The three dimensions of inclusive design: A design framework for a digitally transformed and complexly connected society
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis attempts to answer the following meta-design challenge: In this digitally transformed and increasingly connected society, how can we design in such a way that we include the full range of human diversity? How can we use design to both circumvent the new barriers that escalate exclusion and leverage the new affordances of emerging sociotechnical systems to reduce disparity? \n \nThis thesis documents the formulation, application and testing of a guiding framework for Inclusive Design, suitable for a digitally transformed and increasingly connected context. During the course of my doctoral studies I have iteratively formalised and refined this framework. As a doctoral student, Founder/Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Canada (1993–), and co-Director of the sister European lab, the Inclusive Design Research Centre of Ireland (2008–), I have implemented the inclusive design framework in applied research with colleagues. I have also taught the framework in the graduate programme that I launched at OCAD University in Toronto in 2011. These framework applications have helped to develop tools and design methods that support the framework. The thesis conveys the formulation, implementation, and communication of the framework to several application domains. \n \nThe fields of knowledge are diverse and post-disciplinary. If a primary field must be chosen, then it would be the field of Design, not only in terms of Design Engineering but also in the broader scope of Design for Society: both are explored and developed in tandem. But the impact of the work in the ‘real world’ and within the industry sector that can support community change, is the most important aim and contribution of this research. The evolving framework is already being applied by a global collaborating community and has formed the basis of the corporate transformation of companies such as Microsoft. The applied research has delved into many cognate fields, including Systems Thinking, Deeper Learning, Economics, Machine Learning, Human Computer Interfaces, and Critical Disability Studies. \n \nThe thesis makes an original and substantial contribution to knowledge, articulating a guiding framework for Inclusive Design in a digitally transformed and complexly connected global society. The framework applies Systems Thinking to the area of digital inclusion for people experiencing disabilities and adds the consideration of the design process to inclusive or accessible Design. Examples taken from years of intensive practice that support the thesis are provided as use cases, to support future research and implementation. \n \nThe thesis also attempts to provide a bridge between scholarly study and community action, in part by using clear language to prevent or overcome any conceptual divide between scholars and the diverse individuals who must participate in co-designing a more inclusive society. The thesis includes translations of the concepts inherent in the proposed framework, expressed clearly and succinctly, for a variety of co-designers. The thesis posits that Diversity is Strength: a concept that can be applied in many cognate fields as well.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it