Below is an excerpt from my dissertation, A Pedagogy of One: Engaging the ‘Missing Middle’ Toward Inclusion in Education about the Canadian School of Inclusive Design. The name refers to the endeavours of the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University (IDRC), previously the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre (ATRC) at the University of Toronto, where I am a Senior Manager of Research + Design.
Under the leadership of Director Jutta Treviranus, both the IDRC and ATRC have operated expansively though entirely on external research grant funding, for nearly three decades. Treviranus has directed a multidisciplinary team made up of designers, developers, researchers, and others, pushing the boundaries of their respective fields. The team has advanced approaches that have extended Human Centered Design to Participatory Design further to Inclusive Design and to creating approaches to co-design. The center’s work encompasses various sectors, including education, law, immigration, accessibility legislation, policy at international, national, provincial, and local levels, international standards, telecommunications, medical and health sectors, entrepreneurship, innovation, research, corporate environments, human resources, and architecture, among others.
Our body of work demonstrates that inclusive design approaches have a horizontal applicability, relevant across diverse vertical industries. Furthermore, these contributions have inspired and been extensively referenced by others, notably by author Kat Holmes in the book Mismatch (2018) and the Microsoft Inclusive Design Guide (Shum et al., 2016). Those resources have helped popularize a tactical side of Inclusive Design, one that is often structured around designing a thing.
I have worked professionally at these two centres for the past 18 years, developing a practice of Inclusive Design that defies reduction to a singular ideology or method of operation. Rather, I have thought of ID as an amalgamation of the most effective theoretical frameworks that have preceded it, mixed with decades of experience, and engagement with human diversity on all levels. The approach encompasses a comprehensive collection of leading thought and practice, intellectual engagement, ideation, theorization, prototyping, and production. Consequently, it transcends traditional boundaries, exhibits multi-dimensionality, and cannot be confined solely to a design process or a theoretical framework. A distinguishing feature of this Inclusive Design practice is its ability to surpass many historical approaches that have been ingrained in our collective thinking and actions, which have ultimately constrained our progress.
Perspective Change
In part, this is made possible because Inclusive Design facilitates a perspective change, prompting us to interrogate and contemplate the historical conventions of design. It encourages us to challenge design decisions, such as, “Why has this choice been made instead of an alternative?” and “What are the ethical considerations involved?” as well as “Whom does this outcome affect?” The inspiration that has informed my own inclusive design practice comes from the works of Sara Hendren, Sunaura Taylor, and Jutta Treviranus, among others (Hendren, 2020; Taylor, 2017; Treviranus, 2021). Each of these women challenges our understanding of our embodied existence, emphasizing our situatedness and interactions with both objects and each other.
At the IDRC, Inclusive Design considers the “full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference” (Inclusive Design Research Centre, n.d.-a).
The transformative work from the IDRC is colloquially referred to as the Canadian School of Inclusive Design. This is a distinction from “inclusive education,” a term used to push past segregated “special education” (Florian, 2008), and from the British approach to “inclusive design” that evolved from a Universal Design architectural context and is focused on building architecturally for as many people as possible without the need for special adaptations. The British provenance, methods, and goals make it meaningfully distinct from the Canadian School and more closely related to Universal Design (What Is Inclusive Design?, n.d.).
The Canadian School frames ID through three dimensions. First, recognize, respect, and design with human uniqueness and variability. Second, use inclusive, open, and transparent processes, and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives, including people that can’t use or have difficulty using the current designs. Finally, third, realize that you are designing in a complex adaptive system (Treviranus, 2018).
While Inclusive Design recenters individuals, it also allows for sufficient abstraction to effectively tackle significant systemic issues. By differentiating among individuals, groups, processes, and systems, this methodology can exert a comprehensive impact in a manner that no alternative method can achieve. This depth adds to what can seem like an unstructured and indistinct definition of what ID is. It is difficult to define an approach that is a synthesis of post-disciplinary approaches embodying the profound depth, extensive breadth, and rich diversity present in our world alongside functional, practical, and fabricated products. Furthermore, inclusive design addresses the repercussions of historically inequitable decisions on individuals, their participation, representation, and access. It serves as a methodology that elucidates the underlying factors determining (limiting, enabling, or otherwise supporting) existing circumstances and urges us to confront these realities in every decision we make so that we might not perpetuate biases and exclusion.
A notable and fundamental characteristic of an Inclusive Design approach is a full embrace of all approaches to creating greater inclusion from tactical to socioemotional and everything that is between, a recalibration to adapt to context, and a deep humility of practitioners. In the field of design that sometimes still centers the design expert a la Sanders and Stappers’ (2012) “classical” design approach, ID has no experts. Instead, those of us using ID are simply practitioners who have the privilege of practicing this deeply engaging, perspective shattering approach. The applicability of Inclusive Design is broad. It is made up of the humanity in all of us—a horizontal threads that can weave into and through everything we do. There is no circumstance that cannot be improved by an ID approach. Simultaneously, there are no two circumstances that will require the same approach. ID resists being reduced to a checklist or unilinear approach. It is iterative, dynamic, reflective, responsive, and contextual always.
My own approach to ID treats all decisions as design decisions that carry power: the potential to welcome or exclude. The design itself is not politicized; rather, it is the designer, who selects the design based on the intended context and user, who is political. An Inclusive Designer practices a continuous inquiry, posing questions such as “What is missing?” “Who is not represented?” “Whose voices remain unheard?” as well as “How can I foster trust in this environment?” and “How can I use the power I have to help create the conditions for a brave space?”
With design, our choices can contribute to and perpetuate inequities and barriers to access, or they can fundamentally revolutionize what we do and how we do it. This is both the opportunity and responsibility of design—and all of us as designers.
Inclusive Design vs. and Universal Design
Unlike many ideologies, Inclusive Design does not aggressively seek to upend that which came before it. Instead, it builds upon the best parts of earlier approaches to take them further, pushing them to do more. In this way, Universal Design can be thought of as one of the foundational approaches to Inclusive Design. ID was built on the aspiration of Universal Design’s approach to solve for everyone, regardless of ability and need. ID and UD have some very significant differences that can in large part be traced to Universal Design’s origins in the built environment, from architectural and industrial design: it was limited in flexibility as a result. In the digital domain there is much more opportunity for flexibility with programmatic and automatic transformation of content (Inclusive Design Research Centre, n.d.-b).
Another assumption about Universal Design, especially in the built environment is its reliance on a solvable, one-size-fits-all approach. An advantage of the digital domain or the interactional one is that it is possible to action a one-size-fits-one approach, giving the individual more autonomy and agency. There is an opportunity to minimize how much someone with diverse needs must compromise to use the same things others use. There is also a tolerance for iteration that seems specific to the digital domain. Websites are never ‘done,’ apps are continually updated and adapted. The digital allows for iteration and dynamism and change.
Many Inclusive Design principles in education are built upon the foundation that Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides. But the conversations about inclusion, disabling systems, and the socioemotional impact of inclusion did not grow from UDL in the way they have been sprouting from Inclusive Design. Words matter, and universality harkens a different ethos altogether than inclusion. Universality suggests solutions and completion whereas inclusion suggests an ongoing practice. Universal Design still has the designer as knower. Inclusive Design challenges the designer to be facilitator of lived-experience knowers. This shift in power matters.
Where Universal Design has attempted a one-size-fits-all, our team at the IDRC has articulated a ‘one-size-fits-one’ reframing. The outcome of this reframing is an individual-driven process. Individuals are designers/deciders in this model, they are not subjects to be studied or speculated about. Further, where Design Justice has flipped who is a designer, the IDRC builds, practices, and iterates often on co-design concepts alongside communities of co-designers, experts in their own needs and preferences. The IDRC pushes to center those people who are on the precarious edges of any measure of power, participation, engagement, and more.
Because Inclusive Design takes on the most complex edges of human entanglement (power, exclusion, participation, etc.) we have found that an Inclusive Design Mindset can result in transformational change, cultural revolution, greater insight, and innovation.
Next I’ll talk about some examples that illustrate those changes.
References
Florian, L. (2008). INCLUSION: Special or inclusive education: future trends. British Journal of Special Education, 35(4), 202–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8578.2008.00402.x
Hendren, S. (2020). What can a body do?: How we meet the built world (First hardcover.). Riverhead Books.
Inclusive Design Research Centre. (n.d.). What is Inclusive Design. What Is Inclusive Design. Retrieved October 8, 2023, from https://legacy.idrc.ocadu.ca/resources/idrc-online/49-articles-and-papers/443-whatisinclusivedesign
Holmes, K. (2018). Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11647.001.0001
Inclusive Design Research Centre. (n.d.). Philosophy. Inclusive Design Research Centre. Retrieved October 8, 2023, from https://idrc.ocadu.ca/about/philosophy/
Inclusive Design Research Centre. (n.d.). What is Inclusive Design. What Is Inclusive Design. Retrieved October 8, 2023, from https://legacy.idrc.ocadu.ca/resources/idrc-online/49-articles-and-papers/443-whatisinclusivedesign
Mitchell, Jess H., “A Pedagogy of One: Engaging the ‘Missing Middle’ Toward Inclusion in Education” (2025). Full-Text Theses & Dissertations. 43.
https://jdc.jefferson.edu/diss_masters/43
Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2012). Convivial toolbox: Generative research for the front end of design. BIS Publishers.
Shum, A., Holmes, K., Woolery, K., & Price, M. (2016). Inclusive Microsoft Design. Microsoft. https://inclusive.microsoft.design/tools-and-activities/Inclusive101Guidebook.pdf
Taylor, S. (2017). Beasts of burden: Animal and disability liberation. New Press.
Treviranus, J. (2021). Inclusive Design: Valuing Difference, Recognizing Complexity. In M. H. Rioux, A. Buettgen, E. Zubrow, & J. Viera (Eds.), Handbook of Disability: Critical Thought and Social Change in a Globalizing World (pp. 1–24). Springer Nature Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_98-1
Treviranus, J. (2018). The three dimensions of inclusive design: A design framework for a digitally transformed and complexly connected society [PhD, University College Dublin]. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/2745/
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