Multimodal makes things more accessible. So, what is the difference? The difference is that multimodal is something that's multisensory. It engages multiple modalities. It engages multiple senses like vision, taste, smell, hearing, touch, all these things.

But they are employing those strategic redundancies that Corey just mentioned. So when the lights flash, it is synchronized with the audio effect, not there's an awesome, Brian Eno track playing and the lights flash. Those are not then synced with one another. So this is the difference between multisensory and multimodal. And we harp on that one a lot.

Jonathan:
I think I'm just going to have follow-up after follow-up in this session. First of all, I definitely need to check my own website for that line of code. The idea of deliberately—or you said strategically—redundant. Corey, I think for listeners that means in other words, deliberately redundant. You're being redundant on purpose. To your point about multimodal, the lights flash, the audio is synchronized. These things are synchronized. They're not alternatives that you do later. I like that very much. I did want to check in with you. Maybe you could tell the listeners, a lot of people are confused about where the line of current legal requirement is with these terms.

Universal design is something that in design school and in a profession, that's when you go above and beyond, for example, in the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the American Disabilities Act does have—for many, if not all applications—the force of law. Explain where the law stops and where your work continues?

Sina:
I had a teacher in 10th grade in high school. Great guy. And he had this expression, he was telling us, like when you want to know what was going on in a society, look at the rules that they made to tell you what not to do. That really stuck with me because I don't look at law as prescriptive.

I look at law as the bare minimum of what not to do to just exist in the world. And so the law in every conceivable domain, whether it is medical, whether it is financial, whether it is accessibility like we're talking about here, is truly the bare minimum that a series of compromises was able to devolve to, in order to get a group consensus and therefore get memorialized and codified into a rules framework that the citizens of that particular society are then bound to obey.

It has nothing to do with what is good to do and what is appropriate to do. The law is usually decades behind that zeitgeist within society. So the ADA is, please don't get me wrong, an incredible piece, I would argue it is the most incredible piece, of human rights legislation the world has seen to date. At least to my knowledge.

However, it is also the absolute bare minimum you need to do to not get sued under federal law, to just barely approach minimal adequacy, even allowing somebody into your building. It doesn't speak to some of the most profound aspects of interaction, engagement, any of that stuff.

You put some braille on the walls. You got some handrails. Your ramps can't be more than 5% inclined without a handrail. Don't get me wrong, these are important things, but they are woefully inadequate to even approach making an inclusive or even an accessible experience. And that's where we pick up.

So think of the ADA as, I have this expression, I tell people it's 1% of 1% of what you need to do to actually welcome people. And the other 99.99%, that's where we play and that's where we have a lot of fun.

Jonathan:
Got it. I'm glad, I have my issues with ADA, but it does my heart good to hear you say that it's the most incredible piece of human rights legislation to date, while at the same time being woefully inadequate. Maybe I'll bash it a little bit less often because, like you say, it's a start.

2. THE AVERAGE JET PILOT

So, that was all point number one. I think we set the stage. Point number two is: “The average jet pilot.” The story of the average jet pilot, which is a kind of a hilarious yet bittersweet and awful story at the same time.

Sina, I think you're going to kick us off on this one. Tell us the story of the average jet pilot.

Sina:
Yeah. So, I'll summarize this. Not to belabor a long story. But in the fifties, the Air Force, the American Air Force, was designing cockpits for fighter jets. And they followed this interesting methodology. I think they interviewed something like 4,000 humans, four or 5,000 people, something like this.

And they arrived at all these averages. Average height, average width, average arm span, average seat width, all averages. They took those numbers and they said, okay, defense contractor, go design that cockpit that satisfies basically the midpoint of all of these graphs, And they did that. Then it didn't work for basically anybody. And this is really interesting to me in a way, it's actually like it's a little mean to call that universal design. But it's some of the problems I actually have with universal versus inclusive design because it's assuming that this one act, that this one design notion, can then accommodate many, as opposed to understanding that it's the thing that should be accommodating, just as it's built.

So what happened was nobody could fit in this thing. Nobody could fly this thing it. Total failure. What you need to do is you need to be informed by those numbers. What's like the minimum, the maximum height, these kinds of things. And then you put adjustability, you adjust the seat, you adjust the head rest, you adjust the throttle, you adjust.

And this way you have the ability for the environment to dynamically accommodate the humans. And when we think of that outside the context of piloting and fighter jets, we think of it as the environments we're helping build.

They need to accommodate all sorts of different use cases in humans. So removing that line of code from your website that removes, that prevents, somebody from zooming in. That's an example of this where you're saying, okay, Sina may need to zoom in, or Corey may need to zoom in, but somebody else may not, somebody else may need to zoom out because they have myopic vision.

This is what we think about when we think of what not to do. We don't want to pick an average and then design for that. Because ironically, when you do that, you design for literally nobody.

3. ONE IN FOUR PEOPLE HAVE A DISABILITY

Jonathan:
This is a powerful statement: point number three, “One in four people have a disability.”

Corey, you're going to talk through that one. I remember a guest on this show in the past left me with a single idea that I thought was very powerful, which is everybody, no matter what you think of yourself, is it best temporarily enabled.

So these are powerful statements. One in four people have a disability. Talk us through that math.

Corey:
It’s not necessarily our favorite topic to get into metrics, but often we have to. Develop and surface points of relevance to whomever we're in dialogue with. So if you can imagine we're working on a project and someone says, why would I want to do this or that?

Besides the social context, what we really like to emphasize there is also the business case around things. One in four people in the world has a disability. That's 2 billion people. So let that sink in for a second. When we're thinking about who we're designing these experiences for, who we're creating things for 25% of the population.

One in two people over the age of 35 will have a disability in their lifetime. 50% of the population over the age of 35. Designing for your future self. People have heard that expression before, so that's something you keep in mind. It also means like when we think about discretionary spending, we're talking tens of billions of dollars annually, amongst disabled people, discretionary spending in the US alone. So, huge market. And when we're talking with project collaborators and partners on why we should care, there's a social context and the reasons to do things.

There's also the business case around stuff. And so that's where these numbers really start to matter. And when we think about the needs of administration in the context in which we work, often earned revenue is only one of those strategic performance metrics.

I was at the International Association of Universal Designs Conference in Neglect Japan. I didn't know who I'd be speaking with before I got there. I ended up on a two-person panel with the COO of Toyota. So, he was telling the story about all the great things that Toyota is doing in terms of universal design, inclusive design, and accessibility. And it really became crystal clear that he wasn't talking about like why this was a good idea for the social fabric of Japan or anything like that.

He was purely talking about shareholders. And he was saying, we can sell more of our product to a wider market and we can sell more of our product deeper into the market. So, repeat customers can buy from us for longer if we take this inclusive design approach to what we're doing. Okay, that's around shareholders and revenue and money.

But if we look at the strategic performance indicators of nonprofits, we've been able to map this over the years now as well, that we can see a dramatic opportunity to increase the return on those strategic performance indicators. Could be audience size, it can be visitation, can be repeat visitation, it can be membership.

The visitor comes, they come again, they’re a repeat visitor, they buy membership. It could be earned revenue; it can be audience diversity. So literally every nonprofit performance indicator demonstrates an increase when we apply an inclusive design methodology to what it is we're doing.

So, in terms of that kind of argument, there's really no good business reason not to use an inclusive design methodology, whether you are a for-profit or a nonprofit.

Jonathan:
I want to go back to something that you said that was profound in there. A lot of people who are listening to this show are exhibition people, museum people. They're making these projects. They are thinking about them. They're the ones who are deciding how to do them. Should we pursue this in an inclusive design way? When should we get someone to teach us or help us to learn about inclusive design? What law should we follow? What should we do above and beyond the law, et cetera.

And for those people, I've always found it interesting. To repeat a phrase that you said earlier, which is you are designing for your future self. We may think about the requirements of the shareholders, we may think about the requirements of the audience. But it comes home when you think, no, you're designing for the requirements of, it may not be you right now, but it could be you tomorrow, when you break your legs skiing. And you're going to find out about mobility in a museum exhibit that you just designed, or whatever it is that you just designed.

And that kind of idea, I think can send a chill, a good chill, up the back of people who might not otherwise go out of their way to think about this. And I think that's strong. Everyone is temporarily enabled, and you are designing for your future self, if you're doing it in an in a way that's inclusive. I think these are all great.

Corey:
That literally happened during the design development of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Someone on my team, one of our project managers—one of the people who had been very involved in helping develop the inclusive design methodology for the Human Rights Museum—she injured herself skiing pretty badly. She was now able over several months to take advantage, and use, a lot of the affordances that we had put in place, because we also weren't just thinking about the product, the exhibitions and programs. We're also thinking about how to make the work environment inclusive and accessible.

And she really didn't miss a beat in terms of her work and being involved in a really exciting part of the project. Because the affordances that we had worked on were in existence at that time.

Jonathan:
Hey, on that subject, by the way, because you've mentioned the Canadian Museum for Human Rights several times. That's how you met before you became business partners, the two of you, Corey and Sina. That museum is famous in the world of museums for its at least at the time, extraordinary commitment to inclusive design.

I don't remember what terms were used as the goal at that time, but let's call it inclusive design now. And the testing, the establishment of benchmarks and the creation of guidelines.

So, in our practice, when we're doing projects like this, we often refer to those guidelines. And listeners can find those easily by Googling Canadian Museum for Human Rights guidelines, and you'll find it right away in, in English and in French, I think.

What do we think of those guidelines? It's been some years now. Is that something I should have just advised listeners to download? Or is there something better now?

Corey:
Yeah, there's something better for sure. I started at the Human Rights Museum September 14th, 2009. I was the first sort of museum person on the project. I think I was employee number nine. And I was a department of one. When the museum was open, I was a senior vice president, the project director for the design-build of the museum.

And then at that point I had, five departments and a staff of 65 people in those five departments. And inclusive design and accessibility was a main focus and methodology of everything we did. It didn't matter if it was research, curatorial, elections, art commissioning, exhibition design, media, design and production, literally everything. But it was the first line.

We were using the Smithsonian guidelines as our basis. We were also looking at museum of Science in London; they had accessible exhibition guidelines that we used. Then we did extensive prototyping and testing and created our own version, which was, I would say, a lot more comprehensive than the Smithsonian's guidelines were at the time, which were really focused on the built environment.

That was, we started that process really, I'd say early 2010. The museum opened in 2014, so we're already 11 years since then. And I don't know how much has happened since, over the last 11 years. What I do know is that Sina I have started our company. We've taken that and we have expanded it. I would say we have exploded it, based on all the work that we have done over those years.

We have the true fortune of working all over the world. All different contexts, geographic context, social context, size of the museum, small historic house museum, no full-time staff, and Walt Disney World or Google campus design.

All the resources, none of the resources, and everything in between. And we learn something on every project we work on. Our standards, which are far more comprehensive and far more developed, have been iterated I don't know how many times since then. And with every project just become more detailed, more proven, and better.

Jonathan:
Listeners who are like walking the dog or doing yoga right now are thinking, oh, where do I download the new standards? Are there actual new standards or are you referring to your body of work and your knowledge?

Corey:
There are standards. We are working on a community of practice platform, which is called Mosaic: m4c.space. We hosted our first convening last year, which was a prototype in Boise, Idaho. Everything is about inclusive design and accessibility. We publish our glossary there. There's a micro blog on things that we encounter out in the wild that are interesting ideas, and that is the channel in which we will publish our standards.

Right now, they're available on project basis. And we have all kinds of references and tip sheets, just to say, we have become a lot more comprehensive and sophisticated in our approach to crafting, managing, organizing, and then eventually disseminating this type of information. But I think the main thing to do would be to get in contact with us when you're looking for that level of detail.

Jonathan:
Got it. It's on the way and some of what you just said about your community of practice, I think we can slip that into the show notes if that's something that you'd like listeners to be able to access or check out the show.

4. VECTORS OF HUMAN DIFFERENCE

Let's do one more point before we do a little halftime show and station identification. Point number four. A phrase that y'all taught me working together, which just lit up many different light bulbs in my head when I heard this phrase: “Vectors of human difference.”

And you mentioned earlier that ADA is one of the greatest pieces of legislation for civil and human rights that's ever been done. Corey, you were just talking about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, where inclusive design was pursued.

This idea of inclusive design, this idea that it's a human right, this idea that there are vectors of human difference, started to all go together in my mind in a way I'd never really thought about. And you were building a case by just, I don't know, having dinner with me a little while ago.

Tell the listeners, see if you can get some of those light bulbs to go off in the listener's mind here with this point number four, vectors of human difference. What are they, what are you talking about there? Sina, that's for you.

Sina:
Sure. So I think that there's several different ways of looking at this concept and thinking about it. But when we think of vectors of human difference, we realize that as people, we exist in a variety of different contexts. Some of them are intersectional, some of them are orthogonal or mutually exclusive with one another, and they change over time.

And I don't just mean like throughout your life, I mean like throughout the day. And so when we think of these vectors of human difference, we need to understand that like some of them are intrinsic, things like ethnicity and race and gender identity and things of this nature.

Disability, of course. There's also the vectors of human difference that exist within an individual. You may be able to take the stairs in the morning, but in the afternoon because of fatigue, you can't. And so we sometimes mistakenly model people as monolithic beings, as these static things.

You are able to do it at 9:00 AM that must mean you're able to do it at 9:00 PM It's simply not true. And it's definitely not true when you expand the time horizon too. You were able to do it in 2025. That mean you must be able to do it in 2040, so when we think of these humans, of these vectors of human difference, we want to understand that everybody's different in a variety of ways.

Sometimes that matters. Not always, but sometimes that matters. And where that does matter, we want to make sure we're designing for those possibilities of difference as opposed to assuming just one set. And you're going to notice this is a recurring theme. This assumption of one thing, one height, one ability around vision, one ability around moving around a space with both feet.

This assumption is the death of good design. That is the place where so many experiences just go to languish and die. And so what we want to do is recognize, at the beginning of our design process, that there is this vector of human difference that exists both within us and across all of us.

And this evolves over time, whether it's a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, and that it is multifaceted. Covering language, ethnicity, race, gender, identity, disability, all of these different things. And when we recognize that, I think there's a logical follow-up: what do we do about that?

And the “what do we do about that” answer brings us, again, it circles back to inclusive design. This idea that when you design something, you think to yourself —Corey has this mantra that he repeats internally for all of us: we design things, then we figure out how to surface those things.

So when we're talking about accessibility, when we think about the vectors of human difference, and we think that some folks are able to hear and some are not, we mandate at the beginning of the design process that a piece of media will have sign language. Now, we didn't say that sign language will be in the bottom right hand corner, one sixth of the screen positioned, like this, with this style, et cetera, et cetera.

We just said, the piece of media will have sign language, full stop. That's the design. That is the mandate of the affordance. In this case, sign language. The surfacing is, where are we going to put it? How are we going to, how are we going to show it? Is it going to be on device, or is it going to be on the screen? What if the screen is as tall as you are? We're not going to put the sign language on by your feet in the corner of the room.

So we have to rethink that, so we always decouple. And this is the thing that Corey always stresses. We decouple the idea of developing and mandating an affordance, from how we surface that affordance.

That thinking, whether you're applying it to language, whether you're applying it to access affordances, whether you're applying it to the content and representation therein across various identities, that thinking is how you then achieve that concept of inclusive design.

Jonathan:
That's an excellent definition. You used a word early on in what you just said, Sina, that I want to come back to. You used the word intersectional. Intersectional is a word that probably many listeners are familiar with. I bet they are not familiar with the phrase “vectors of human difference.” Intersectional has been around for a while, I think. I'm not sure, but it feels to me like vectors of human difference is like a Sina and Corey thing.

Sina:
It is. It's a Corey thing. I have a math way of thinking about it. For the two math nerds listening to this podcast, there's a concept of vector spaces. And in a vector space it's multidimensional. So when you hear all these math and physics guys talk about like 250-dimensional space, 11-dimensional space, it just means that you can have all of these vectors floating around and they don't have to all be flowing in the same direction.

And they all can be composing, organized in an infinite number of different ways. That's how I model humanity, is that there's this infinite diversity and infinite combinations, to make a very old school Star Trek reference. And within that is where we also find the joy of the human experience.

It's just that so often we don't design for all of humanity. We design for 50 to 70% of humanity.

Jonathan:
Our listeners will remember that Sina, at the beginning of the show, identified himself as a blind computer scientist. We just got some proof of that: 11- dimensional space, and also a Star Trek reference. Thank you for that. So a lot of people do know this word intersectional, to the degree that might help listeners get to understanding vectors of human difference.

Intersectional just refers to overlapping, intersecting identities. Like someone can be not only a woman, and not only an immigrant, and not only elderly, and not only a cane user, but all of those things. And that's what intersectionality is, and the problem is that the more vectors of human difference you have, and the more things that are overlaid, the more you might be discriminated against because it starts to add up.

So I think that might be a way to, I don't know, leapfrog into this new idea that you have. And I'm not even going to start defining the word affordance. If I start defining all the words, we're not going to get to the halftime show. Halftime show. Did someone say halftime show?

HALFTIME SHOW

Okay. Let's do a halftime show. A little station identification. If you're just joining, you're listening to Making the Museum. I'm Jonathan Alger. This is a project of C&G Partners, the exhibition and experience design studio. If you find this show valuable, please help spread the word.

You can hit follow on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can rate the show with stars, especially if you are in one of them five-star moods. Or you can leave a review, or you can do all of the above. And a big MtM thank you to everyone who has made the show a five-star podcast and a global top 5% show. How about that?

Some listeners and readers have asked me just what the heck my company does. Appreciate the question, obviously. C&G Partners is a award-winning exhibition and experience design studio, with clients like the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Cornell University, Gates Foundation, US Holocaust Museum, NASA, the Smithsonian that Corey was mentioning before.

This year is our 20th anniversary. Yay for us, but we're always looking ahead. So if your next big project needs this kind of help, or you just need some advice, reach out to me. I'm the Managing Partner at C&G Partners. By the way, that conversation where we just chat is going to sound a lot like this podcast. Except don't worry, we won't hit record.

Speaking of which, back to the show. Our session today is called “Inclusive Design Will Change the World, with Sina Bahram and Corey Timpson.” Maybe now you're getting where we're coming from when we say it's going to change the world. Because I think it will. Next up is point number five. Got three points left in our seven points.

5. INCLUSIVE DESIGN HAS NO BOUNDARIES

Number five: “Inclusive design has no boundaries.” Inclusive design has no boundaries. Point number five. And I think the boundaries here that we're talking about are professional discipline boundaries, but knowing both of you, there may be some other ways to interpret that word. Corey, I think you're going to kick us off on this one.

Corey:
One of the main points that we bring to our practice is this concept of the ecosystem. And on any of the projects we work on, there's typically different roles and responsibilities, different project collaborators who are participating, and have different subject matter expertise.

They may have different performance objectives, all kinds of different things. But everyone comes together, and we produce a project for other people to experience. When it comes to inclusive design and accessibility, this really has to be a shared responsibility.

The ecosystem must have every part doing its job, in order for the ecosystem to be inclusively accessible. For example, if the media producer has a really great inclusive design and accessibility approach, and they're developing, the documentary film, and they're making their film, and it's got signed interpretation, captioning audio description, the transcript is available, this is all great. That team is doing a great job.

But what happens when that media piece sits in a digital interface that's been created by another team, say a digital engineering company, or software development company, or web development company, whatever, and their interface is not accessible. That's a barrier to getting to that accessible piece of media, that interface.

Say the interface design company, the navigable media company, interactive company has done a great job. It's WCAG compliant. It works perfectly. You can access the accessible media within that accessible interface. But it sits in a piece of exhibitory or furniture that's been done by an exhibition design team and a fabricator that has no forward access.

Maybe it's in a piece of the built environment that's up two stairs and there's no ramp to get there, because it's a historic building or something.

So you can see that these are all different groups that are all working on their own parts. Often the parts don't ever come together until we're literally installing it.

And so we really need to think about the boundaries of what we're doing. And when it comes to inclusive design and accessibility, there really are no boundaries.

We also want to ensure that when content is being developed, that there isn't this erasure of disabled people not being in the group photo, or not being in the media. Because as we've already mentioned, one in four people in the world has a disability that's 25%. I'm sure if we go through museums and do a quick audit, how many disabled people are in the media? It's probably not representative. So there's that.

There's how is the content being scripted? Is it using plain language? What is our reading level for the content? That content is going to make itself into a built environment, scenographic work, media, etc.

So when it comes to this idea of boundaries, it really is important that it is a shared responsibility amongst everyone, that even if you have a champion or people leading, they are not a unicorn or a group of unicorns that can literally do everything themselves. They can't. It needs to be a team effort.

And so when we think about our work, we're coming into a project, we're immediately thinking about the ecosystem. Even if we have a very small or narrow band within that project, it is still has to be responding to and informing the context in which it exists. And so that's what we think about when we think about the boundaries of inclusive design and accessibility.

And this is why those strategic performance indicators and the greater return on that investment is an important angle for us to keep in mind when we're working across so many different teams and groups.

Jonathan:
You mentioned that you can't have a couple of champion unicorns, but it's going to be an awful uphill struggle if the people at the top aren't going along with this. The people who have to hire you and tell everyone, hey, this is the direction we're going to go. I assume you need that from the top, right?

Corey:
You need it from the top, but what we found is its top-down for sure, like at the Human Rights Museum, I had the authority, so it was pretty simple, this was just going to happen. And I came in at the earliest point, so it was easy, as people were onboarding, as the project was becoming broader, more dynamic, more complicated, that prerequisite was at the right point.

But often it requires ground-up as well. So it really has to be bi-directional, where you have mandates, you have official policy protocols, et cetera. But then you have people who care, who are on the ground, who are maybe more directly in touch with visitors, etc. All of that is important.

So it really has to be bi-directional. And then without getting too much into the tactics, we have a few tactics on the organizational side, like the forming of internal inclusive design working groups, community disability advisory groups that get paired with worker groups, so on and so forth.

I like telling the story of the first one that I set up at the Human Rights Museum because it was tough to get some people to participate. And it was funny that the finance department, I wanted representation from every department in the organization, because this is how you build an aware culture. And the finance department was like, are you kidding? We're opening a new national museum. We don't have time to participate in this. I was like, you're going to, sorry, I have the authority.

I like telling that story not to shame the finance people, but because the finance people started sending three people to every meeting. They loved these meetings, and it was a great communication device across the organization to break down silos and boundaries. The real mandate of that group was inclusive design and accessibility, and getting everyone on the same page and working together, getting that ecosystem to gel. But that ecosystem provided a lot more functionality than inclusive design and accessibility.

And the most basic, and in some ways the most fundamental, was just really good corporate communications amongst different groups.

Jonathan:
To your point earlier, because it knows no boundaries, you'd be surprised who has to be involved in order to make this work. You said before, even in what you might consider the normal realm of a project, how you write a script is going to affect everything. So yeah, why shouldn't the finance department also profoundly affect everything? You might be surprised to find out. I guess it just has to be that the next step is all of society.

Corey:
And I was going to say Sina has he has this tactic that he applies also. He'll often help the procurement office from the different projects that we're working on, ensure that there's a language within the contracts that they're using to procure additional services to ensure that those people are on the hook for participating in terms of inclusive design and accessibility. And importantly, so the client group doesn't end up double-, triple-, or quadruple-paying for certain things because of murky contracting language. So really everyone has to participate.

6. IT’S A CONVINCING COMPANY, NOT AN ACCESSIBILITY ONE

Jonathan:
Super. Okay. Point number six, I think is the next step. In what you were saying before, how many people do you have to convince to get on board and to make this ecosystem that you are referring to. My mind is saying next stop all of society.

And I think that maybe is the case, but your point number six kind of points the way, and that is: “It's a convincing company, not an accessibility one.” That's something I've noticed in both of you, that you're, it feels like you're advocating more than you are requiring or consulting. So say more about that. It's a convincing company, meaning your company, not an accessibility one. Sina.

Sina:
Yeah, I think a lot of what we do is, obviously consulting, we have hundreds of pages of standards and guidelines and rigorous processes that we go through across every conceivable domain you can. Think of websites, and programming, and architecture, and engineering, and interaction design, and all of these things.

But the thing is, that's the engineering effort that doesn't get to happen, or even get encouraged to happen, or even be thought of happening, until you convince stakeholders that it should happen. And so a lot of what happens with respect to accessibility, inclusive design, welcoming the widest possible audience, layering in strategic redundancies, multimodal, all these things we've been talking about, it needs to start with a conversation that convinces.

Whether it is senior management, the board funders, et cetera, the validity of this work, and the appropriateness of this work, and the benefits of this work. And that's what we spend time talking and thinking through, because the conversation to make a really wicked awesome video game accessible, those are really fun, and frankly in a way, for us, easy.

I know for other folks they may think of that as really complicated, but we love that stuff. That's the fun stuff. But here's the thing, until the folks commissioning and paying for the video game decide that they are going to spend some time, resources, all of those logistical expenditures on that concept, it doesn't happen, and it doesn't get encouraged to happen.

Sometimes there's also a mismatch where management will say, we really believe in accessibility and inclusion, we have to do this stuff, it's super important. And then they sign their email and they go on to the next meeting and literally nothing else occurs.

Okay. Congratulations, you said some words. It's utterly devoid of any meaning. It's utterly devoid of any action. It's utterly devoid of any accountability. They're just meaningless, empty, may as well not have been said, words. Whereas if you take another approach and you say, listen, we're producing media here. Let's wait until the end and then caption all of it. Produce some sign language. Put that in the timeline. Now you've taken something that is aspirational, and you've made it implemented. You've made it actioned. And so, what we are doing in a lot of this work is convincing—whether it's a project manager, a stakeholder, a designer, a product manager—what needs to happen and when and why.

This is important, because as time goes on, what occurs is that pressure gets ratcheted up. Deadlines come due, budgets get tight. All of these things occur. And what is the first thing then to get cut? It's accessibility. What is the first thing then to get minimized? It is the inclusive design affordances.

So, what we want to do is ensure that it is layered in such a way that it's not just this nice-to-have that is subject to dismissal and deletion the first time anything the going gets tough. But instead, we want to make sure that it's intrinsically part of the design ethos, the DNA, and the very nature of the work.

That does not mean it must be all or nothing. I want to stress that sometimes you have to make some difficult decisions, pragmatic ones. But what it does mean is that you don't treat accessibility / inclusive design differently than these other fundamentals we hold dear.

Whether it is budget, whether it is security, whether it is the quality of the content, the aesthetics the visitor experience. All these need to be siblings with one another. And so often accessibility is approached as a nice-to-have instead of that intrinsic aspect of the project flow.

7. A COMPANY THAT’S HOPEFULLY POINTLESS ONE DAY

Jonathan:
Great. Perfect. That was point number six. It's a convincing company, not an accessibility one. I wasn't sure what that meant, but now I sure know. Thank you for that, Sina. And last but not least, lucky number seven. Point number seven, your last point: “A company that’s hopefully pointless one day.”

It's an ironic thing, but I think I know what you're getting at based on what you just said in point number six. So, point number seven, a company that's hopefully pointless one day.

Corey, over to you. I think you're going to take us home on this. What does that mean? You want to be pointless?

Corey:
Yeah. I don't think Sina or I want to be pointless. We have many interests and things we would love to be working on. Besides inclusive design and accessibility and besides convincing others.

It’s interesting that, as mentioned earlier, we do lectures at universities. Sina, myself, various people on our team. And we often get the question, where do you go to school to learn all of this stuff? How do you get a job doing this stuff? And it's not an easy question for us to answer. We just feel that there's a certain level of responsibility across all of the various professions, subject matter expertises, and professional disciplines that need to weigh into that whole system concept.

And we would love to see all companies, all professionals, and importantly all education include inclusive design as a fundamental pillar within its educational and training structures. I'll quote Sina, because he'll often say, we'll be on a project and another project partner will be like, oh, you're just going to give us all of this information? Is it not proprietary? And Sina says, no, we're not really worried about it, because the world, it turns out, is a deeply inaccessible place, so we're not worried about our future business.

With the sentiment of education and training, along with this sentiment that we learn ourselves on every single project we work on, every project is a little bit different. We have different collaborators, so the mix is different. And we want to have a chemistry and a congruency with everyone. But we're constantly learning. Because no two contexts are exactly the same. We learn more when we have collaborators like yourself, who are up for it, who are interested, who get it. And that's really what we're looking for.

So we think that when we have a critical mass of that, and an economy of scale, where more and more people are thinking about it, maybe the need for Prime Access Consulting doesn't really exist, or it exists in a different way.

And maybe that's an ambition that's going to stretch longer than we're going to work, or be alive, or anything like that. But that's our goal, that at some point, all of the various design expertise and different subject matter expertise that are feeding into this scenario, that they are well equipped, and conscious, and aware of putting the burden on themselves as professionals.

As opposed to putting that burden on the disabled person, to try and survive in a world that is deeply inaccessible and highly inequitable.

Jonathan:
Super interesting. That’s what I thought you were going to say. And a few things that I didn't expect you were going to say. I was, like many people in what I do, trained in ADA. I'm trained in universal design, so to speak, et cetera. What you're talking about, this kind of idea of inclusive design, how you do that from the very beginning is very interesting. We've all been working on a project together, so we're starting to do that together. I'm like, wow, this is really super interesting in a way I didn't even expect.

But I want to put you on the spot a little bit before we close out. There are a lot of people listening who are probably also thinking, wow, this is really cool. How could they start? What would you recommend, you don't have to answer now, maybe we can put it in the show notes. But what could they read? What lecture you've done?

Could they start with your work in Canada at the museum? What could they do? Because I think you, what you're saying is, eventually you either want to have no need to pass on any baton, or you'd love to hand over the baton to somebody.

Corey:
And we love when there's an idea or concept that we haven't even thought of. And we always say we don't know everything, and we learn on every project. I know Sina will want to jump in on this. I'll just say that at the very outset of our session here, Sina talked about the medical model and the social model and various models of disability.

And when we think about the training and the education, we get very technical. I think there just needs to be a little bit more of an equilibrium with the social approach, the intentionality behind what we're doing, versus the technical aspects of what it is we're going to do, to try and accomplish those things.

And that's the area that doesn't quite exist. You'll learn how to use the software. You'll learn design tactics and techniques. You'll learn code and standards. But what about this larger social context with within which all of these other things operate?

Sina:
We can see that like in people's learning journey. So if you're thinking about what people can do to get into the space and learn more, yes, there's reading about accessibility, and watching videos. We can share some in the show notes on inclusive design with lots of examples, that kind of thing.

But a lot of it just comes down to also the doing. Think of a project you're working on. It could be a carpentry project, it could be a music project, it could be an art project, it could be a building of an entire block in a city. Any scale is fine. Personal, professional, really any flavor is fine.

And think within the context of that which you're working on. Whom am I accidentally excluding? It's not intentional, but who wouldn't be able to benefit from some of these things? And what are some design decisions I've actively made, which contain some of the assumptions we've captured in this podcast?

Like the jet pilot example with the cockpit, and the average pilot, the average user. What are some of those assumptions? Because it turns out, when you think about your work, your project, your endeavors in this way, if you apply some critical thought to that, it becomes very apparent what those limitations and differences are.

If you're designing something and you ask yourself, I built out this porch, but how can somebody who's a wheelchair user use it? It spurs a lot of questions. Or if you are designing something visual and you're like, what if you can't see?

And people think, oh, that only applies to engineering, and architecture, and more transactional things, but it's just not true. Imagine designing a bottle for whiskey. And what's on the bottle? What's the shape? Is there tactile relief? Is the aesthetic, is the gestalt, the experience translated multimodally so that you can recognize and honor everybody's experience when interacting with that thing?

That's what we want to get people to think about, because the rest is the machinations of those thoughts, but you first have to start with the impetus to get you to think about those things.

A lot of this is sounds fuzzy feely, but it's really taking a step back, examining whatever it is you're working on, and then thinking through, how would this be made better, more multifaceted, beneficial, inclusive, accessible through a multimodal approach, and through considering how we may be accidentally excluding certain folks from that conversation,

Jonathan:
I just love what you just said to recognize and honor everybody's experience. Also, I can't believe you just said machinations and impetus in the same sentence.

Sina:
I'm a wordy guy.

Jonathan:
That's right. I'm like taking notes here and I'm like, machinations. There's an “h” in there somewhere, I think. Must consider.

Sina:
That’s what computers are for.

Jonathan:
Absolutely terrific. Lots of mugs here.

Corey:
You know, what is a great example of what he just said as well—we were talking about wine earlier—but this gentleman from France decided at some point in making his Côtes de Rhône that he was going to put braille on the label. And now you when you buy a bottle of Côtes de Rhône, there's a good chance, if it’s a French Côtes de Rhône, that's going to have braille on the label.

That hasn't, for some reason, perpetrated across all wine bottles. Unsure why, but the story behind it is that this guy, I think his name's Michel, wanted his wine to be accessible to more people and there's a lot of wine bottles on the shelf. And in Côtes de Rhône, now many purveyors of that variety of wine have braille on the bottles.

Jonathan:
I guess his competitors are like, wait a minute. He's selling to an entire new audience.

Corey:
Exactly.

Jonathan:
Ah, yeah, once again, it does many things at once. Awesome.

Okay, let's do a quick… now I want some of that wine. It worked.

RECAP

Okay. Let's do a quick recap. This was our list for today. Our show was “Inclusive Design Will Change the World, with Sina Bahram and Corey Timpson.”

Number one, what is inclusive design? We talked about accessibility and universal design versus inclusivity.

Number two, the average jet pilot.

Number three, one in four people have a disability.

Number four, one of my favorite phrases you've taught me, vectors of human difference.

Number five, inclusive design has no boundaries. Meaning professional discipline, boundaries, but others too.

Number six, it's a convincing company, not an accessibility one. We were just talking about that.

And the last one, number seven, that was what we were just talking about, a company that's hopefully pointless one day. I love that idea.

How did we do? Did we get it all in?

Sina:
We did.

Corey:
That and then some.

Jonathan:
And then some. Okay. Sina and Corey, it has been great to have you on the show. If listeners would like to get in touch with you both, what's the best way for them to do that? Someone's walking the dog or doing yoga right now, and they want to hear how to reach you, email, LinkedIn, website?

Sina:
The website's great. It's nice and short. PAC.bz And it's not because the company is based in Belize. That sounds lovely, though. It's because we wanted email addresses that would fit on one line of braille on a business card. And so that's why we went for that.

So PAC.bz is Prime Access Consulting's homepage, and there's a contact form, you can read about us, and things of that nature.

And there's another website if you're interested in reading about some of the materials and things that we've been talking about, like our glossary of terms and so forth. And that's called Mosaic, and its URL is m4c.space, m4c.space. And Mosaic is where we hold our convening, and we have our glossary, and we also have our reading list. So those videos and things that you are asking about that people could read, that's where we would point folks for such materials.

OUTRO

Jonathan:
Got it. Okay. We'll get all that in the show notes as well. PAC.bz and Mosaic. Terrific.
Okay, I think we covered it. Thank you, dear listener, for your time. In exchange, I hope this episode gave you some news you can use.

Don't forget to hit follow on your Apple podcast or Spotify app. It's free and it's easy.

And if you would like to get in touch with me, or you have an idea for the show, or if you have something you would like to help people learn on the show, just like Sina and Corey have been doing for us today, go to makingthemuseum.com, and hit contact.

You can also find me on LinkedIn under Jonathan Alger, or at the website of my firm, C&G Partners.

By the way, this podcast has an older sister. It's a one-minute newsletter with the same name. One quick insight—three times a week, and a Sunday Digest—for museum leaders, exhibition teams, and visitor experience pros. And it's the best way to get word, before anyone else, about new episodes of this podcast right when they come out. You can subscribe to that at makingthemuseum.com.

Meanwhile, I'm Jonathan Alger. And I hope you'll join me next time for Making the Museum. Bye for now.