Inclusive Design

At least five million Australians are vulnerable to exclusion based on the number of Australians living with disability and the elderly alone.

They possess over $40 billion in annual disposable income, a significant portion of which is untapped due to design exclusion.

Centre for Inclusive Design; The Benefit of Designing for everyone. PwC Australia

Inclusive design should be used at the beginning of the design process because the cost to implement inclusive design increases the later it is introduced. Design that is not inclusive can lead to complaints, legal challenges, planning delays and costly retrofits as a product or service matures. Poor design can also negatively impact brand reputation. The relative cost of retrofitting a product or service to become inclusive will increase significantly over time and can reach up to 10,000 times the cost of introducing inclusive design earlier on.

Inclusive design harnesses the experience of human diversity to improve products, services, physical environments and digital experiences for the benefit of everyone.

We incorporate inclusion into the design process and help organisations embed inclusive practices into their strategies, operations, and communications enabling increased employment for people experiencing barriers. By applying lived experience and co-design to infrastructure, products, services and customer experiences; designers and engineers gain unique insights into barriers experienced by those hardest to reach and the solutions to benefit everyone.

Benefits include:

• Fully supported access to people with lived experience
• Unbiased and practical feedback
• Offer flexible short-term work and helps foster inclusive employment
• Improves customer experience and engagement
• Avoids costly re-work and retrofitting
• Avoids legal issues caused by exclusion
• Sparks innovation and differentiation and inventive and design-led thinking
• Cost effective concept prototype testing
• Customised testing of plans, prototypes and interfaces with people with vision, hearing, cognitive, physical, gender, culture and age differences
• Access to candid insights and observations to ensure equity and increase innovation
• Fast turnaround to meet your people needs with no lengthy recruitment delays

The Ability Works Inclusive Insights platform allows people to register their interest for Inclusive Design project engagements.

Our team will contact you and personally follow up to make sure we have relevant information to match you with projects.