Where's My Toothbrush?

Hi, everyone. My name is August. Yes, I was born in the month of August.

As Courtney mentioned, I work in design, and I currently work for a company called Varo, which promotes financial inclusion for the majority of Americans who are overcharged, underserved or just outright excluded from everyday financial services.

I’ve also worked for companies and products that you might have heard of. I spent 14 years at Microsoft, where my last role was head of design for Xbox. Then I moved to the Bay Area a few years ago, where I worked for Pinterest. Right before Varo, I spent some time at Google.

What’s interesting about this sequence of jobs is that when I used to tell people I worked at Xbox, I’d often hear, “Oh, my son or husband or boyfriend would want to meet you.” Then when I worked at Pinterest, I’d hear, “Oh, my daughter, my wife, my brother.” Then when I worked at Google, no one wanted to meet me.

I want to start my story with a little bit of a provocation, which is this: Whenever I see a bendable straw, I see a love story.

So let me explain.

Back in 2013, I was working for Xbox, and at that time, I would have characterized it as my dream job. Well into that role, I read an article that suggested a good night’s sleep was the new status symbol. Knowing my obsessive personality, I really got into it.

I learned about thread count and different strains of cotton and how many layers are the right number to make your bed just so. At that time, I bought an overstuffed, summer-weight duvet. What it did was change the visual proportions of my bed.

One night, when I thought I was plopping down into my bed, I actually fell on the floor and hit my back against the side railing. This resulted in a trip to the emergency room. Because of hospital error and misdiagnosis, I ended up with a spinal cord injury, and I’m now in this chair.

That’s a whole other talk.

Over the next six months, I spent time in the hospital going through recovery and learning my new normal. The one thing I knew would make me feel like my old self again was getting back to work. So I just rushed and rushed, hoping to get back to my day job.

What I found, in typical corporate American fashion, was that when I returned to work, the entire company had gone through this massive reorganization. I returned with a new boss and a new charter.

All the different heads of design for the different products now reported to the same person. This head of design tasked each of us with creating a design agenda. In other words, what were the themes, qualities or principles that all the products at Microsoft could share?

Obviously, what was top of mind for me at the time was the notion of accessibility. Along with a couple of colleagues, I really pushed for accessibility to be part of this design agenda.

In our exploration of accessibility, we came across things like universal design and inclusive design, which really struck a chord with me.

For the purposes of this conversation, I often hear accessibility, universal design and inclusive design used interchangeably, but I just want to clarify this point: Accessibility is an outcome. Universal design and inclusive design are two of many approaches to realizing this outcome.

On the one hand, universal design emphasizes the end result, creating as accessible a solution as possible for as many people as possible. In other words, it’s a kind of one-size-fits-all solution.

Inclusive design, on the other hand, focuses on the genesis of the problem, typically involving just one person or a small group of people.

Inclusive design has been around for a while, but it has gained a lot of traction lately for two reasons. One is the advancement of digital communications technology. The other is that, in 2006, the United Nations General Assembly, in its Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, redefined disability from the so-called medical model to the social model.

The medical model suggests that disability is a phenomenon based on some sort of physiological or cognitive impairment or difference. The social model suggests that disability is, in fact, a mismatch between any person’s given spectrum of abilities and the artifacts and environments with which he or she interacts.

This brings us to the kind of damning conclusion that disability is, in fact, designed.

In thinking about this, one might ask: If we apply inclusive design to these single cases or small groups of people, how does it benefit everyone?

Looking at the history of inventions and innovations, we find that this approach benefits many, many people. It takes a kind of leap of faith to assume that if you solve for one, it will benefit many.

For example, let’s take the remote control. The original design intent of the remote control was actually to help people with mobility differences who couldn’t easily get up from the room to change the channel.

Jump a few decades ahead, and each one of us expects a remote control to come with the television.

The list goes on.

Early email protocols were invented by Vint Cerf, who was hard of hearing, so that he could communicate more seamlessly with his wife, who is deaf.

The typewriter was invented by an Italian aristocrat for his lover, a countess who was blind, so that she could write letters without assistance.

Think about the last time you took advantage of closed captioning at the airport or in a noisy bar.

The telephone was originally invented as a device to assist the deaf. There’s the electric toothbrush. Cruise control in the car was invented by an engineer with low vision who longed to drive again.

Think about the times you’ve listened to audiobooks.

Which brings us to the bendable straw.

The bendable straw was invented in the 1930s by Joseph Friedman, right here in San Francisco. So it’s kind of ironic that we’re one of the first cities to ban these.

What happened was that he had taken his young daughter, Judith, to the soda fountain. He noticed that she was fussing with trying to drink her milkshake because the straw went over the tall glass, and she had trouble drinking from it.

When he got home, he took a straw, put a screw inside it and wrapped it with dental floss. He invented the bendable straw, and the rest is so-called history.

What’s interesting about all these innovations is that they’re all love stories. They were all expressions of love from the inventor to someone they cared about.

So if you want to start thinking about inclusive design in your own practices, there are three steps to it.

The first is to seek out a form of exclusion, whether you yourself have felt excluded or you want to understand how someone else has been excluded from an everyday experience.

Then solve on the personal level. Solve for that one person or that small group.

This is where it takes a leap of faith that the solution could benefit the person who has been excluded and also benefit others as you begin to scale it to broader and broader audiences.

As Courtney mentioned, inclusive design is a shift from a kind of rational model of design, where there are hypotheses, to an empirical model, where even if one person is the target, we have evidence that the solution actually works.

I think that is much greater than designing for a so-called average user who doesn’t even exist. There is no such thing as an average user.

It’s my hope that as you embrace inclusive design, you’ll be inspired by the words of Charles Eames, who suggested, “Design for someone you love. That someone might be you.”

And in doing so, as you look around in your everyday lives, I hope you realize that you’re surrounded by love stories.