Diversity and Design

"We needed a book that introduces students to issues of diversity in design practice; this edited volume fills that gap. Fifteen engaging chapters argue that diversity can be an end product of a creative process that promotes social and economic inclusion. This volume places design at the center of emancipatory and progressive social practices and encourages designers and students of designed artefacts, environments, and systems to think of the social impact of their practices." – Arijit Sen, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA

"All design has hidden consequences. This anthology is a welcome addition to the literature exploring the role of designers in helping to create a more inclusive society." - Jeremy Myerson, Helen Hamlyn Professor of Design, Royal College of Art, UK

"Diversity and Design provides evidence of the profound but often unintended consequences of design decisions across a diverse spectrum of users and range of scales from video games and everyday-use products to architectural environments. The fifteen case studies that comprise the book’s chapters illustrate how a range of factors and user characteristics influence designers’ thinking. Through content, discussion questions, and exercises, the book provides excellent tools for design instructors to better illustrate ways to avoid unintentional discrimination and segregation with design." - Lynne M. Dearborn, Ph.D, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

"This book is a new interpretation and overview of the social issues that have been finding their way into education and practice for the last 50 years. Beth Tauke and colleagues have provided the overview necessary to take an array of perspectives and put them into a coherent and well-organized structure [allowing] educators and practitioners to continue to evolve toward a greater understanding of the continual emerging complexity in the global culture for which we are designing." - Craig Vogel, director of the Center of Design, Research and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

"This book looks beyond contemporary formal design practices to examine its struggle to impart meaning and impacts a broad public. It engages the work of our professional and academic colleagues that have operated with an awareness or the imbedded identities, diversities and marginal desires of the real community of users. The rich exemplar collection is intensely conscious of and impacted by the real diversity around us. As we make and remake our known world with this awareness, we would all do well to understand these intriguing lessons." - Nathaniel Quincy Belcher, Professor of Architecture, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

"Current models of ecology suggest that diversity = survival and complexity = life. The ecology of environmental design put forth in Diversity and Design shows us diversity also = creativity. For design to make a difference in the things that make a difference solutions must be creative, alive, and complex, recalling Niels Bohr’s concept of complimentarity where the richness of shared experience that comes from such solutions can only be achieved through multiple, overlapping, and at times mutually exclusive points of view." - Bruce Lindsey, AIA, Dean, E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration, USA