Inclusive Design Paves Way
For More Harmonious Society

In the design world, Rama Gheerawo is considered an inspirational figure whose words and actions speak to a wide range of people. His "human first, designer second" approach places empathy at its center and focuses on using design to solve social issues related to age, diversity, race, and other factors.
(Reprinted from the DESIGN VISION Annual Report 2021 booklet published in October 2021)

What is your typical day like?

My day-to-day is filled with design creativity and talking about leadership. I lead the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, which focuses on Inclusive Design, a design concept defined as including the widest range of people.
My day-to-day is never the same. One moment, we’re looking at driverless vehicles, the next moment at the challenges posed by obesity or older age. We do a lot of work in technology, looking at how to understand the customer.
I try to live by three values that I talk a lot about in creative leadership, which are empathy, clarity, and creativity. Empathy—and what it means within business, society, and commerce, and how it is deployed—is one of the biggest trends and discussion points in the world today.

Can you elaborate on your definition of inclusivity?

Inclusive Design is design at its most powerful and conscious. I think very little design should be happening that isn’t inclusive, but the fact is that design excludes many people in different ways. I talk about Inclusive Design in four ways. I look at exclusion by age—older people, younger people. You can be 25 and still be excluded. The next is ability: whether you have a registered disability, or whether you have some neurodiverse condition, or whether you’re just stressed.
Sometimes, you’re less able to do something, and the design world doesn’t support that.

Then there’s gender exclusion. There are more than two genders on this planet. There are many identifiers, many dimensions. In yoga, we talk about masculine and feminine as dimensions of experience rather than male and female—like sunshine and moonshine. They’re experiences that everyone can tap into. So it’s important to incorporate that kind of understanding and stop designing in such a gendered way.
One of the worst examples I have seen in the last ten years is the "pinking up" of technology for women—the idea that if you just take anything and make it pink, women will buy it. It’s utter nonsense.
And finally, race exclusion. We need to be considerate of racial background, whether one defines that biologically, culturally, or intentionally.

It’s incredibly important that we consider these four aspects, which we call innovation axes. For example, companies that truly consider age have a diversity of customers, clients, and colleagues and perform better.
A racially diverse group in your company raises performance by 35%. Who doesn’t want that?
But there is a flip side. We spoke to a management consultancy that has a team of 27 people of 22 nationalities, a mix of genders and ages, but they all think the same because they all went to similar business schools.

Why do you think this happens?

I think one reason is that we teach people to think in a very limited way, and a limited way of thinking produces limited results.
If you look at most business schools—which do have a purpose and do serve a role—you’re taught about business canvases, financial management, business plans, project management, and delivery.
In the book I’ve just written on creative leadership, I ask how much of the language that we are taught in relation to good business may just not be good business.

How much of anything to do with good business actually features in human conversation? If we were to meet for wine or coffee, would I be telling you that I think the GDP of my garden is going to be amazing and that the cost-benefit ratio is going to be greater than 1.5, while the yield is going to be 15%?
I’m more likely to say that the garden’s lovely, that it’s been such a blessing amid COVID-19, and that my mother really enjoys sitting there and pruning the trees.
So, there’s this huge disjunction between the world of business, which is seen as hardheaded, and the world of humanity. If you are seen as an empath, you are not seen as a good businessperson, and people will actually say that. It’s all about production KPIs.

We conducted a creative leadership performance re-evaluation for airlines and discovered they could manage 150 data points across different sorts of things.
We also did some human research, where we asked management and staff about what makes a good day for them.
And the operating control center staff replied: "Sometimes, when something goes wrong." When something goes wrong, they come together as a team and work as a family. They rely on each other to solve the issue.
There is that interaction. There is that feeling that they’re serving other people, that their actions can make or break someone’s day. And they walk away knowing they did something good, and that they did it together.
We should change key performance indicators into key performance aspirations. We should move into things such as empathy indexes. We need to change the rhetoric and invite different languages into the boardroom and into business.

Could you tell us about the Design Age Institute and why you created a separate organization to tackle age diversity?

Aging was the starting point for the Helen Hamlyn Centre and Inclusive Design. In 1991, we founded something called the Design Age program for older people—Helen Hamlyn was a visionary who saw the ageing of the population, even if neither the design world nor technology world were ready for it.

One of the worst things I heard about aging was from a mobile phone service provider that no longer exists. They said, "We don’t have to worry about older people because they’ll all be dead soon." That was fifteen years ago, and since then, life expectancy has gone up.

If you look at the UN SDGs—and I salute the UN for establishing them—one big thing is missing: age. Aging is the next biggest challenge, but people aren’t aware because there is no Greta Thunberg of aging.

It’s a forgotten, unsexy subject, but it’s a social environmental crisis waiting to happen. So, we need to tackle age using design’s ability to solve in a human centric and creative way.

In fact, we pitched the British government on setting up a national strategic unit to address aging by creating a marketplace that is ready to look at aging and be age inclusive. This is what the Design Age Institute does—it promotes designing across the life stage. It’s not just about older people.

(Interview conducted online on August 17, 2021)

Interviewer’s commentSony Design Centre Europe Designer

The Design Age program Rama Gheerawo launched with the British government is not merely an initiative to deal with the problems of aging. It can be called an attempt for us individuals to use the power of design at every stage of life by understanding that old age happens to everyone and confronting that regardless of our own age.
This way of thinking is expressed in the words of Gheerawo himself: to emphasize empathy as an individual human being before being a designer. This was a valuable interview experience touching on powerful messages, including thoughts on Inclusive Design^*2.

*2 Sci-Fi meets design to shape hopes for the future: Designer roundtable on DESIGN VISION 2021