This subject is somewhat connected to the reflections we made regarding how to ensure ethical thinking within Universal Design (UD) and Disability Research. My personal conclusion on that topic was that design guidelines would at least facilitate ethical thinking within these areas, if not ensuring it. After getting to know about formalized principles and practices within UD, I came to realize that they are quite similar to the design guidelines I reflected upon previously. And I do like the idea of having principles and practices to guide the process of UD, since this is a way of ensuring a certain level of design quality. Moreover, principles and practices address the issues of stigmatization and normality, by minimizing the former and broadening the latter.
Essentially, UD is about changing the environment we live in to make it usable by all humans. Molly Follette Story explained this quite well in the article Maximizing Usability: The Principles of Universal Design when describing different ways of enhancing an individual’s capabilities. By changing the environment, as opposed to changing the individual or providing the individual with tools, the individual will become as autonomous as possible without having to change daily routines. And although it might not always be feasible to change the environment, principles and practices are design frameworks that will at least bring designers into the proper mindset of conducting UD in an optimal manner, provided that the principles and practices are standardized and communicated to designers doing UD throughout the world. I do however have one point of criticism to this article, and that is how the author describes the benefits of UD from a supplier-consumer perspective: “The most significant benefit to the proliferation of universal design practice is that all consumers will have more products to choose from that are more usable, more readily available, and more affordable.” In my opinion, the most significant benefit to the proliferation of UD is that less people are excluded from society by changing the environment to be suitable for all. How this affects attributes regarding usable products on the market is a secondary result.
Finally, a small remark to the suggested process of UD by Sheryl Burgstahler in the article Universal Design: Process Principles and Applications. Step 2 in the process is about describing the overall population that will use the service being designed. I generally prefer the idea of non-exluding design over inclusive design, and I believe that this step focuses more on including people than not excluding anyone. But then again, some products or services might be specialized to a certain extent that they are just not suitable for everyone. And that raises the question of whether or not we can have only one set of standardized principles and practices for UD, or if we need several sets depending on the aim and purpose of our design.
Non-excluding Design 