Found in Translation by crcasavant3

Found in Translation CHRISSY CASAVANT

Found in Translation

Found in

Translation Chrissy Casavant Boston University Graphic Design MFA 2021

Colophon This publication was produced as the culminating project of three years of study at the Boston University School of Fine Arts as an MFA candidate and Certificate holder, from 2018-2021. Design, compilation, editing Chrissy Casavant, April 2021, Boston, MA. Printing Blurb Paper Blurb Standard Color 70# Binding Hardcover, ImageWrap Typography This book is set in Verdana and Circe. All imagery is mine unless otherwise noted.

Acknowledgments Thank you to my parents and siblings, for their endless support and patience. Special thanks to Papa, who encouraged me to pursue design education. Thanks to Tom, for always being there. Thank you to my professors at Boston University for their endless support, and guidance, especially in the last year. Thanks to all the guest critics for their time and feedback on this book. Thank you to Betty Bothereau, for her patience, understanding, and encouragement. Thank you to Valerie Fletcher, Elise Roy, and Katie McCurdy for sharing their experience and lending their time to me. Thanks to Kari, Ari, and Sloane. Thanks to all my classmates during my time at BU, I’ve learned as much from all of you as I have from any design textbook.

Table of Contents 8 Abstract 10 Exploration 22 Inclusive Design 32 Elise Roy, Interview 40 Accessible Design 42 Valerie Fletcher, Interview 60 Designing for Health 74 Hospital Room Design 84 Katie McCurdy, Interview

90 Wellness Design 106 Thesis Essay 112 Inventory 128 Annotated Bibliography

Abstract At the core of design is communication. Communicating clearly, consciously, and thoughtfully is important to my design-making process. Part of being a socially conscious designer is being thoughtful and deliberate when making design choices. I’m curious about how design can solve human problems. One of the problems facing the design world today is inaccessible and exclusive design. My thesis work aims to explore inclusive design, expand the definition of accessible design, and reach other designers who are also interested in making inclusive work. Inclusive design can improve quality of life and access to information for a wide range of users, and it can create impactful social change. I’m interested in exploring both digital and physical inclusive design, as they each have the capability to reach different audiences. Analog design has staying power, while digital design offers adaptability. Both are important for a designer like me to understand. I’m particularly interested in using inclusive design in the context of health and wellness tools and 8

organizations. I think there’s a need for wellness design in the design community, the wellness community, and society as a whole. In my research, I hope to expand my own understanding of inclusive design across varying industries and environments. I also want to pass this knowledge on to other students and designers. Inclusive design isn’t as thoroughly taught in design schools as it could be, and I’d like to help change that. Making work more usable to people of different ages, abilities, cultures, and socioeconomic statuses benefits everyone: the client’s message gets distributed further, the user can access more information, and the designer’s work is successfully communicated.

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Concepts That Matter

Exploration

As a visual person, seeing my questions mapped out like this helped me make sense of where my interests lie. In fall 2020, after a turbulent year, I first started thinking about my looming thesis exploration. To help me understand what I wanted to explore in a thesis, I compiled fifty questions about design that are important to me. Some are answerable questions, some are rhetorical, some are just silly. The questions resulted in a book and poster as final outcomes. In evaluating my fifty questions about design, I created an infographic poster (left) and graphed each question. Each dot represents a question. The dot features are determined based on category, indicated by color; content, indicated by dot location; and how important the question is to me, indicated by size.

Left: 50 Questions Poster, 24x36.

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The Questions Design Ethics 1. How can American designers justify commercial design and sustainability? 2. Lots of design is created to sell/influence. Is that moral, if the point is just to sell a product? 3. Is it possible to be financially successful and also only take on meaningful/exciting projects? 4. Is it a privilege to say no to design work because it goes against my morals? 5. How can I have my own design style when I’m doing client work? 6. How can designers protect their work and ideas in digital space? 7. Why is it hard for graphic designers to collaborate? 8. How is public and collaborative design owned? 9. Can social activism through design pay the bills? 10. What determines my aesthetics? 11. Will I benefit from dressing like a designer? 12. Will looking like a designer make others take me more seriously? Will I also take myself more seriously?

Exploration

Design & Society 1.

What is design’s role in society?

What is my role as a designer?

Can design successfully bring social change?

In what social segment is design most needed right now?

How has design influenced social movements?

What impact has removing social interaction had on design?

How is “impact” for a designer defined?

What impact has removing social interaction had on design?

Can bringing myself into my design make more of an impact on viewers?

10.

How do I know if my work has made an impact?

11.

What will the defining characteristics of work from our generation of designers be?

12.

When we design, how important is it to consider the environment we design for?

13.

How does environment affect design?

14.

How does good design can build community?

15.

In what ways do graphic design and interior design intersect?

16.

What is the next artistic movement?

17.

Does a solitary environment hinder creativity?

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Health & Wellness 1. How can design impact wellness and mindfulness? 2. Is there a way to universally design for wellness, when it’s so individualized? 3. How can design form new or better habits? 4. How can we balance self-care with the fastfaced freelance and education environments? 5. Why does design evoke an emotional response? 6. Why do certain colors and styles make us feel different ways 7. Do plants actually make people happy? 8. Do plants actually boost creativity? 9. Do I only like plants now because I’m stuck at home and also getting older? 10. How can design combat mental stress and exhaustion? 11. How can wellness design be most successful? 12. How to address serious issues like mental health through design? 13. How can I create an empathetic experience? 14. Why does mindfulness and quietness often get pushed aside? 15. What effect does constantly being plugged in have on creativity and mental health?

Exploration

Public Health & Pandemic 1. How is public health connected to design? 2. In what ways does human wellbeing affect how design is developed and delivered? 3. Will removing in-person learning create a different generation of design students? 4. How can education be redesigned for our new reality? (We’re trying to do the same thing we’ve always done, to very varied levels of success) 5. How do you explore hobbies and interests when we can’t leave our homes? 6. How can online artist communities (i.e. Grad Studio) develop at the same level as in person artist communities? 7. In social design, should the focus be on the process or the final product?

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Important Design Questions: A Journal The final outcome of the project resulted in organizing the questions in a journal, categorized into four categories: society, health, ethics, and wellness. Each question has space for me to answer at the end of this year, as a brand new designer, as a designer in 5 years, and as an experienced designer in 15 years.

Important Design Questions: A Journal. 9x9 in. 16

Exploration

Spreads from Important Design Questions: A Journal. 9x9 in.

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Thesis Taxonomy Things I Care About Digital, 1920x1080.

This is a video loop that incorporates all the things I’m interested in within design. Each word flows into the next using repeating words or phrases, since all of these concepts are circulating in my head at the same time.

Exploration

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Well UX Design Improving wellness through an app like Well will enhance our quality of life and provide a consistent source of calmness. This app will serve as a foil to the constant bombardment of notifications, heavy news updates, and messaging. Users of all levels of wellness and wellness education feel calm, nurtured, comfortable, and encouraged through four sections of the app. Well is designed for users of all socioeconomic status, ages, races, and global locations.

Exploration

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Inclusive Design Journal Entry September 12, 2020 I’ve been thinking a lot about how design can bring social change and impact communities in positive, permanent ways. I’ve noticed in the past few months that designers on social media have been using their voices and platform to inform, educate, and take a stand. I respect that a lot, and I want to be a designer that can use my voice for positive changes. As a designer I have the opportunity to elevate causes I care about and movements I think are important. I’m a part of a lot of communities: a student, a womxn designer, a young adult, a Bostonian, and so on.

Right: Typeface Design, 18x24. 22

Inclusive Design

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Inspiration Inclusive Design Tooklit Kat Holmes’ Inclusive Design Toolkit for Microsoft is an exploration on what inclusive design means. She explores how inclusion shows up in what we create and how the make-up of our teams leads to designed outcomes. The toolkit initially focused on physical disability and diversity, and has evolved to cognitive ability and social inclusion. It includes a manual, activities, and also videos aimed at educating designers on how to identify areas for inclusive design, how to utilize diversity, and basic principles for universal design. A key point about this design is that it’s also free for designers to download, and therefore bypasses a cost barrier, and

Kat Holmes, Inclusive Design Kit. Copyright Kat Holmes.

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lives up to its mission of being inclusive.1 This resource is a 32 page PDF, and is formatted in simple, digestible phrases that are straight to the point. It’s educational but also is formatted based on its principles, and is cleanly designed. Microsoft Design writes, “If we use our own abilities and biases as a starting point, we end up with products designed for people of a specific gender, age, language ability, tech literacy, and physical ability. Those with specific access to money, time, and a social network.”2 That really made me start thinking about some biases I likely have in my work without even realizing it. As a designer who wants to work in social responsibility, I realize it’s up to me to educate myself on ways to make my work the most inclusive it can be. 1 Wilson, Mark. “Microsoft Went All in on Accessible Design. This Is What Happened Afterwards.” Fast Company, Fast Company, 19 Nov. 2019, www. fastcompany.com/90432365/microsoft-went-all-in-on-accessible-designthis-is-what-happened-afterwards. 2 Microsoft Design. Inclusive: A Design Toolkit, Microsoft, 2017, katholmesdesign.com/inclusive-toolkit.

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Inclusive Design

Classmate Biography Information Design For this project, I created a map of my classmate, Michael. He has a background in city planning which inspired the demographics-style map imagery, but is made up of so much more. Part of coming up was this concept was incorporating the many different aspects of his life and personality that he thought were important. I started with the big concept and made adjustments for smaller icons as the project progressed.

Left: Poster, 24x36. Above: Still from GIF. 27

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Design Theory Response Education and Power

I strongly believe it’s up to my generation of designers to fix the representation issue in design education and art history by doing work to find minority artists and supporting their process. I had pretty strong reactions to the “Education and Power” readings from this week, because it was really refreshing to see that the things that bother me in the design world are also things other people are thinking about. There’s a real lack of diversity in high profile designers and in art history as well. I strongly believe it’s up to my generation of designers to fix the representation issue in design education and art history by doing work to find minority artists and supporting their process. Margaret Andersen says, “While every design student loves a good Walter Gropius story, teaching design from a Eurocentric perspective fails to reflect the diversity that exists in the student body or regional history of contemporary institutions.”3 I agree with this state3 Andersen, Margaret. “Why Can’t the U.S. Decolonize Its Design Education?” Eye on Design, 20 Aug. 2017, eyeondesign.aiga.org/ why-cant-the-u-s-decolonize-its-design-education.

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ment: even in Boston University’s design program we have a refreshing mix of nationalities, sexual orientations, and ages. Design history should be inclusive of that as well. In Martha Scotford’s “Is There a Canon of Graphic Design History?” the question of design canon centered around the singular perception that comes with a canon.4 Unfortunately, the people creating the so-called canon are usually wealthy, upper class white men. A lot of work included is why any modern artist gets big recognition- sometimes they’re doing innovative, outside the box work, but a lot of it is about who you know, and how well connected you are in the art world. That inherently is exclusive to the majority of artists and designers. Museum collections are problematic because museums are pretty universally Eurocentric, and even though the collection is well regarded, it definitely is a small window from very limited viewpoints throughout history.

4 Scotford, M. (1991) ‘Is There a Canon of Graphic Design History?’, in De Bondt, S. and de Smet, C. (eds.) (2012) Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983–2011). London: Occasional Papers.

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/spoon/ noun

a utensil for use in eating, sipping, stirring, mixing, slurping, measuring, snacking, ladling, splashing, scooping, serving, etc., consisting of a small, shallow bowl with a handle.

Inclusive Design

The Spoon A Metaphor for Inclusive Design A spoon is an inanimate object, with many lives. When presented with a spoon, every user will have a different use for it. One person may use a spoon to scoop ice cream, while another might stir coffee, while the next might eat cereal with it, and so on. The same universal object has many uses to many different people. Inclusive design considers all types of users and aims to make the design condusive and usable by all users, including frequently excluded groups. Much like a spoon, inclusive design makes the finished product easy and intuitive for all people to use.

Left: Spoon poster. Digital illustration. 24x36.

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Elise Roy delivers a TED Talk entitled “When we design for disability, we all benefit.” Imagery copyright TED, 2016.

Interview

Elise Roy

“The concept of designing for disability and traditionally excluded populations helps us design better for everyone.” 32

Inclusive Design

Elise Roy is Vice President, Product Inclusive Design and Accessibility at Salesforce, and gave a Ted Talk with 1.2 million views. She is a deaf lawyer, artist, artisan, inclusive designer, and human rights advocate. Chrissy Casavant: Hi Elise! I came across your Ted Talk5 and I thought the way that you talk about inclusive and accessible design is really digestible and you make it seem very logical. So I’m excited to talk to you today. Could you just tell me a little bit about how you got into design and what your path was like from being a lawyer and then the transition into what you’re doing now? Elise Roy: I kind of have a crazy path. When I was a lawyer, I was actually in Zambia and I was 29 and while I liked the end result of the work, the day to day stuff I didn’t enjoy so much. As a kid I had always loved design and in college I took design courses so that kind of inspired me to make that shift into design. That was when I first got into graphic design as well and that was fun, I loved it, but I missed the “doing good” part. So I went back to school to MICA. They have a program on social design. I got my Master’s there, and while I was there I fell in love with application design, and then realized that there are all sorts of barriers because of hearing loss and that’s what I started trying to solve for. 5 Roy, Elise. When We Design for Disability, We All Benefit. TED, www.ted.com/talks.

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Safety glasses design. Copyright Elise Roy.

My solution, that I talked about in the TED Talk is the safety glasses. It was my first introduction to inclusive design when I didn’t even know what inclusive design was. Through the concept of designing for disability and traditionally excluded populations helps us design better for everyone. In the case of the safety glasses, it was a single safety mechanism that could be applied to a broad variety of us, and something that helped people whether they were deaf or not. That was my journey, there’s a lot of other stumbles along the way as well. C: So were welding glasses your thesis project at MICA? E: Yeah! My thesis was overall looking at what the barriers were for deaf individuals and fabrication and so I looked at other barriers as well. For example, in teaching fabrication, that’s a big barrier for deaf individuals. I went and took different courses on learning fabrication. Metalworking was interesting because at the time they didn’t have good auto darkening welding helmets. They were pretty much pitch black except what you can see with the weld. It’s very hard to learn how to weld

Inclusive Design

without hearing someone tell you what’s happening and what you should be doing at the same time. C: That’s so awesome! How do you define and differentiate between inclusive design and accessible design and human centered design? It seems like terms are used a little bit interchangeably and I just want to make sure that I’m using the right terminology as I’m working through my thesis. E: Exactly. There’s definitely a lot of overlap. The way that we’re teaching our designers and engineers at Google is that accessibility is more about applying predefined standards. The WCAG, that kind of stuff.6 The end goal of accessibility is to help people with disabilities. Whereas in inclusive design the end goal is to look at excluded populations and to extend that benefit to everyone. So there’s a bunch of different little differentiations. Inclusive design doesn’t just include disability, it includes all different types of exclusions. Accessibility doesn’t always require us to include the excluded population in our design. A lot of times what we see happening in accessibility is that people assume that they’re the experts and they don’t really understand what the user truly needs because they haven’t lived with that disability. Inclusive design counteracts that and says we need to be researching this population. We need to be designing with them, and bring them into that design actively. It’s a co-discovery process. C: How do I know what I don’t know? It’s easy to design for myself but it’s hard to be able to think outside the box and make sure that I’m being inclusive with my designs. What are your suggestions for making inclusive work? 6 (WAI), W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview.” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), www.w3.org/ WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/. 35

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E: Great question. I think the biggest thing is trying to learn how to recognize exclusion, to be able to see when it’s happening. So part of that’s learning what your bias is, and recognizing that they exist. There’s a great course by Professor Jutta Treviranus, she’s at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU). She teaches a course called “Unlearning And Questioning’’7 so you can unlearn all of your biases. You learn to question the world again with fresh eyes. That starts helping you see who’s excluded. Also, I think it’s about exposing yourself continuously to difference, because that’s how you start seeing those different and unique perspectives and experiences. C: Yeah that’s that makes a lot of sense, and it sounds like a really cool course. That’s been a challenge of mine: I’m able, I’m a millennial and I speak native English and so it’s hard for me to realize what I’m missing out on so that’s really helpful. I’ve seen different takes on this, but how do you approach inclusive design? If you have a problem that you are trying to solve, do you solve for one specific person or do you try and solve for everyone? What’s the direction that you take as you’re designing? E: That also gets into the distinction between inclusive design and universal design. Universal design you’re trying to design one thing for a variety of needs and trying to include as many people as possible. But what often happens when we do that is we lose fidelity and effectiveness in our designs. Inclusive design does tend to look at one or two especially excluded populations in 7 “We’re All Misfit Consumers - We Need Inclusive Design.” OCAD UNIVERSITY, 27 Feb. 2017, www2.ocadu.ca/news/ were-all-misfit-consumers-%E2%80%94-we-need-inclusive-design.

Inclusive Design

a certain setting or problem space, and then dive deep. So the key is trying to figure out which excluded population you should be focusing on. That’s a whole process in itself. It starts with figuring out what your problem truly is and what space it’s operating in. NPR, for example, looked to deaf people and to people with anxiety and redesigning its apps. It makes sense: if you think about it. When you see the news, you get anxious often. Usually, news is horrible, unfortunately. So, you don’t have a clear mind and that’s very similar to how someone with anxiety experiences things. So they looked to people with anxiety to try and design their apps. They also looked to people with hearing loss because they’re a very audiocentric news platform. And so that helped them rethink how they present their news. C: So how did you and your team actually solve that problem for NPR? E: Users with anxiety that helped them improve their navigation and try and rethink how they prioritize certain things that they were displaying. Deciding which story should be first, which is not seen when you’re feeling anxiety, and making sure that users can see that story if they need to. With deafness, they talked to me, and my suggestion was that even if they have the podcast plus the transcript, it would be helpful to integrate the captions into the podcast. Even if it’s just audio, I still hear a little bit and I’d rather listen and read the captions at the same time: that’s a full experience. There’s a lot of people who are just losing their hearing who could benefit in a similar way. You just don’t get the same experience with a transcript. C: How do you go about finding excluded groups? Did individuals that felt excluded reach out to NPR, or was 37

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that their internal team thinking “maybe we need to rethink our app?” Who started the conversation and who moved it along to production? E: Ideally you would get feedback from your users and also have your team look at the problem space that you’re in and try and identify those who would be most excluded. That’s really just like pulling apart whatever you are designing and really thinking about the foundational elements, what context and environments it will be used in, and the overall space you’re functioning in. Is it risk management, is it news? Then identifying abilities related to that and you usually you’ll come upon an excluded population. But there’s actually two ends of the spectrum: you could be really excluded, or you could be an expert. Often when you have disability, you both have a lack of something: a lack of hearing audio for example. But then you become an expert at something to make up for that lack. For me, it’s reading body language. Or for someone who’s blind, it might be wayfinding and being able to give directions in a different way. So it’s a lack and a gain.

Inclusive Design

Journal Entry October 12, 2020 I came across an article about a luxury designer who has switched to designing sleeping bags for homeless individuals. His endeavor started when he met a homeless man on a cold night in the Netherlands: He thought about giving the man one of his signature fashion hoodies, but paused for fear of diminishing his brand. A few months later a friend’s father, also homeless, died of hypothermia. “I felt guilty,” says Timmer. “I had the opportunity to help, and I did nothing.”8 To make up for it, he dedicated his brand to helping others. Rejecting his first idea of hoodies for the homeless as not good enough, he designed around the requirements for life on the streets: waterproof, warm, portable and good for sleeping.” I have incredible respect for him changing directions in his career, seeing a problem and using design to solve that problem. He also could have never told the story of his guilt and why he ended up changing his design style, and taken credit for being just a good person, but it makes him more real and relatable. I’m thinking about finding more creatives that are using design to solve real problems, because it’s really inspiring to see how much of a difference he’s made in just a few years. If every brand made small changes to improve the world, that could make a real difference, possibly the difference between life and death, for a whole lot of people. 8 Baker, Aryn. “Designer Bas Timmer’s Snowsuit Keeps Homeless People Safe.” Time, Time, 8 Oct. 2020, time.com/collection-post/5896371/ bas-timmer-next-generation-leaders/. 39

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Accessible Design

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Interview

Valerie Fletcher Valerie Fletcher has been Executive Director of the Institute for Human Centered Design since 1998. She currently oversees projects ranging from the national website on accessibility and inclusive design in cultural facilities for the National Endowment for the Arts. Chrissy Casavant: Hi Valerie! Thanks so much for taking the time to be here with me today. I’m working on my thesis at Boston University. My thesis topic is inclusive design as a whole, but then I’m also looking into it from the lens of inclusive wellness and also inclusive healthcare. Those are two industries that are really interesting and important to me. So it’s more of an exploration, and part of that is conducting interviews. Valerie Fletcher: I’d really like to speak to that issue relative to inclusive wellbeing, wellness and healthcare. 42

Accessible Design

Valerie Fletcher is a keynote speaker for events worldwide. Image Credit BAC Student Life Blog.

C: Yeah! We can jump right into that. V: Can we? We actually have developed a proposal for a research project that looks at the design of information and communication for BIPOC communities with the experience of disability. One of the issues is that there is almost no evidence that people in BIPOC communities are self identifying as having a disability whatsoever, even though they have the highest rates of disability. You can understand why that is for a variety of reasons: one is “what the hell’s in it for me?” White

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middle-class people have led the disability rights movement from the beginning, and it was based on the women’s rights movement and gay rights movement and to some extent the Civil Rights Movement, but it was really identity-based. For a white person, it’s easy to understand why one might choose an identity and then defend that identity as legitimate. Why would a person from a BIPOC community need another identity? They don’t necessarily associate with the dominant culture in our society, but they’re not looking for an identity, they’ve got that pretty well covered. At least in my very unscientific experience even people with what we would consider quite significant disabilities refer to their issues as health issues. C: Oh interesting. V: I think that that’s part of the key. “Disability” has gone off on a particular road that has worked for white Americans, but it has not served the people who have the highest rates of disability. The issue I think is to figure out the door to be able to talk about rights within a framework that starts with health and wellness. Does that make sense to you? C: Yeah, that’s fascinating. V: You know sometimes when you analyze things for a long time, it then seems self evident? It wasn’t selfevident to start, now it’s self evident. You can’t go down that road using language that people just object to. C: Sure, I get that. V: The inclusive or universal design movement really

Accessible Design

The goal is to create a facilitating environment. What does a facilitating environment mean for someone with an anxiety disorder? Or for someone with a chronic health condition? had the underpinnings of an original focus on the world’s aging population, on the lived experience, and the functional limitations or disability. Everyone doesn’t have the same attitude towards disability: with aging, by the time your life is over, you’ve experienced something of a function limitation because it’s just sort of in the cards. All parts of our bodies don’t last in the same way, so you have some experience in a physical or sensory or brainbased issue before you’re done. Those people almost never, I mean anybody really with an acquired disability over 70, would never self-identify as having a disability. My dad was blind, deaf, ate through a stomach tube, was on oxygen 15 hours a day and used a cane. And he would say “Honey, I’m not a man with a disability, I’ve never used a wheelchair!” C: There you go. V: There you go! But that’s fairly normal. There’s actually a very tiny proportion of people who would self identify as disabled. And they tend to have conditions that are congenital or acquired in early adulthood or childhood. More often, those that identify are

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particularly evident, so you can see a white cane, or a service animal, or wheelchair, and that’s actually only a tiny proportion. 26% of adults in America are considered by census to be people with disabilities. Only 1.4% use wheelchairs. So you can see how it’s kind of problematic. In the last 20 years, brain based reasons for disability are rising to be number two for all adults. They are absolutely number one for children and have been for two decades. Of course, children grow up, so it’s the primary reason for functional limitations for a young adult in America. We finally, maybe, are going to deal with that from the perspective of health and wellbeing. In a post COVID environment, if nothing else, we now have a kind of awareness about mental health issues there’s never been there. No stigma, these are realities, how dare we ignore them. So it’s a fascinating moment so I’m delighted that you are looking at these. C: I feel like inclusive design is something that gets pushed to the side in traditional design education and it’s something that I think is personally important so I’m trying to educate myself and learn as much as I can to be the most sensitive designer I can be. V: That’s really terrific. C: I’m trying to learn as much as I can. Obviously there’s an end date to my thesis, but I want to keep learning and reading. V: And there’s not a ton of information on graphics, it’s not so easy, but it’s really important. C: That’s actually how I found you guys. And you happen to be in Boston, which is coincidental. I was trying 46

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to do research and find guidelines and in the history of inclusive design and I found so many resources that I was able to use from your website. I absorbed a lot really quickly. V: Oh good, I’m glad to hear that. C: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and what your career path was to get to where you are now? It sounds like you’ve had a lot of unique experiences. V: I’ve actually run the organization since 1998. That is by a long stretch the longest I’ve ever done anything. My career has remained divided between the two things that drive me. One of them is social justice, and the other is design. I did them separately, so I ran a studio business and I would then decide I couldn’t do design because it was too indulgent, it wasn’t moving the needle, it wasn’t changing the world and I needed to do that. The two things that have been the overriding focus of my social justice work have been racial discrimination and mental health. C: That sounds like me in a lot of ways. V: Well, my grandfather was Algonquin Iroquois and I had an early understanding of the irrationality of racism. That pervasive societal attitude that people with mental health struggles are somehow like other beings, that these are realities to be ashamed of. In my family I have bipolar illness on both my mother’s side and my father’s side, so I had a grandfather, an uncle, a cousin and my brother, and I saw that kind of distortion of mental illness as something to be ashamed of. So public mental health was part of the arc of my career and I was very fortunate that I had an opportunity to start in 47

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direct care and end up as the Deputy Commissioner of Mental Health here in Massachusetts, and led the largest planning process ever undertaken in the State Mental Health System. So I’ve been lucky, and the opportunity for innovation was amazing. The opportunity for the engagement of people: amazing. But you know, state agencies are highly political. I left and I was doing consulting briefly. I realized I do not want to travel constantly by myself, peddling an idea that I really valued but it’s really just peddling. You’re not really staying long enough to do anything. C: Right, that’s hard. V: A friend was on the board of directors of this organization, which was then called Adaptive Environments. A design workshop at the IHCD. Image Credit IHCD.

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I had been running a budget that was almost 560 million dollars. So this budget was tiny, but I thought there was something there that I needed to pay attention to. It was the early days of universal and inclusive design, because the principles had just been published that year. I looked at it and I just started plowing through the state-of-the-art information at the time. And this organization was very much at the forefront of those early days. We published the first book with 22 case studies on strategies for teaching universal design in 1995. This is design that matters, this is design that actually recognizes what design can do. I think I had an appreciation of that partly because I was a textile designer and the reality is most textile designers end up as fashion designers because that’s how you make a living. I had to make it work. I ended up with a very expensive line, I was very lucky that I made a living from the get-go and I had a wonderful client base. Not surprising, the people who can afford very fancy clothes are older women. C: That makes sense. V: So part of my expertise was really figuring out what clothing design worked best on older women to make them feel great about themselves and look good. It’s really that power of design to really shape directly human experience, at a very small scale. But it’s not just how it looks, it’s what it can do. So I’ve never looked back, Chrissy. I was very lucky. We ran the first international conference ever six months after I started. Then we did four more, every two years. We did one in Providence with RISD in 2000, and 2002 we went to Japan and did it with students in Yokohama, Rio de Janeiro two years later in 2004, in 2006 back to Japan in Kyoto. And then I kind of looked up and said “I don’t want to run conferences for 49

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a living.” The movement had very rapidly exploded and it was partly because there’s power in bringing people together and we had an average of 32 countries. So there were people from all over the world and they were all kind of having the same idea at the same time. The excitement of being able to cross fertilize was unbelievable, and I made that decision with my eyes wide open but I also had a great deal of guilt about the environmental cost of what we’re doing. C: I spent time planning conferences, so I relate to that. V: People flying thousands of miles to come to this event and was that really necessary? At the time, it was 2006, it was a moment of reckoning, in which people suddenly said “Oh my God, designers are really at the heart of an environmental crisis, they don’t care at all about the environment.” And I felt that it was irresponsible, and I also thought we’d just keep doing it digitally. And it hasn’t actually worked like that. Though we do a monthly webcast now and get people from all over the world, I’ve become one of a handful of people in the world who go from one country to another in keynote conferences, where they are way too often reinventing the wheel. Not going way beyond where they’ve been before. So I have a tinge of regret. I know the power of bringing people together, but it means that there’s been a great deal of time and energy wasted on replication. And discovering things over again that should have been shared and understood so that you go beyond them. One of my biggest regrets now is that we do a particular kind of research with real people, and you would enjoy this, it might be something that if you stay in the Boston area we would welcome you to observe this. C: Ooh yes! That sounds great. 50

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V: It’s contextual inquiry, so real people, real environments, real service design, and we learn what works and what fails. But we have failed, as has pretty much everybody else, to figure out how to organize that in such a way that we can build shared knowledge. So that instead of project-by-project, we build data about human experience that informs the design of the project. We allow it to roll forward and make it available to anyone, so that’s a big priority for me now. So that you would know, for example, what are the perceptual issues of neurodiversity? Or of low vision? How pervasive is it, what do people see? That’s the variety of that experience. Where does color vision enter? Who has difficulty with it? If you had that to work with, given your interest, you’d run with it. I think it would reinforce the inherent creativity of always going farther, always learning more, the next lesson. It is so far from accessibility, in which the usual response is “just tell me what I have to do,” because people don’t think it’s about creating. It’s a curse, and if we allowed inclusive design to land in that space, who would care? It’s got to be understood as deeply creative, that you are uncovering new insights on design that work. C: And how do you fix that problem of attitude and also shared knowledge? V: The shared knowledge thing, I am working on that now. I’m looking at GIS: geographic information systems have become a huge thing, so you can get in any physical environment, you probably can pull up data on the environment, on economics, on health, on education. It’s kind of staggering, what’s out there. I’m interested in learning about people’s sense of their needs and wants about design at that level, particularly the 51

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least advantaged among us. So looking at the poorest communities and people of color, and really learn about housing, school design, parks, playgrounds, street sidewalks and access to transit. Those are a population of people who don’t think of that design, except maybe they care about fashion, but other than that, design is something they learn to live with, because they don’t have a sense that somebody’s making decisions about this. Somebody does this, this is their job, but I’ve worked a lot in communities that really had no idea. C: Sure. V: It’s lousy public schools, Boston is full of lousy public schools. They’re horrible in every way. They have bad light, they have bad acoustics, they have ugly space, they have bad materials, they mold. And yet, the teachers and the students feel like their job is to figure out how to make this bad environment work. We do a lot of work in museums, so I don’t know if that’s an area of your interest, but we are working at any given time on a half dozen projects at a museum. C: What sort of projects at a museum do you do? V: It could be everything, so we’re doing an evaluation of existing conditions, but more often than not we’re working on exhibits. C: So making the exhibits as inclusive as possible? V: Yes, in every way. One of our projects in the past year was exhibits at the new Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs. And that actually was pretty remarkable in terms of pushing the limits. There 52

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are some things that have happened there that have never happened anywhere. C: Like what sort of things? V: If you need, for example ASL, or if you need captioning, or if you need audio description, or if you need Braille, every exhibit you go to when you arrive gives you that. It’s pretty seamless. C: That’s very cool. V: It wasn’t us that invented this, it was a group in Manchester England that we’re working with. It’s the idea that it’s seamless and it’s cool. It’s not clunky, it’s not weird, it’s not going to isolate somebody. One of the things we learned quickly is that you can’t use paralympians as user experts. You can use them a little, but they’re so unusual in their abilities that you have to mix it up with just folks. C: So what does your design process look like for a project like that, where there are so many varied abilities? V: We try to find the overlapping solution. We’ve got a new project that we’re working on for a college. This time we’re looking at 3 dormitories, and a dormitory has got to accommodate people of all sorts over the course of its life, and it probably won’t be renovated for 35 years, so it better look down the road. And today, if we’re doing dormitories we’re always looking at patterns. So it isn’t that you’re looking at an individual, but you’re looking at trends. One of the trends, for fairly elite schools, is that we have a far higher proportion of people who are neurodiverse. On the dormitory side, there are very significant design implications. These are 53

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people who are often hyper-alert to sound and light. You want to be able to allow an individual to tailor the sound and light in their room, but protect others around them from the sounds they might make. So the acoustical conditions are really important. We also have learned over time that that population should always be allowed a private room. Sharing a room with a neurodiverse person and forcing a neurodiverse person to share a room is not a good idea. The level of stress and the likelihood of time and energy spent resolving things isn’t worth it. One other single issue that has made a big difference in a lot of schools, regardless of the school’s pet policy, is that dorms allow pets of any kind. Those are the kind of things that really make a difference. C: I hadn’t thought of that before. V: One key concept is that we’ve really moved beyond the idea of barrier removal, that’s an accessibility idea. The World Health Organization redefined disability as a contextual variable. Function limitation is a fact that disability is a negative thing created at the intersection of a person and their environment, and importantly that’s physical information, communication, policy, and attitude. Think about that in your healthcare experience. The individual experiencing the environment doesn’t care whether you’ve got a responsibility only for graphics, if they’re having a bad experience because the place is so noisy. They just want the environment to be better. The goal is to create a facilitating environment. I think that’s a much more creative and open-ended kind of conversation to have. What does a facilitating environment mean for someone with an anxiety disorder? Or for someone with a chronic health condition that involves fatigue? I think it’s much more aspirational.

Accessible Design

C: How do you go about doing your research to find all of these potentially excluded people and make sure that they’re part of the process? V: We have over 500 people here in Boston, they range from late teens to late 80s. We call them user experts. They all have lived experience with either physical, or sensory, or brain based issues, and they’re all paid for their time. Last year was rough, because for the most part these people are defined by being vulnerable. We did as much as we could, and we actually have a webcast event doing it virtually. We worked with the Smithsonian doing some virtual reviews, and of course we do our digital reviews, which can be done virtually anyway. We are going to be closing our big space down by North Station for a smaller storefront, maybe 2,000 square feet. We want to prioritize our research and our library. It’s not a circulating library, but since we have things that nobody else has, I want students like you to be able to visit and see state of the art of the literature, as it’s not all available digitally, and much of it is User experts eploring an MBTA station. Image credit IHCD.

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from outside the US. We’d also use it for public education, hoping that one day the public can actually interact. Things like having the screen facing the street with webcasts and other things of interest. C: Has the pandemic changed inclusive design significantly? Obviously it’s changed your day to day work life, but has it changed what you’re actually doing? V: It’s probably too soon to be sure, but I’ve got to tell you, we have been sought out by people at a rate unrivaled to any other year. We do no marketing and we get spoiled because people come looking for us, but the people who have come looking for us have been really interesting. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation came looking for us because they wanted to renovate their space post COVID, and wanted it to be inclusive. We are working with the state on a primer on the future of work through inclusive design review of all their principles and guidance. That’s a good thing! Mass General Brigham Health, our biggest health provider, has said that they won’t do anything anymore that we aren’t involved with, and we recently reviewed for them a model for an ambulatory surgical center, 60,000 square feet. We’re working on the Holyoke Soldiers Home, again we’re the specialists, not the architects. The only time we do individualized design is in a facet of our work, which is not a dominant facet, but which I have been unable to not do, and that is do individual homes. On Monday I have a meeting with a couple in Concord, and they were referred by a widowed previous client who was fabulous. We did a model design build project with them. The husband had ALS, he was an affluent guy, he and his wife were both Harvard educated. When he got ALS he managed to get himself elected to the board of the ALS Foundation nationally, and then he quickly ended up as

Accessible Design

the president. And he wanted a house design that would give him the same advantages that having a really good physician and really good medication and a really good clinic would have. And there was no time to waste, because ALS is a horror. He did die, and the house was a success. It was a combination of physical and smart home design. It was all the tricks we knew for the physical house, so he could control heat, light, cooling, music, his elevator, windows and doors, and he could do it all with his hands or with his voice, and when he didn’t have his voice anymore he could do it with eye tracking. C: That’s incredible! Wow. V: So this couple was referred by his widow. These projects are tailored to the whole family. If the spouse is anxious, and for example doesn’t want to be able to hear people who are working and taking care of her husband, she doesn’t want to hear them coming and going, so we deal with that stuff. We have a client who’s home we’re going to be renovating soon, and he had polio as a kid, and is one of the unfortunate people who have post-polio syndrome. There’s nothing you can do to exercise and build up your muscles so you can keep doing things. You’ve got only a fixed amount of muscle and energy left, it’s pretty scary. So of course we’re going to do that one. He’s our client, he’s my friend, and he trusts us and he doesn’t trust anybody else. C: And that work is so fundamentally life changing for those people. It would be hard to say no, I can see that. V: But if you did it every day, you’d have to close the doors because you couldn’t make enough money. It takes a lot of time because it’s very personal. You don’t have to hold the hands of a museum. If we’re working 57

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on a museum for example, physical stuff’s pretty easy. We might still test it, but it’s pretty straightforward. Once you get to the sensory and the brain based, there’s so little data on design responses to brain-based conditions, that we do extensive testing in that area. On the MBTA we’ve done extensive testing with sensory and brain based conditions because there’s nothing. One of the things we learned is how scary the Green Line is, and you’ll appreciate this. Picture not being able to hear. Oh my God! It comes in both directions on one track sometimes. So if you can’t see it or can’t hear it, you could easily be standing in the middle of the tracks looking for it. It’s really quite alarming. Now we’re working on green line transformation. Now we’re taking all that information and we’re applying it to the design of all the renovations to make the whole green line accessible and inclusive. We are committed to inclusive design. C: Do you think that will become the standard for public places? Or is it sort of currently the standard? V: Overwhelmingly, unless there is somebody really influencing how people think, accessibility is so stuck in a post-polio world, that imagined that wheelchair users were a big story. 1.4% of adults use wheelchairs outside of nursing homes. That should not be driving everything. I deal all the time with people who think “I want to make inclusive design in my multi-family housing development, I’m going to make every apartment wheelchair accessible.” You don’t need to do that. But let’s think about an apartment that is going to work for somebody with a traumatic brain injury, or an anxiety disorder? What does it look like inside an apartment where the acuity of their vision and their hearing is likely to diminish. C: It’s fascinating! I’ve tried to do so much research on 58

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this and there’s just not a lot, so it’s great to hear you talk about it. V: We’re sort of on the frontier of what people have no idea how to do. Those are the things that we’re really interested in. I tell you what, we haven’t run out of work!

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Designing for Health Design Theory Response Design Systems I’m interested in healthcare design and designing for wellness, so Lucienne Roberts’ article is super interesting to me. I guess I knew that design influences healthcare but until I read this article I hadn’t thought about the scale and scope of it. Design played a lifesaving role in communicating the risks and destigmatizing malaria, leprosy and HIV/AIDS, and now COVID-19.9 Good universal design is important in these cases, and especially important in regions where literacy rates may be lower, or where there are a variety of languages spoken, in order to save lives and prevent suffering. 9 Roberts, Lucienne. “What Role Does Design Play in a Public Health Crisis?” Eye on Design, 6 Apr. 2020, eyeondesign.aiga.org/ what-role-does-design-play-in-a-public-health-crisis/.

Healthcare Design

During the Ebola outbreak, awareness posters had to reach a culturally and linguistically diverse population with minimal formal literacy. That presents a unique design challenge, but an essential one. The solution was posters and cards that communicated signs and symptoms of the disease. I wish I learned about the United Nations’ open brief to creatives to help raise awareness and understanding of the Coronavirus and how to slow its spread. It’s clear that design is being utilized in a way that improves global health in the immediate future, and hopefully will save lives and the global economy in doing so. Reading this article certainly makes me wonder if better design communication early in the pandemic could have saved lives and educated people sooner, before it became politically charged. It also makes me wonder what other health design opportunities are out there in need of more universal design, and in improving design, how lives can be improved or even saved. 61

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Inspiration Britain Get Talking

Britain Get Talking had a simple goal: to raise awareness of mental health by encouraging more people to talk about it, bringing families closer as a result. Each print ad used the endline: “Tune back in to the story in your living room.” This campaign was widespread and appeared alongside the TV guide section of newspapers all across the UK.10 Mental health is very stigmatized still, and it is often a challenge for individuals that are struggling to get proper help and support. The campaign reminds parents and carers to have conversations with their children about how they’re feeling. From a design perspective, this is clever because it plays off the standard TV guide layout, and fits in with the page but also stands out due to the image treatment (ripped) and colored boxes on a white page. Time for entertainment in the home is often a time when families are home together, and is a time that adults can start having those conversations with their children. There is also a light sense of humor, that brightens up the topic in a way that invites the viewer to engage. Especially today, during a pandemic, anxiety 10 Tucker, Emma. “ITV Co-Opts the TV Listings to Get Us Talking Again.” Creative Review, 28 Oct. 2019, www.creativereview.co.uk/ itv-co-opts-the-tv-listings-to-get-us-talking-again/. 62

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Britain Get Talking newspaper ads.

and stress levels are higher than ever, and the unknown is scary. This seems to be very successful in opening the door for conversations within the home, which is an important place to start. The ads are also very identifiable, as they all vary in content and layout but have the same style.

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Liminality During a Health Crisis Interactive Design, Artivive App At the beginning of this project, the concept of liminality didn’t have much of an application to my life. Then, after spending two weeks in Europe during the start of COVID-19 spreading throughout the world, suddenly our future plans weren’t as clear, and everything was up in the air. My classmates and I were asleep during the US travel ban announcement, and with no clear guidelines. We woke up in the middle of the night to calls and messages from worried friends, family, and professors. We got panicked messages telling us to get out, immediately. We packed what we could, and realized that all the airline websites were down. By the time we got to the airport, there were hundreds of other people also waiting to book any flight they could. Our group got split up all over the world and country, and no one knew what would be waiting for us on the other end. That was the most in-between and uncertain I’ve felt in my life, jumping from our planned schedule to no schedule, unsure if we’d make it back to the US. These three AR files document my experience in a liminal time in my life. They’re chronological: when I woke up from a deep sleep to dozens of notifications, my thoughts as I couldn’t book a new flight or cancel my scheduled flight, and my experience in a crowded airport with hundreds of stressed Americans doing the same thing. This project transitioned from a “art-y” grad school assignment to a documentation of my very real experience.

Healthcare Design

Left: original digital image. Below: Video that overlays original image when viewed with the Artivive app. Collection of messages recieved early in the morning after the travel ban was enacted.

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Left: original digital image. Below: Video that overlays original image when viewed with the Artivive app. Stream of consiousness as I was trying to simultaneously pack and book a flight, when airline help lines were all crashing.

Healthcare Design

Right: original digital image. Below: Video that overlays original image when viewed with the Artivive app. Chaos of the airport, with hours long wait times, classmates booking connecting flights, trying to get a spot on a flight to the US going to any city.

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Inspiration Tik Tok UX Design Tik Tok has been a newsworthy app lately because it took the social media world by storm. It rapidly gained popularity with young users in early 2020, and the majority of users are under 18. The app is addictive, with unlimited new content and short clips that are tailored to viewer scrolling experience and tendencies, and encourages users to scroll and scroll and scroll. This can be damaging to the mental health of young users who are learning to navigate the real world virtually during COVID. @TikTokTips is an account that is built into the algorithm that shows up with a wide variety of content creators after prolonged app use. The videos remind users to get a snack, go for a walk, and take a break from screen time. Even though the app is problematic in other ways, this initiative is a successful way to remind young people to take breaks for their mental and physical wellbeing by being built into the content a viewer is shown. A notification or banner alert may not be as successful as a video reminder, because that’s what the viewer is expecting. While the app doesn’t stop viewers from continuing to scroll, the video reminder may be enough to shake up the viewer’s habits. It might not be quite enough, but the implementation of this was well designed.

Healthcare Design

TikTopTips still.

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Healthcare Design

Inspiration Office Space I’m excited about the movement by large companies to redesign office space for mental wellbeing. I visited this beautiful coworking space in Amsterdam during a workshop with The Daily Gorilla, and it’s clearly designed with employees in mind. The office is set up in a large warehouse and every element of the office is thoughtfully and carefully designed. The space encourages movement with wide open spaces and lots of open desk space for workers to make their space work best for them. The space is a relaxing environment with a wall of live plants, and enables collaboration with beautiful coworking pods for team meetings. There are massive windows, as natural light is beneficial for all-around wellbeing. Even the lighting was thought through, with natural light-imitating bulbs that were a far cry from the typical harsh office lighting. Work is a source of stress, anxiety, and frustration for so many people, and architecture design for mental wellbeing is a way to alleviate that to some degree. This space was incredibly deliberate and thoughtful, and the best tell of all was that the workers seemed happy. Everyone who we interacted with commented on the beautiful space. We spent a day doing a workshop, and it definitely fostered a creative environment and promoted creativity. Mental health is inherently connected to the environment, and places like this one are a step in the right direction for mental health in the workplace.

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Spot UX Design for Boston University

Spot provides real-time crowd and density monitoring tools across the BU campus, allowing students to gauge crowd size and building occupancy in certain areas so they can more effectively evaluate their risks and make more informed decisions on campus as we adapt to COVID. As the UX designer on the team, I had to make sure the interface would be usable for all students. Designed in partnership with BU Spark. Above: Spot app interface. Right: Spot Application Promotional Poster. 24x36. 72

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Savannah Cardenas 2021 Computer Science

Chrissy Casavant 2021 MFA

Priya Kumari 2021 Computer Science & Finance

Melissa Lopez 2021 Computer Science

Nick Ni 2021 Computer Science

Problem Boston University students do not have access to real-time data about how crowded a specific location is on campus.

Our Product

Solution Spot provides real-time crowd and density monitoring tools across the BU campus, allowing students to gauge crowd size and building occupancy in certain areas so they can more effectively evaluate their risks and make more informed decisions on campus as we adapt to COVID.

User signs in with their BU credentials → User selects a specific location on campus → User gets directed to a page with information about the location including number of people at the location and address Real-Time capacity of dozens locations on campus, Key information on specific locations, Sorting capabilities, BU oauth React Native, Express, Node.js, Expo, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, SQL

Value Proposition Our current product is specific to Boston University’s campus and shows information in real-time. Other features in the application are geared towards providing insightful information about a location for a Boston University student. There currently is no market alternative available for students that displays this information about Boston University’s campus.

Primary Target Users Silent Studier BU student who has an upcoming test or homework assignment and wants to find a quiet study location on campus where they can get work done.

Social Butterfly BU student who wants to find a place on campus that isn’t too crowded or busy to hang out, do some work, and relax with their group of friends.

Socially Responsible BU student who needs to be on campus for classes or school work but is worried about COVID-19 so they want to avoid crowds and stay socially responsible.

Innovation Journey At one point, we did not have a reliable way to access the number of people in a given location. We were thinking of placing raspberry pi’s across campus and having users ping those devices to determine the number of people. Luckily, IS&T is already collecting information on population density across campus and allowed us access to their database.

What’s Next? Greater user specific actions (profiles), favorites, nearby locations, greater location ability, more vital location information, more precise locations (specific floor/wing/etc of buildings), more tags for better searchability, map view, more locations, expand beyond BU

Ethics Audit We are currently using pre-existing technology from IS&T to capture user capacity across campus. After COVID, such tech might be dismantled. We will likely switch over to crowdsource data if that happens. As a result, we need to get permissions from users to get location data, anonymize the data, create policy documents and explain clearly how their data is being used. We also have to Implement BU AUTH so that only BU personnel have access to the information. We currently pull images from online sources. In the future, we will likely need to put this on the server directly for security purposes.

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Healthcare Design

Hospital Treatment Room Design

Vinyl Illustration and Installation for Boston Children’s Hospital Hospitals, at baseline, are intimidating and unwelcoming, especially for a child or young adult. As part of my work for L’Attitude Gallery, I design engaging artwork for permanent vinyl installation that aims to make a scary experience less scary: and possibly even fun. Each room has a distinct theme, with the goal of making an environment that distracts the patient from pain or fear. The process takes up to 18 months from concept design to installation. As of May 2021, my colleagues and I completed two MRI rooms, two Xray rooms, a preprocedure room, and two hallway installations, with others in the pipeline. All of the following images of Boston Children’s Hospital are copyrighted by L’Attitude Gallery.

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Email Interview

Katie McCurdy

Katie McCurdy is a User Experience (UX) Designer, researcher, strategist, and creative problem-solver. She focuses much of her work on healthcare.

C: What drew you to healthcare design initially? K: I was drawn to healthcare because of my personal experiences as a patient from the time I was 13 years old - I loved my work as a designer, and I was excited to be able to do that work in a field that would help me 84

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Katie McCurdy. Credit Seven Days Vermont.

make a difference for other patients (and doctors). I was working at an agency in NYC and wasn’t doing very well with my health, so I moved back to Vermont with my husband and started to consult with healthcare startups and organizations. That was 9 years ago! C: What is a challenge about working in healthcare? K: A few ideas: Larger organizations are resistant to change. Healthcare is needlessly complex at times, and appropriately complex at other times. It can be hard to make change happen. C: What do you enjoy the most about it? K: I have really enjoyed working on projects that can make an immediate impact - especially through my work at an academic medical center, where I consulted for 85

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Designer’s Oath Katie McCurdy

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant: I will draw upon the hard-won wisdom of those patients and clinicians upon whose behalf I advocate. I will learn from and share with my fellow designers, thus strengthening our collective knowledge. I will apply, for the benefit of the people, my skills of listening, observing, and inviting all stakeholders into the design process. I will use my strong voice to advocate for the people I represent, and I will seek the simplest solution to the problem at hand. I will practice my craft with an open heart. 86

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Pictal Health: Health history visualization service & product. The goal was to create a viable health history visualization service, product, and business. Copyright Katie McCurdy.

a few years. There, we also had great access to patient and clinician collaborators and testers, which was very rewarding. C: What role does accessibility play in your work? K: It’s been a part of most projects in some way or another. There is accessibility on the web, and also contrast and color choice concerns for print materials. We even worked on redesigning wayfinding in the physical space of the hospital, where physical mobility was a key concern. C: What does your typical research process look like? K: Depends - usually some up-front research like interviews, observation, looking at survey results or any past analytics, baseline usability testing. Sometimes some co-creative workshops. Then usually there is some testing of prototypes all along the way. 87

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C: Sometimes it’s hard to transition from collecting content to actually designing. How do you go from research to designing a visual identity? I’m not a visual designer so don’t do visual identities, but usually there is a pivot from synthesizing research to ‘making’ - usually brainstorming starts with some prompts or principles that have come directly from the research. It’s helpful to set aside a working session, ideally as a team, to kick off the process of coming up with ideas and make sure we are thinking of as many solutions as we can before we start narrowing in on one. C: It’s easy, for me at least, to get weighed down with content details. How do you approach synthesizing lots of content? K: It’s my favorite thing to do - when I am working alone I often do this somewhat intuitively, finding patterns and moving information around in a large document first. With a team, it’s good to get research data down on sticky notes and group them together - an exercise called affinity diagramming that I learned in grad school. C: How do you know your work has made an impact? K: Measure results in some way - when working as a consultant, sometimes I don’t see the long-term outcome of my work. But I usually have tested the solution with people, which provides insight and helps us predict what the impact might be. I have also heard anecdotal stories about the impact of the work. For a pediatric inpatient orientation guide that I co-created with the hospitals patient and family centered care group; they

Healthcare Design

heard stories from nurses about how helpful the content was for parents staying with their kids. C: I absolutely love the Designer’s Oath that you wrote. It totally gets to the heart of healthcare design. Where did this project originate? Is this oath something that you refer to frequently? I’m also curious about the “simplest solution”— what does that mean to you? This originated with the agency Mad*Pow a number of years ago - they asked me to contribute.

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Infographic on the spending trends in wellness. 90

Wellness Design

Wellness Design Journal Entry October 17, 2020 Pretty consistently, I’ve spent a lot of time this week focusing on the balance of work/classes/ off-screen time. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about routine. I have slowly been adjusting my routine to allow for time to take a break, take a walk, do yoga, or whatever it might be. Since I’m really interested in wellness, routine is a key part of physical and mental wellbeing. I like having a schedule, and being home all the time means I have to make my own schedule to make sure everything gets done, but also that I have time for fun too.

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StatIonary

BIker GanG Peloton aficionados say the latest exercise craze gives them a sense of community they sorely missed.

Robin Arzon works a crowd like Ariana Grande making a surprise appearance at your local mega-church. Last May, she bounded onto the stage of New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom to “All I Do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled, wearing a blindingly white minidress and flashing the red soles of her Louboutin stilettos, long brunette ponytail sailing behind her. “I have a feeling we have epic milestones in the audience tonight,” she predicted through her Madonna-style headset mic.

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Inspiration A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful Candy Chang’s A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful was on exhibit from Feb 10, 2018 - Jan 7, 2019 at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. It is an interactive installation work that invites viewers to write and post reasons why they are both hopeful and anxious on vellum cards. This results in interesting comparisons between the two categories. There have been over 55,000 responses, and a lot of them centered around the future and the unknown. This was installed in 2018, and responses are still being analyzed by information designers and psychologists as a bridge between the human psyche and design. The responses result in some fascinating comparisons, such as “I’m anxious because so few people vote” and “I’m hopeful because I can vote in the next election.” Some are much more honest than expected, like “I’m anxious because I don’t know how to be alone,” but the anonymity allows a layer of security and comfort. She’s making commentary on mental health in a way that’s open and honest, and invites others to do the same. By opening up the conversations in a public way, she fosters changes in society to help those suffering from anxiety to be open and reveal internal struggles in an anonymous way, which is less scary to anxiety sufferers. One of mental illness’ strongest forces is secrecy and shame, which leads those people to suffer in silence and try and cope on their own. Lifting the veil opens up discussions about these hard topics. Right: A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful” by Candy Chang. Image credit Candy Chang.

Wellness Design

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Inspiration Headspace UX Design Headspace is an app for mental health and wellness, with a wide range of programs that range from 5-30 minutes a day and guide listeners through meditation to improve mental health with specific fears, worries, stress, and more. The app’s content is full of easily digestible mental health tips, with soothing voices and calming graphics. I’m particularly drawn to the graphics. They manage to be inviting and sweet without being too cartoony or childish. Anna Charity is the head designer for the app, and purposely uses characters and storytelling to help users understand meditation, which is a somewhat abstract 96

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concept with lots of negative connotations. The color palette is beautiful, and has very soothing nature-based shades of blues, pinks, and oranges. It’s also clearly designed to be inclusive and allow users of all ages and backgrounds to use the app easily. There’s not a lot of text, and it’s very simple to navigate. Especially with a mental health app, the interface needs to be soothing and easy to navigate for users in a heightened mental state (or not) to use the app.

Left and below: Headspace UX design. Image credit Headspace.

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Wellness Design

Poster Design Inclusive/Wellness The poster to the left is the result of research into color studies in the context of accessibility, and thinking about inclusive design and wellness. The project started as a collection of colors recommended by the American Printing House for the Blind for visibility behind black text.11 This book’s color palette, typographic choices, and layout are driven by guidelines from the APH.

11 “APH Guidelines for Print Document Design.” American Printing House, 11 Sept. 2019, www.aph.org/aph-guidelines-for-print-document-design/.

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Inspiration Rietveld Academie Educational spaces have a responsibility to create an environment that promotes student wellbeing. The school library at Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam is very intentionally designed for student wellbeing. The tables have cutouts for trees to grow through the space, and there are bookshelves with planters built in. It’s scientifically proven that plants can boost creativity and reduce stress. They also help with filtering and purifying the air. Giant windows that let in plenty of natural light also help with student stress. The natural wood paneling and ceiling offer comfort and softness. “A school’s architecture and design can improve student’s mental health by helping them overcome daily struggles, open unfiltered discussion, and reduce the stigma associated with mental illness.”12 School libraries are a bit of an anomaly because they are a place for reading and writing, but also a place of extremely high stress. This aesthetically pleasing environment can help mitigate student stress and is a good example of design being responsible and thoughtful.

12 “How School Design and Architecture Can Impact Students’ Mental Health.” LAN Associates, 24 Mar. 2021, lanassociates.com/industry-insights/ how-school-design-and-architecture-can-impact-students-mental-health/.

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Thesis Essay:

Found In Translation At the core of any design is communication. A successful design approach translates information at every level, to a wide range of users. Found in Translation brings together inclusive design, which is centered around communication, and my interest in health and wellness, where the metaphor of “finding” is frequently used. Finding breath, finding clarity, finding balance, finding specific muscle groups during exercise, and so on. In the wellness world, the process of finding is never fully completed, it’s more about the journey. Design has exploded as a vessel for information transmission, and designed communication is what first drew me to the field. I come from a marketing and communications background, and found graphic design in a search for more creativity and flexibility within marketing. As I began my graphic design studies, I became interested in the responsibility of a graphic designer to make socially responsible choices. 106

Thesis Essay

Found in Translation brings together inclusive design, which is centered around communication, and my interest in health and wellness, where the metaphor of “finding” is frequently used. Designers hold power in society as the facilitators between information and the consumer. Communicating clearly, consciously, and thoughtfully is important to my design making process. Part of being a socially conscious designer is being thoughtful and deliberate when

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making choices about working with a client or making design decisions that can reach the greatest number of users, and that comes with designing inclusively. In our digital era, and particularly in the pandemic world that exists as I write this essay, technology allows individuals to maintain a human connection while physical connection is on hold. More individuals are dependent on technology to connect with the world than ever before, and that brings both the challenge and beauty of inclusive design. When life as we knew it suddenly shifted to virtual reality, inclusive and accessible design became an essential part of society. Messages, text based or subliminal, are communicated in seconds through digital communication tools, and their design can help or hinder that communication. Accessibility design is increasingly a requirement for designers, particularly in web and digital design. It was an easy place to start my research because the rules are very clear and very specific. In web design, designing for accessibility has little gray area. Print design has a little bit more flexibility, but the guidelines are still relatively strict. This book was designed according to print accessibility guidelines: including typeface choice, spacing, type size, and color choices. As I learned from my interviews and research, accessible design specifically considers the needs of users with disabilities. Unfortunately, much of accessible design is added to meet the bare minimum requirements. I came across inclusive design early in my research about accessibility, and universal design is also frequently referenced in these same resources as well.

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Universal design is created specifically to reach the greatest number of people, including, but not specifically, those with disabilities. After my conversation with Elise Roy, she noted that universal design, in its quest to be used by everyone, often excludes those with disabilities. Universal design considers how to create a product that is easy and efficient to use for the average user. Inclusive design then, is the larger umbrella design approach that both universal design and accessibility design fall into. Inclusive design expands access to information to a wide range of users, and carefully considers the user. It is reflective of the mental space a user may be in, physical location, and is inclusive of disability or challenges. And what intrigues me the most about 109

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inclusive design is that it’s new, it’s progressing, and there’s space for significantly more growth and creativity. Inclusive design can improve the quality of life and ease of access to information for a wide range of users, and create impactful social change. I’m interested in exploring both digital and physical inclusive design, as they each have capability to reach different audiences. Analog design has staying power, while digital design offers adaptability. Both are important for a designer like myself to understand. Across my research, the use of the term “inclusive design” is encouraged as it “make(s) the case for design that anticipates the widest possible spectrum of people across the spectrum of ability, age, culture, and socioeconomic status.”13 As a designer, I inherently design for myself. I’m an able bodied, English speaking, millennial designer. I often don’t know what I don’t know, and what I may be missing from my work. It’s easy to accidentally sidestep inclusive design, but deliberately considering how to make my work more inclusive will allow me to reach the greatest number of users and make socially responsible formatting choices. I’m particularly interested in using inclusive design in the context of health and wellness tools and organizations. I’m excited by and have personal interest in wellness and have enjoyed my work doing design in the healthcare industry. There’s a need for wellness design within the design community and in society as a whole. I personally struggle with prioritizing my wellness, and I’ve seen a lot of people close to me struggle with various types of wellness challenges. Inclusive design could help solve 13 “Principles.” Institute for Human Centered Design, www.humancentereddesign.org/inclusive-design/principles.

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wellness issues in a time when stress and anxiety are at a high, and individuals are feeling isolated and scared. Healthcare design and wellness design are both huge industries, and it’s important to acknowledge that they are industries that are financially driven in many ways. But I also really believe in the power that wellness design has, especially in a pandemic. I’m inspired by the history of wellness design, and the way wellness design has created an industry that is life changing for so many people, including myself, in a digital age. Similarly, healthcare design can make a massive difference in the lives of the public and of patients. Public service healthcare design spreads information clearly and concisely. Internal healthcare design can improve patient experience. Healthcare design is deeply rooted in inclusive design, as many healthcare facilities and communications are used by a range of people. Wellness design isn’t as inclusive as it should be, yet. I plan to continue research and contribute to inclusive wellness as a designer. The research and assembly of this thesis book deepened my understanding of inclusive design and opened my eyes to areas that need more work, and to my own areas for growth. Making work more inclusive of users of varied age, ability, culture, and socioeconomic status benefits everyone: the client’s message gets distributed farther, the user can access information more, and the designer’s work is successfully communicated. Inclusive design, especially in health and wellness, can change lives for the better and improve human experience.

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Inventory

A collection of everything else that I’ve worked on over the past three years.

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An American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages.

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tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

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Inventory

s ' t

a h

happening? 1,300,000,000 accounts 500,000,000 tweets sent each day 6,000 tweets sent each second

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116 1

Chrissy Casavant

designing books is Inventory

laughing matter.

OK, it is. chip kidd 117 CFA AR 882 Graduate Graphic Design 1: Spring 2020

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Who lied about the murder of Hae Min Lee?

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Serial, an NPR Podcast

On January 13, 1999, Hae Min Lee, a high school senior, disappeared.

Narrated by Sarah Koenig

Hae's body was found in a local park, strangled, her time of death was in the 21 minutes after school.

Season 1, Episode 1

There are multiple accounts of what happened on that day, at that time. Maybe Adnan Sayed, Hae's ex-boyfriend, is innocent. But what if he isn't? What if he did do it, and he's got all these good people thinking he didn't?

Adnan Syed

Someone is lying.

Found Guilty

Popular high school student, golden child, EMT, school athlete Led double life between home and school because of cultural differences

Conservative Muslim family

▶ He and Hae had just broken up Didn't remember anything specific about that day

Jay Wilds

State's Star Witness

▶ Adnan told him that "he was

going to kill that bitch, referring to Hae Lee"

Asia McClain Never testified

Sold weed at Adnan's school, they smoked together

Nothing strange happened, he couldn't remember specifics after weeks went by

Didn't know Adnan at school

Changed his story multiple times

Boyfriend also saw him

Jan 13, 1994 2:15- 2:36 PM

Unsure where he was, what he was doing, it was a regular day

Testified that Adnan murdered Hae and he saw her body

Claimed that she saw Adnan at library during time of death

Described an extremely calculated, planned attack

Wrote letters to lawyer immediately after accusation

▶ No physical evidence linking him to the crime scene

Says he probably went to the library and then track practice Track coach, as a policy, does not keep attendance record

Denies any part of Jay’s story happened, except that they saw each other Maximum security, received life sentence + 30 years

▶ Maintains his innocence after fifteen years

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Describes a killer, manipulator, master liar, psychopath

▶ Picked Adnan up from parking lot, saw Hae's body in the car

Drove to park to help dig grave Adnan "Needed to be seen," dropped him at a few spots after the murder

▶ Says with certainty that she saw him at the library on that day

Library no longer has login records or surveillance video

Lawyers ignored her letters, and she never testified

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10.3 – 11.15.2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Coat Check Hall 465 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 617-267-9300 info@mfa.org mfa.org 123

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LOVE

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an the en thei r l a ugh is fun n i e r th jo ke wh

tsol saw taht gnihtemos gnidnﬁ

trashy reality tv

satisfying videos

csu

crim nta

e u r t e m

e x e r c i s e c l a s s e s

beach naps

summer brunches on patios

erdieo

cozysweaters taking

bubble

in gl

g u n

bath

a per f

wine nights 126

VACATIONS

ado oc

THANKSgiving tly ripe av eating a ec snack that i’ve been c r a v i n g DOGS IN SWEATERS

FAMILY

thunderstorms

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HATE

b ad spel ling and gr am mar

uncomfortable shoes Paying Bills

PEOPLE WHO ARE RUDE TO lines WAITERS

regretting a decision

m g n

waiting in

si o l

CONFRONTATION

rodents

nnin pi

ois y nei hbor

whe

ple s ap

the el

parking tickets

close talkers

y k ey s

cHaPpEd LiPs

f l i g h t

d e l a y s

ARGUING

s l o w

i n t e r n e t 127

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Annotated Bibliography (WAI), W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview.” Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), www. w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag Standard web accessibility guidelines, specifically for adapting web pages to be more usable for users with disabilities. 2020, Defining the Mental Wellness Economy, globalwellnessinstitute.org/ wp-content/uploads/2021/01/GWI_mentalwellnessresearch2020.pdf. Report from the Global Wellness Institute analyzing spending in the wellness industry. “Accessibility at Yale.” Accessibility at Yale | Usability &amp; Web Accessibility, usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/accessibility-yale. Sample accessibility guidelines from Yale. “Accessibility Solutions - APH.” American Printing House, www.aph.org/ accessibility-solutions/. Guidelines for accessiblility in printing and general information about designing for accessibility. Andersen, Margaret. “Why Can’t the U.S. Decolonize Its Design Education?” Eye on Design, 20 Aug. 2017, eyeondesign.aiga.org/ why-cant-the-u-s-decolonize-its-design-education. Article criticizing the US design education system and its lack of representation, and comparing international design programming. “APH Guidelines for Print Document Design.” American Printing House, 11 Sept. 2019, www.aph.org/aph-guidelines-for-print-document-design/. Print guidelines for designing for low vision users. Baker, Aryn. “Designer Bas Timmer’s Snowsuit Keeps Homeless People Safe.” Time, Time, 8 Oct. 2020, time.com/collection-post/5896371/ bas-timmer-next-generation-leaders/. Profile on Bas Timmer’s snowsuit/sleeping bag design for homeless users. Frey, Malia. “Why the Wellness Industry Needs to Be More Inclusive.” Verywell Fit, 2 Sept. 2020, www.verywellfit.com/ wellness-is-for-everyone-5072350.

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Bibliography

BIPOC communities are less likely to benefit from wellness initiatives due to bias and lack of inclusive advertising. Offers suggestions for approaching the problem. Greenwald, Michelle. “Why Inclusive Product Design And Messaging Matters: 20 Best Practices.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 4 June 2020, www.forbes.com/ sites/michellegreenwald/2020/06/01/meaningful-authentic-approaches-toproduct-and-service-inclusivity/?sh=68bf2398524e. Guidance for designing inclusively, and reminders of why that’s important. “A History of Design in Global Health: Design for Health.” A History of Design in Global Health | Design for Health, www.designforhealth.org/ understanding-design/a-history-of-design-in-global-health. Examines why lots of large companies, like GE and UNICEF have pivoted to focusing on design work to communicate lifesaving messaging. “How School Design and Architecture Can Impact Students’ Mental Health.” LAN Associates, 24 Mar. 2021, lanassociates.com/industry-insights/ how-school-design-and-architecture-can-impact-students-mental-health/. Clear correlation between school design and student mental health. Microsoft Design. Inclusive: A Design Toolkit, Miscrosoft, 2017, katholmesdesign.com/inclusive-toolkit. Downloadable toolkit for designing inclusively, by Kat Holmes and Microsoft. “Principles.” Institute for Human Centered Design, www.humancentereddesign.org/inclusive-design/principles. Principles, history, and information about inclusive design. “A Radical Transformation in Building and Designing for Health Is Underwaybut Not Everyone Will Benefit Equally.” Harvard Graduate School of Design, 28 Apr. 2020, www.gsd.harvard.edu/2020/04/the-pandemic-may-instigatea-radical-transformation-in-building-and-designing-for-health-but-noteveryone-will-benefit-equally/. Considers how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect health landscape, and criticizes focus on technology over architecture for health. Roberts, Lucienne. “What Role Does Design Play in a Public 129

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Health Crisis?” Eye on Design, 6 Apr. 2020, eyeondesign.aiga.org/ what-role-does-design-play-in-a-public-health-crisis/. Explores the history of design in public health campaigns, including COVID and HIV prevention. Roth, Katherine. “Creative Design for the Disabled, and Everybody Else Too.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 16 Jan. 2018, apnews.com/article/1b3c58b13c4 447509717108c55730d45. Roy, Elise, director. When We Design for Disability, We All Benefit. TED, www.ted.com/talks/elise_roy_when_we_design_for_disability _we_all_benefit?language=en. TED Talk about designing for disability to be more inclusive. Tucker, Emma. “ITV Co-Opts the TV Listings to Get Us Talking Again.” Creative Review, 28 Oct. 2019, www.creativereview.co.uk/ itv-co-opts-the-tv-listings-to-get-us-talking-again/. Britain Get Talking campaign for talking about mental health at home. Virdi, Jaipreet, and Liz Jackson. “Why Won’t Nike Use the Word Disabled to Promote Its New Go FlyEase Shoe?” Slate Magazine, Slate, 5 Feb. 2021, slate.com/technology/2021/02/nike-go-flyease-shoe-disabled-design.html. Nike’s new shoe design is inclusive and specifically designed for users with disabilities, but they won’t use the word disabled when talking about it. “We’re All Misfit Consumers - We Need Inclusive Design.” OCAD UNIVERSITY, 27 Feb. 2017, www2.ocadu.ca/news/ were-all-misfit-consumers-%E2%80%94-we-need-inclusive-design. Course offered by OCAD about unlearning biases and why we need to design inclusively. “What Is the Difference between Accessible, Usable, and Universal Design?” What Is the Difference between Accessible, Usable, and Universal Design? | DO-IT, www.washington.edu/doit/ what-difference-between-accessible-usable-and-universal-design. Basic definitions and differentiations between terms. Wilson, Mark. “Microsoft Went All in on Accessible Design. This Is What Happened Afterwards.” Fast Company, Fast Company, 19 Nov. 2019, www. fastcompany.com/90432365/microsoft-went-all-in-on-accessible-designthis-is-what-happened-afterwards. Analysis of Microsoft’s accessiblity design toolkit and movement towards entirely inclusive design.

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