JANE McLARTY:
Good afternoon, everybody.

I would like to welcome you to our 13th disability lecture. It seems hardly possible, my name is Jane McLarty, senior tutor at Wilson College, but a long time ago, 1995, I was the University's first disability adviser, which is why I think I have got this gig.

Ray Jopling normally does the job of introducing the speaker, but unfortunately he is unwell. We send him our best wishes.

In a moment, I will introduce our speaker, but first, I will make you aware of some dull but essential things, fire safety, we are not expecting the fire alarm to go off. If it does, it is a real emergency. So please take a moment to note is where the exits are, either side and also at the top, either side.

If it does go off, we need to live, and gather on the lawn on the far side of the court outside. I should also just say that we have got a photographer working in the room, and both the lecture and Q&A session at the end will be recorded for future broadcast.

And we are, as ever, enormously grateful to St John's College for their hospitality for this event, to the University's disability resource centre for making it happen, and for the University's equality and diversity section for their support as well.

So, to turn to our speaker, it is our 13th lecture, but at the first International lecture, so that is exciting. I am excited to introduce Dr Sue Kroeger, who is the Doctor of disability resources at the University of Arizona. Where, as well as managing a staff of 32 employees, and provide services to University staff and students with disabilities, she also offers consultation and education on designing inclusive learning and working environments.

Before her work in higher education, she did academic training, both at Masters and doctorate level is in the field of rehabilitation. Sue publishers on disability and higher education, she teaches undergraduate courses and disability studies, and advises graduate students. She is active in research, and has consulted widely within the US and internationally.

We are delighted to welcome you, Sue, to talk to us on the power of design, inclusion or exclusion.

DR SUE KROEGER:
Thank you very much, Jane. Welcome, everyone. Can you hear me? Sometimes I lean forward and mess up the mic.

I am incredibly honoured to be giving your 13th annual disability lecture.

I must tell you that there is something very daunting about being invited to Cambridge University to lecture.

I don't know if you all intentionally remote that kind of intimidation, or if it is a US malady, I suspect the latter. We tend to talk boldly and audaciously in the US, but inside, we are a bundle of fears and anxieties. So help me through this one, OK?

I want to thank John Hardy and the DRC team for the invitation, and all the planning and preparation. Kirsty Weiland and Laura Gisborne were especially helpful, and I told Laura, she told me I did not have to, but I said I would topically apologise to her, because I insisted on calling her Lisa for a good amount of time. This was even after she politely told me her name was Laura!

I am sure she was wondering about the wisdom of me as the choice for the annual lecture. Thanks also to Jane McLarty for the introduction, and I want to thank all the staff at St John's for hosting.

I understand that the equality and diversity team co-fund the lecture and provide support and assistance, so thank you to them.

Of course, a warm welcome to all of you, and thank you for being here this afternoon.

My dear spouse, Kevin, is in the audience somewhere. I don't know, he probably try to get away so that he wouldn't distract me, but we both have so enjoyed our few days here in Cambridge.

We have been busy touring the colleges and the museums, and I tell you, it is really something.

I think my expectations of Cambridge are certainly being met, so you all must be very proud of your fine university and this wonderful community.

As Jane said, My presentation tonight is entitled The Power of Design: Inclusion or exclusion. It is not really a speech about opening doors, even doors tend to be a problem, but it is a speech more about the culture behind the doors.

I believe that the disability experience epitomises that of many other marginalised groups. All of us insisting that we not only be let in the door but into the various rooms, including the rooms of power. With the understanding, once inside, that we want to rearrange the furniture, move some walls, use captions, and electronic print, and generally move in as co-owners, rather than short-term tenants that many… Well, many is too strong, that some hope we are.

New perspectives seldom appear when people strongly share the same culture and life experiences. And therefore, use the same unconscious mental models to interpret what is going on around them, and to design their responses.

I have to change the slide here, I will see if I can do this.

The first slide is a quote by a gentleman named Warren Berger. He has a website called… I think it is A More Beautiful Question. He has this quote on his website, where he says, "Why do we not appreciate that it is not about the world of design, but about the design of the world."

My hope is that we all will leave today with some appreciation of that, that the design of the world is the important concern.

My next slide says, "Society is deliberately perpetuating the disablement of many of its citizens." Yikes. "Deliberately" is a tough word, isn't it? I want to tell you a story before I get started with my speech, and I didn't know if I would have a story, because I wanted it to be a current story. And I should have known better, because as a wheelchair user, I get stories. I have stories every day about design.

This one was particularly interesting, funny, aggravating, and I thought I would share it with you.

When we landed in London and the airline was British Airways, is it British Airways? And that is really not relevant, this could have been any airline, I promise. I don't want you to think I am picking on the Brits.

But we landed after 10 hours on this plane. And actually, I had never moved. We did not move for 10 hours, so we got pulled in and we waited and waited. Everybody was standing up, they could not wait to get out. We waited and waited a good 10 minutes, then they came on and said they were having some issues.

Everybody waited a little more, and finally, 10 more minutes went by, and they said, "It appears that we are not going to be able to fix it, so hold on. We will get the stairs."

So we waited another 10 minutes, and then it was time for the stairs. So everybody was up. And I can use crutches, so I have crutches that I use. I am not very good at walking any more, but I can never get a bit. So I was working on my crutches out of the plane, and I was concerned about my chair, because whenever the routine changes, you never know where the chair is going to end up.

So as I was walking out of the plane, I said to the first flight attendant, "I am concerned about where my chair is going to be."

"Don't worry, the chair will be at the bottom of the stairs. You can manage the stairs OK, right?" I typically don't answer those questions, Kevin does. I pretend I don't hear them.

So I kept going and got to the next flight attendant, and said, "I am a bit concerned about my chair." She said, "We have it. It will meet you at the bottom of the stairs. The stairs are OK, right?" And I said that we would make it work.

This is a big plane, so the stairs are a lot of stairs, and they are steep. And I am starting to navigate down, and all of a sudden, the flight attendant comes running down in front of me, and get right in front of me. And said, "I have just got to help."

Kevin said, "It is better not to help her…"

I kept manoeuvring down the stairs, and got to the bottom of the steps, and I know the story is going on too long, but it is an important story. I got to the bottom of the steps, and I said, "I am concerned about my chair." My chair wasn't there.

A man came running and said, "Your chair is up there." It was, like, you get down the stairs, and your chair is up there.

I said that I had got down, but I could not get up the stairs. I knew I would not be able to.

"Oh, that is OK. Follow me. We will get your chair." So we follow him under the plane to a vehicle with a lift on the back. He puts me on that lift, and we ride up, and we walk into this vehicle, and it is very nice.

I forgot to tell you, it is blowing, like, 60 mph, on the tarmac, but we get into the vehicle and it is warm, and there are seats. So we sit down, and they bring my chair. This is after I am in. They bring the chair, and they are trying to get it into this little door. He is lifting it up real high, and the brakes were not, so it was falling over. The other guys were getting it in, and they pull through this little door.

Then I am finally with my chair, and we are sitting there. And his vehicle goes up, so it raises up, and it moves forward, I don't know, maybe 10 feet, and connects to the other side of the aeroplane, you know, where they bring in the food and stuff on the other side of the galley.

A door opens, and these two lovely elderly people walk in. And I am, like, trying to remain composed, but it is, like…

Kevin turned to me and said, "I bet they are first class."

Anyway, that was my story in getting it. That had a design to it, didn't it, that whole experience. So of course, if the jetway had worked, great. But even without the jetway working, they had an option. And it didn't kick in.

Kevin and I were talking about the number of people it took to arrange for me to get to my chair, for my chair to get to me, anyway a remarkable example of poor design.

But anyway, let's get back to this slide.

I say that society is deliberately perpetuating the disablement of many of its citizens. And "deliberately" is a troubling word, right? That is hard-core.
And I think also, in some respects, society is a troubling word, right? Maybe not this crowd, but to many people, it would be a little jarring. I thought, "What is a softer word than deliberately?"

I looked it up, looking at some synonyms and antonyms, and of course, the antonyms are a little softer. It might be unwittingly, unintentionally, but that didn't fit for me.

Then I thought, "Maybe there is a synonym that doesn't sound quite so harsh." Do you know what the synonyms are for "deliberately"? Knowingly, premeditatedly, purposely, wilfully, with eyes wide open. And finally, this is the killer, "in cold blood."

So even if we remove those words, deliberate or society, the notion that something external, something outside of the individual is disabling is news to many. Again, maybe not so much for you all here, but for most of the world that is news.

Because individual differences are the primary problem. It is individual difference that receives our primary focus, our remedies. Treatments.

All in an attempt to maybe mainstream, to assimilate, accommodate, to fix, to correct. And probably the worst is to eradicate. So what is going on?

We define normal in our cultures and societies. Our societies function around this concept. And anyone who cannot, or does not want to, operate within this concept must be abnormal. Must be deficient, must be old, must be scarier.

Rights, benefits and opportunities are afforded to people that we deem normal. There was assumed to have significant differences are treated differently. And may not have the same experiences and opportunities.

Societies tend to focus on the individual differences and turn them into problems to be addressed, rather than dealing with systemic systems and structures that create barriers.

But I do believe there is a design storm brewing. An epidemic, maybe. Simply put, it is in a holistic approach to solving problems from a user perspective.

It is about designing the user experience. The blogs are generating new thoughts and material about how designers are penetrating new spaces. More clients are asking designers to think about a wider range of issues.

Design is being recognised as the most important function in our society. Think about that, design recognised as the most important function in our society.

Perhaps the only thing, some people will say, that will guarantee the future if we redefine and transform it to be socially responsible.

When we look back in 100 years, we may see very well the design storm as a shining example not unlike the great industrial revolution. But the challenge is to diminish the power of the normalcy construct. And include access and inclusion in our notion of socially responsible.

It is amazing to me how easily those two concepts, access and inclusion, full of one's radar when designing.

Just another quick story. Just before I left the US, I got another call from the biology department. There is one class that always does a field trip. We work with the biology department every friggin' year. And we talk to them about this field trip and how it could be designed.

And they always get excited and go, "Next year we are going to remember that."

Well, the annual field trip was upon us. We happen to have three students who are chair users. They have them meet on a path and then the students go off into the desert.

They go up the hill, and identify plants. They meet to discuss their findings, and the students arrived via buses which the department pays for. Three chair users in this class. There was a new instructor who apparently did not drink our Kool-Aid.

Our suggestion, as it had been every year, was divide the class up into groups. Some groups can go up the hill, some groups can stay around the path. The University has a wheelchair accessible van, you can rent that just like you can rent the non-accessible van.

This faculty member, of course, it was late, we were not involved and figured it was going to happen… This faculty member calls and says she will not have it, she will just not have it. Those were her exact words, "I will not have it. This compromises my course."

And she wanted to let me know the department would not be paying for an accessible van. Her solution was that the chair users can just choose to not go on the field trip, it was OK with her.

"They don't have to go, they can get the data from the other students when they return."

Again… Ooops. My next slide is a quote from Bertrand Russell who says, "In all affairs, it is a healthy thing to hang a question mark on the thing you have long taken for granted."

And here we were ready and, a field trip happening the next day and the biology department, this particular instructor, refusing to make these design changes.

So, again, it was about how can we make an individual accommodation that will work for these students?

What happens is we take that normal construct for granted, often times not questioning it or appreciating its power. This is not an unusual response from a faculty member, although I would not want you to think that the faculty at the University of Arizona are all this hard-core.

We mostly find faculty, once we talk to them, as getting quite excited about the possibility of redesigning their class to make it more inclusive.

But we also do get a lot of this still. I don't know if it happens at Cambridge. Maybe? But, again, it is this getting stuck in what is normal.

"So what?" you say. So what is going on? That wasn't my slide!

So what, anyway. We need to recognise that all of us are the designers. And I guess if we take one thing away today, I would like you to take that away. To recognise we are all designers. All are agents of social change. This storm, this revolution is not just about the professional designer.

This means we all have the power to creatively resolve problems and design sustainable, and improved solutions. So whether we are teaching a course, whether we are developing a program, for those of you on the server side of the house, our service delivery practices, our activities and our policies. OK?

"Design…" I am going the wrong way! "Design has the power to make us feel competent, or incompetent. It has the power to include us or exclude us." And this is a quote by Elaine Ostroff, who is head of the Institute for Human Centered Design.

So think about that for a minute. We're all simultaneously privileged and oppressed by design. I had actually thought about that as a title for this. I was going to call it, I don't know, "oppression by design, exclusion by design" it seems way too out there so I changed it.

We actually are, all of us on here, both privileged and hampered by design. Take a minute and think about yourself under many different characteristics.

Try to identify a design, or those designs, maybe it is a product. You know, it might be that cell phone, or I don't know, we used to call them VCRs. You can tell how old I am. One of those things that record now.

DVRs, thank you. Think about, maybe there is a policy that has impacted you negatively, or positively. An activity, a space, OK, that hampers you. Or a design that might privilege you.

For me it might be made dang tyre pump. It has a cord about this long to plug-in. I, not being able to kind of stand-up and do it all, literally sitting on my garage floor, plugging this in and then finding something to set it on.

Bringing my tyre, and then the cord to the tyre is only about that long. And then I got so frustrated, about five days ago, that I literally threw it in the garbage can.

I felt so incompetent and so aggravated with it. For Native Americans in Arizona, it might be a rule, and into scholastic rule about hair control that won't allow them to wear these neat, low buns in their team colours, wound tightly around the bun.

It expresses team pride and cultural might, and they're not allowed to wear those at the basketball games. So, the design see me think of for yourself. Do they include you, or exclude you? Make you feel competent, or incompetent?

Think about that design. What seems to be the most important to the designer? What kind of users is he or she designing for? I mean, who designed that hair control rule? Who were they designing for? Think about changes in the design that would increase its effectiveness.

For me, that tyre pump, all it would have taken was a longer cord. And I probably would not have thrown it away. I'm going to go and buy one with a longer cord and I will let the company know.

Many of you may discover that most environments seem to be mostly designed for you. Maybe not perfectly, but they work. And you don't give them a lot of thought or attention.

But there are groups that are impacted by design vary significantly, and on a regular basis. Those groups who are a little too different. For them, the impact can be outright exclusion, or at least marginalisation.

For many disabled people, and they expect for other marginalised groups, the experience is like being let into a dance but not asked to dance.

I can get into the dance, but I am not dancing, and are not asked to dance. What does this mean exactly? For disabled students, this might mean you are admitted to the University, but you may not be meaningfully participating in classes, programs, activities.

Or may experience a somewhat separate, but sort of equal experiences. Examples might be, I have to take my exams in a separate location.

I have to find a substitution for fieldwork.

I might be denied a study abroad opportunity.

I might have to sit through videos and PowerPoint slides, mine for one, that are not captioned. I might have to get textbooks or other readings recorded, or digitalised.

Or just having to spend an inordinate amount of time arranging or coordinating special services.

In essence, what it means is that design ensures that the disabled student experience will be quite different from a non-disabled student experience.

There in the door, they are at the dance, that they may not be dancing. And I want you an example from my own shop work at the University of Arizona.

I said before we got serious about applying social model thinking to our services. This was our testing accommodation practice. So if a student, let's say a student who processes information differently is going to find a 50 minute bubble sheet pen and paper exam not the most accessible, not the most inclusive.

Certainly a big concern it would not be really assessing their learning. So a test of accommodation would be reasonable. In order to get a test accommodation in our facility about eight years ago, maybe even six years ago, students come in.

They have got to identify themselves, which seems only fair. They come in, then it is about the documentation. You know, the proof. Then there was a lot of steps they had to go through to get the right kind of proof for an exam accommodation.

And I could talk to you about all of that, but it would bore you to tears. Things like, cannot be older than three years old, has to be from a certain kind of a professional, certain tests had to be administered. It was unbelievable.

So they had to prove they were legit. Then once the proof was there, we had to have a conversation about, OK, is this reasonable?

We would have to look at each class and be sure an exam accommodation was reasonable. Once we, and the student, agreed on that, the student took a form. There was a form for every class.

They would go to their instructor and have a conversation with their instructor about the situation. And get the instructor to sign a sheet. And then when those were all signed, they would bring them back to the DRC, and we will check them to make sure they were in order.

We should have had a stamp.


"And then you have to go upstairs to the exam administration office, get these in and get your exam schedule." So the student would go upstairs, turned the forms in and scheduled their exams.

Then on the day of the exam, they would go to the exam, bring their exam back to the DRC, getting their spot, to take the exam. And guess what, when the exam was over, we would reseal it, sign it and take it back to the instructor.

I don't know how many steps you counted there, but there were a lot of steps. OK? That is what a disabled student had to do in order to have access to an exam.

So as we began to think about what we really valued and believed about disability, which I know you Brits have got this down, because it is your researchers that I rely on. But the social model, right, we know what that means. We intellectually did too, but we sure weren't applying it. Our practices were a medical model.

As we took a look at that, we realised the disabled student experience was very different from a nondisabled student experience. What does a nondisabled student have to do to take an exam?

Yeah, show up, right? That a disabled student had 10, 12 steps.

So what? I am going back again… Sorry. This is a quote, a 1982 quote from the US Department of Education, and says, "The world which people have constructed is made by and for nondisabled people, for those that can climb stairs, turned doorknobs and faucets, see where they are going, hear noises and voices, commit instructions and information quickly to memory. Our educational programs reflect these values."

Shortly after I read this quote, so this has been almost 25 years ago, I was not fully appreciating how provocative it was. And I still go, "1982… This is pretty good stuff, especially from the US Department of Education." But I had an a-ha moment about design. I was meeting with a statistics professor about an individual student.

And the individual student was asking, not asking, but saying, "I am worried because this professor requires that we memorise all of the statistical formulas, so when we go into the exam, we have to have all of those in our heads, and know which one to use. I am just not sure that is anything I will be able to do."

I went and talked with this instructor, and we were having a great conversation, like I was telling Jane before I started, I try to not go in wagging my finger, "You have got to do this." It is more about wondering, "Can you wonder with me?" We had a great conversation about what is the essential knowledge that he wanted his students to be able to learn?

We were talking about that, and I don't want to go on here for too long, and we had a fairly long conversation, and would have a sudden he looked at me and said, "Memorising formulas really isn't where it it is at, is it? It is not what I need to be testing, whether they memorise the formula. What I want to know is if they can pick the right formula to use in a certain problem."

And I said, "Yeah, yeah. It would be OK, then, if this student brought in maybe cards with the formulas on it, would that be OK? I am still stuck in individual accommodation."

He looked at me and said, "No, I will put formulas on the test for all of the students, because that doesn't make sense to me any more, but I am asking the students to memorise the formulas. Why would the disabled student get cards and the other students wouldn't?"

It was a a-ha moment when I realised what good design is. Good design is for everyone, not just something we do for a disabled student.

Not everyone is marginalised by design, and that is because when we design, we tend to design with a certain standard in mind. And then it is back to normalcy standard.

I say this a little bit tongue in cheek, while the nondisabled, white, heterosexual, Christian male often times can be that unconscious standard, right? But we know that is not the reality, it probably never was, but it has been our reality for a long time.

The reality is differentness is what brands each one of us. Working to increase access and inclusion, we tend to focus on the individual, the human variation is the problem. So then we end up individually accommodating, which of course is better than what has happened to disabled people historically, which you know, when you think of institutionalisation, euthanasia and all of that. But still, we could alleviate many of these reactive and consumable modifications and accommodations if we were to focus on the real problem.

So what do we do now? Many of us, myself included, but I am trying to get away from it, use the phrase "universal design". But practically, we really don't know what to do with it. And many are suspicious of the word "universal".

So the end result is not universal and not inclusive, ie. I got into the dance but I am not dancing.

It might be that we think of universal design as a universal construct to guide our work, rather than a checklist. The checklist alone may not be enough for us to internalise the notion that design is a moral issue, design is a social justice issue. And we need to ask ourselves the big questions, why do we design in ways that exclude? What might happen if we genuinely embraced and valued human variation? And what role can I play with all of you, in designing for access and inclusion.

If our goal is to get people to be invited to the dance, invited to dance and then dance, how might we play a role in reaching that goal?

Probably a big first step is that we need to recognise many of us, and I would say all of us, disabled and nondisabled, because even those of us with disabilities oftentimes forget about the other disabilities, OK? So this is for all of us.

We need to recognise that not having to consider access and inclusion is a form of privilege, OK? And we need to 'fess up to our privilege. And that, oftentimes, is the first step towards increasing access and equity.

The other big thing we need to do is what we have been talking about, we need to understand the relationship between design and exclusion. And I have a couple of examples here.

One is a picture of steps going up, up to nowhere. The door is off to the left side, so you would go up the steps and walk into the wall.

Another great picture is a gentleman at a urinal, and they are too high to urinate.

Another one that I love, this is called poor design, it is a picture of a swing set, and a guy was wanting to swing, but the chains are so long that he lands on his face. You obviously will not swing, the chains are too long.

And finally, this is the inconvenience store. This is where everything is clear up on the ceiling. I am not sure how anyone would get those.

So, appreciate that most of our work around access and inclusion is focused on remediating, fixing or correcting individuals. And sadly, oftentimes helping them to be grateful and satisfied with unsatisfactory situations.

Sometimes I feel like that is what we do. We don't do it intentionally, but sometimes at the Disability Resource Centre, we are convincing students to be happy and OK with these accommodations, right? Yes, the accommodations do increase access, but when you think about inclusion, they fall short. And yet, we spend an inordinate amount of time try to help them feel OK about it.

Even when we say we embrace a social model of disability, our practices are not always aligned with that. It is very easy to intellectually say, "this is what we believe." And then our behaviour goes right back into all of the old thinking about difference.

It is important to accept the fact that design is not solely the scope of professional designers. I have said that before, and I will say it again, apply to higher education, all of us play a role in designing student experiences, as well as the institution's structures, systems and culture.

We all could, and maybe do hopefully, play a significant role in designing or redesigning that experience. This might mean that as designers and design thinkers we observe and engage with a diverse population of students. Understand their situations, and with empathy place ourselves in their positions to imagine what it would feel like to be that student.

The challenge is to define and conceptualise users or students in all their human variation, to tap the ideas of marginalised and excluded populations, to engage users, students In Design, otherwise we will continue to design for a few, rather than many. Design thinkers and practitioners and educators should join with diverse populations to generate creative ideas to design for and promote inclusion. That way, we create sustainable and inclusive environments, and the cultural, social and economic futures of more people expand.

I don't know if any of you ever read the book by Malcolm Gladwell The Tipping Point. How little things can make a difference. He talks about how we can create epidemics to realise transformation. And as I said in the beginning, I like to think that inclusive design epidemic has begun.

But how do we all get on board promote and provoke an inclusive design epidemic to engage in those small changes that will tip exclusion and marginalisation toward inclusion and connection? Well, we know that we need to agitate. We need to agitate for transforming the way our society is think about design.

We have a responsibility to advocate, as an advocate, OK? For systemic change. That is a role we can play.

Then we need to demonstrate design's capacity to solve, or at least decreased the exclusion marginalisation problem. That is what we have direct control over. We need to model where we can, so again if we teach, that might be a cause. If we are a service provider, it might be our practices, the way we deliver services.

If we are at home, it might be the way we design our parties. Or our events. If we are an administrator, it might be the policies that we develop.

We all have a spear that we have a little more direct control over, and that is where we can model good, inclusive design.

And key is to bring together marginalised and excluded population as co-change leaders. A lot of times people want a nice little checklist. But if we are not engaged with populations that we all have deemed as a little too different, our designs are not going to change much.

We have got to immerse ourselves and engage with people who are different from ourselves. We can choose to accept and continue practising exclusion through our designs, attitudes and assumptions.

Or we can choose inclusion through design, and attitudes that embrace and value difference. Oh, I forgot this one. This was one of my other pictures, sorry.

It is a picture, this is another example of bad design. It is a picture of a toilet, and the door bumps into it, so they cut out a little piece of the door so it would go around the toilet. Anyway…

I actually found these online, there are lots of them. So my final slide is a quote by Brian Collins, who is in advertising. And he said that, "Design is not a plan for decoration. Design is a plan for action."

It fits with what I have said previously, the design is a moral issue. Design is a social justice issue.

And that we're all designers. And if our goals are access, inclusion, sustainability, social justice, social responsibility, then we must ask ourselves, what is the good work for me to do?

And it is about applying design to the full spectrum of our work and our personal lives. Recognising that everything we do have the design.

That it matters, that it communicates a message, and it has consequences. And it is about depathologising, and redesigning our world.

(Applause)

JANE McLARTY:
Think you can tell by the length of time that applause went on how really great that talk was. I think people would agree, it is really motivating that we are all agents for social change.

I think this is the first time we have had an all woman panel up here. So let's celebrate that. Can I take the first question from a woman?

SPEAKER:
Hello, firstly, I would just like to say thank you for a great talk, it was very interesting. My name is Abbey, and I am from Keele University in Staffordshire, and I'm working on my Ph.D. looking at access for people with persons with disabilities.

Particularly, from a content angle. And I notice you talked about designing courses and things. One of the things I'm trying to look into, at the moment, it seems to be really present disability and the legal education context either in terms of discrimination, employment, and potential defences to murder, which I think is quite interesting. In terms of diminished capacity and responsibility. I was wondering if you, in your experience at the University of Arizona, had any input on content design?

DR SUE KROEGER:
I cut you off, I didn't mean to. I am really glad you brought that up, content is design too, isn't it? When we design classes, we're designing both the activities and the content, right? And you're absolutely right.

Is our content representative of our diverse world? And the problem relative to disability in the curriculum, or the Academy, is that it usually, almost always is represented in the applied fields like special education. Or rehabilitation. Or counselling, psychology. Psychology is probably not a fair one.

When you think of abnormal psychology, you think of it. Often, in the humanities, or in the law, disability is not even there. And if it is, it would be within a pathological kind of context.

Content is really another huge and very important piece in terms of design, how does disability get represented? How does get portrays, talked about? And how doesn't it? I think the absence of it is glaring in the academy. So, at the University of Arizona, we do not have a disability studies program.

I have often thought that we should have a disability studies programme. And I still do. But I also remember, I don't know if any of you are familiar with Paul (unknown term) a disability scholar from the US, and I remember talking to him about my frustration getting a disability studies program going.

It looked like if it was going to go, it was going to end up in disability and psychoeducational studies, which is rehab, special ed, and that made me sad.

And he talked to me about how he didn't know if that really should be the priority anyway of having a disability study. He said, "Look at some of the others and how they have been relegated off to the side."

Instead he really encouraged us, how do you infuse it into existing curriculum? How do you get it into history, political science, economics. And it is a great challenge. A great challenge, don't you think?

JANE McLARTY:
Another question. Gentleman over there.

SPEAKER:
I won't make a joke about you taking a question from a man. I am a retired university careers adviser, but I have a stammer, what in the states you call a starter, it is the same thing. For many years I was a trustee from the British Stammering Association. One of our concerns was that technology was fine, email social media, you can be very fluent in it. It is wonderful to find it very difficult to speak.

You can be very fluent in writing, in email. The problem arises when organisations lay down laws about how you speak and work in terms of how you answer the phone. It was not a problem for me when I started work 40 years ago, but as I got older and the system developed, I worked in one university where you have to answer the phone in a certain pattern, using certain words in the right order.

And I cannot do that. Answering machines drive me nuts, I have to give myself up to say what I want to say before I make the phone call. If an answer machine cuts then I have lost it. I am not alone in that.

I think while many stammerers, modern IT is wonderful, there are some aspects where we fall down. Voice recognition for instance, because our speech pattern is sometimes unusual. Our word order is not what it should be, we have to take breaths where a fluent person wouldn't.

Sometimes we get cut off in the middle of a transaction. I have a terrible job dealing with banking and credit card, often they don't give me enough time to say what I need to say. I think this is an area we are interested in.

You are saying design isn't too bad, but there are some areas where in trying to make life easier, it has been made more difficult for us.

DR SUE KROEGER:
Exactly, I would say that is true. Jane and I were talking before we started too, and I think that is the problem with the word "universal", how to find a design that is going to be right for everyone.

It seems like as we come up with a good design, it doesn't work for some. But I don't see that as a reason to not keep working design.

The one thing that caught my attention when you said about answering the phone, I know we struggle with this at the University of Arizona because our office also works for workplace access.

We are doing accommodations for employees. It is just amazing for me how many departments will write a job description and it will be how you should do your job, not what they want you to do, right? It ends up being how.

So talk about exclusion, we go in, we try to have these conversations about this is what you are doing. Some say, "That is not what I meant, what I wanted to do." Others, "Of course you need to be able to hear, speak, get down on the floor," whatever it was.

It is amazing to me how ingrained we are to think this is how something must be done And forget about what is it that we want to have done.

I think we do that on the learning, academic side as well. And I think that really is an important piece in terms of good design. What is it that we want students to learn?

Not how should they learned.

JANE McLARTY:
We have time for one or two more questions. Gentleman over there.

SPEAKER:
Thank you for your talk. I wanted to talk about somethingat the Open University and its design practice.

For us, the residential schools field practice has been impossible for a lot of students. They would be (inaudible) with trays of rocks and so on. They could not get out in the field. The way we got around about the open University was recreated a thing called the alternative learning experience.

We used the concept similar to your design alterations here. I don't know if you have come across it. The difficult thing was not the practicality or the tech. The engineering department were very quick on the draw with the kind of kit you could use for this sort of thing.

Most of it was caving equipment, small video cameras and so on. What it meant what you could take people out to locations within reason. And you could have eTutor, or possibly somebody else in the team looking at various aspects of rocks.

It was the way in which they crossed the Rubicon. A way which was applied. And it is interesting to me that in your institution, you are using a concept to platform how those changes can take place. Because it can be very infectious. It is an example of your Gladwell trigger thing, we are very aware of stickiness and stuff.

DR SUE KROEGER:
That is a great example. Can you tell me was the alternative experience open to all students?

SPEAKER:
Essentially, what you had was huge variations in people's capacity. Lots of senior citizens, for example, who didn't have the capacity. They could do the trek out there, but they couldn't get back. It was good, it got them to these places. And they loved it.

I work for the Open University for 20 years, I know there is a world of difference between people locked in a little room with the curtains closed in the summer, and being out in the field. But they were equally happy when it was bucketing down with rain.


DR SUE KROEGER:
We have a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona that has just developed an accessible study abroad experience in Italy. And I shouldn't have started down this road, because I couldn't even tell you what they are going to do in Italy. There is something interesting about Italy and geosciences, something about the landscape…

He too had gotten all these individuals together, and they have collaborated and designed this really remarkable experience that was totally inclusive and accessible. I really applaud the sciences, because we see that in other little corners of the University too.

Somehow you guys get into design more.

SPEAKER:
(inaudible)

DR SUE KROEGER:
Absolutely, thank you.

JANE McLARTY:
Time for one more question. Just here. Sorry!

SPEAKER:
My name is Adam. (inaudible), I agree with you. We are all responsible, and we need to be making society more accessible, inclusive. I just wondered what your thoughts were of having the input from disabled people in the design, because obviously, they are people that know what is needed, and know what works for wider society. If that makes sense.

DR SUE KROEGER:
So the question is how to include disabled people in design? I think it is everything, actually. But I feel like that is what the new design thinking is asking us to do. We need to engage with users, and we have to actually empathise with users about the experience of either a space or a policy, or a course.

And that is key to good, inclusive design, to engage with the users. And as I said in my remarks, the challenge for us is to be sure that we see the user in all of its human variation, and its diversity. Otherwise, we tend to seek out users that are like us, so we have got to really challenge ourselves to engage with all of the human variation. And that is just key.

With out it, our design is not going to be transformative, or in my opinion socially responsible. And that is the other piece. If we believe in access and inclusion, we should see design as a moral issue. And that prompts us to engage with users.

But we haven't thought of it that way, right? Even though, intellectually, we may say, "Yeah, that is right." That isn't in our practice. So it is challenging. But it is so very important.

I go back to the statement that I made right in the beginning, that the design thinkers are saying, "This is the most important work for the future of our planet." It is designed. Socially responsible design. So it is key, for me.

JANE McLARTY:
I am afraid we have to stop there. We could go on all night. Can we thank Sue again for a fantastic talk.

(Applause)

DR SUE KROEGER:
Thank you. Thank you very much, University of Cambridge. I am bowled over!