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linked, an inclusive platform can
be built for a product and enables
mainstream design principles to
be applied.
Day Three: presentations
Their brief for the final day was to
develop an inclusive design concept
and present it in six minutes.
Results
The five teams visited street markets,
shopping malls and care homes.
The results were accordingly varied:
from new concepts for Falafel
packaging to care home service
delivery. One team based their idea
on a chance encounter with a 47-
year-old Arab grandmother living in
Jaffa. She had invited them into her
home, and described her feelings
of isolation as an empty nester.
The design team responded
by devising Friends-4-U, a landline
phone-based service which would
link her with others in her situation
so that they could exchange news,
gossip and advice anytime.
Another team surveyed the
local shopping mall and found no
place for mothers who wished to
breast-feed their babies discreetly.
They designed ‘mbrace – a
dedicated facility within the mall,
which encompassed the need for
comfort, privacy and sociability.
The winning team went one
step further and produced a prototype
in less than 24 hours. At a
street market they had met an
elderly woman who went there daily
with her small dog to socialise and
shop. She lived in straightened circumstances
and was in poor health.
The design team understood her
need for an inexpensive product
that would combine the functional
qualities of a shopping trolley with
an integrated seat.
Enterprisingly, they retrieved a
discarded trolley from a skip, fixed
a seat to it and welded hooks to
the side to allow shopping bags
to be hung from it. Their conversations
with their key user had
convinced them that even if a
perfect product were designed and
manufactured, it would have been
unaffordable. Showing her how
to improvise within the context
of what she owned was the most
inclusive solution. The results were
judged by industrial designer Ofer
Zick, design historian Mel Byars
and Julia Cassim from the Helen
Hamlyn Research Centre.
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