Designing for Who, Part 2: An Interview with Minnie Moll

Good design includes everyone. VAGUE Resident Daisy sits down with Design Council CEO Minnie Moll to explore why disability and inclusivity must move from afterthought to foundation, and what it will take for the industry to finally build a world that works for everyone.

After wandering through the Design and Disability exhibition at the V&A, I knew there was one woman I needed to speak to about the designed world that we all inhabit, how it can aid us and how it can create barriers for us. That woman is Minnie Moll, the CEO of the UK Design Council - who also happens to be my mum. 

Sitting down with her over a cup of tea we spoke about the exhibition, about her role at the Design Council, about each of our own personal experiences with inaccessible design and about the huge, messy overlap between design, the planet and people - a space where good design can flourish when we ask the right questions.

A basic question to begin with - what is the Design Council, and who are you? 

The UK Design Council exists to champion design, and the use of design to make life better, in the UK. From architecture to fashion, from digital design to product design.

I'm the chief executive of The Design Council, I've been there for four and a half years.

Can you share a little about your career background before this position?

I'm not a designer, but I am a passionate advocate for design and champion of design. My degree was in art and drama. I spent the first part of my working life in advertising - commercial creativity I always think of it - and then went much into brands and marketing, and then into innovation, which, you know, really starts to intersect with design. 

I became a leader in retail businesses and one of the things I loved doing most was when I was commissioning designers; to design the garden center of the future, to design packaging, and actually relevant to this, when I was at the East of England Co-op as the joint chief executive, we set out to become a really dementia-friendly retailer. 

That involved design because we had to ask: how could we adapt the design of our stores so that they far better served people living with dementia?

“I became a leader in retail businesses and one of the things I loved doing most was when I was commissioning designers...”

Out of interest, what were some of the ways that you were able to make stores more accessible for people with dementia? 

So we were setting out to be really dementia friendly and this is a really interesting insight of when an organization really works well. The East of England Co-op exists across East Anglia; Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, so many of their little supermarkets are in really remote villages and very small towns. Feedback was coming back from our colleagues in those stores that they had quite a lot of elderly customers who they knew had dementia. 

That meant that sometimes they came into the stores, they could sometimes be disorientated, confused, flustered, would need help paying, would sometimes struggle finding the things they wanted. 

Good design is user centered, it really focuses on the users and how to make the product or service as joyful as possible. So, it was then that we set about talking to Alzheimer's Society and other organisations to get their expertise.

We also carried out a whole load of our own experiments. 

I actually was one of the guinea pigs, they put things on my wrists, my elbows, my knees, my neck. I had to wear a weighted down suit that kind of doubled me over. I also wore ear defenders so I couldn't hear properly, and glasses that impaired my vision. 

So I just generally felt really disoriented, then they gave me a shopping list and a basket and set me outside the store so I could actually go in and experience what it was like. Now that can't ever be an absolute proxy for having dementia. But it was a way to try to give me an actual experience of what it could be like shopping in the store. 

We did that with some of our managers too, a couple of them were really moved by it. Then we began to make changes.

And what did it then look like? It meant that certain things that we knew were the kind of things that older shoppers often bought regularly were put on lower shelves to be able to reach them.

Also not having things so tightly packed into the shelf, so that you're not having to shove your fingers in to try and get them out. So better spacing on the shelving. 

A black mat on the floor, by the doorway, to someone living with dementia may well look like a hole because it impairs your vision - so not using black for any of the mats. 

Signage, much stronger, bigger, clearer signage.., here's the thing about inclusive design, better, clearer signage is better for everyone. 

Then there were a lot of things to do with the staff and how to help customers with their payments, and things like that.

That's so interesting as you might think you know about dementia, but you'd never consider those things. And yet so many of them are so simple, and as you say, better for everyone. Has being part of the Design Council changed the way you think about design?

It totally has. 

The first thing, of course, I would say, wouldn't I, but design is so powerful. 

It literally shapes the world that we live in. If Mother Nature didn't create it, someone designed it, well or badly. And, you know, sadly there is a lot of bad design still in the world. There's also phenomenal design. 

But one of my other observations about design, and why the Design Council exists, is that we need to keep drumming, drumming, drumming away with government, with business, with consumers, about the importance of design because it's very easy to take it for granted. 

I think what happens is people notice bad design because something doesn't work, and it really irritates us, or it's really ugly, and then we notice when design is brilliant because it's wonderful. It's either joyful, or beautiful, or just works incredibly intuitively, and it makes our life better. So we notice both ends, but I think a lot of the stuff in the middle, which is good design, it's sort of frictionless and so we don't really notice it. So I think it's very easy for people to forget that every single thing from the moment we wake up, our slippers, our bed, our kettle, our house, the transport we use, the building we work in, every single thing's been designed.

So the Design Council has really, of course, heightened my sense of just how important it is, and how powerful therefore because it shapes the world we live in. So consequently making sure that the design sector is a good reflection of our culture and diversity. 

“[Design] literally shapes the world that we live in. If Mother Nature didn’t create it, someone designed it, well or badly. ”

I’d love to hear a bit more about that, does the Design Council actively seek to improve that part of the design world? 

Yes, about six months after I joined, we launched our new mission - the Design for Planet. The climate and nature crisis is the biggest crisis of our lives, it is absolutely urgent and design has got such a critical role to play in designing the products and services and systems that not only help us have a sustainable future, but designing a more regenerative future. Designers have a critical role to play there. 

We know that 80% of the environmental impact of any new product is determined at the design stage. So the choices a designer makes around materials, designing with nature rather than against it, circularity, and the entire lifecycle of a product all happen right there.

It’s a huge responsibility for the designer. Which is why as part of our Design for Planet mission one of the biggest, most important things we're doing is we've set a really bold ambition to upskill one million designers in green design schools by 2030 so they have the skills to be able to make the right decisions.

That’s an amazing goal. Do you have any insight into how design schools currently address the environment in their curriculums at the moment? How are you getting in there at that stage? 

Well it starts with the question: who are the one million that we're gonna upskill? 

We see it in three groups. One is, critically, improving and increasing the number of people that are taking design and technology GCSE and making sure green design is built into that curriculum at GCSE level. 

The next is making sure Design for Planet and Skills for Planet are built into further education. We know from people finishing their degrees that they still don't really feel that equipped. 

The last, but not least, cohort that we need to upskill, probably the biggest, is jobbing designers. And that's super hard because many of them are in small design companies, many of them are freelancers. We know that they're working really hard just to pay the rent. So however much they want to make the right decisions, it's really hard to have any hours left at the end of the day to keep up to speed with materials you should use and so on. So we're working through, with businesses, how to best support those people. 

GIF source: Fox Searchlight Pictures

I've been looking into the BCorp process recently, and it really seems set up for bigger companies with control over their supply chain, for a small business, just finding the time to fill out the paperwork is a stretch. And for SMEs, investing in more sustainable practices usually means a significant upfront cost, even if it pays off long term.

The thing that I hope will happen is that the blueprint we’ve put together was the hard work - actually distilling everything. So that when you have it, it’s something you can look at and take as guidance, so it isn’t taking loads more time. 

Because actually a lot of this, making any kind of big changes it’s about building changes into process - fundamentally about embedding the right questions in at briefing stage. A lot of the time if you aren’t given the checklist or it isn’t in the brief, then it isn’t thought about. 

I love that we detoured to Design for Planet. It's an amazing initiative, and this idea of how hard it is to initiate better practices applies to making design more accessible too, or at least people seem to think it does. Do you think there's overlap between sustainable design and inclusive design?

Yes, very definitely. The Design Council arguably, throughout its 80 years, has partially existed to champion good design and to encourage, foster, and celebrate good design. I think that Design for Planet and Design for Inclusivity are good designs. So to some extent, one of the things where there should be overlap is that the work will be done when everyone just knows that good design does both of those things. 

The other big overlap is about the mindset, when we're talking to people about inclusive design, before you start designing the thing, you really spend time in the first part of the double diamond, which is discovery, which is where you're thinking about who is this for? How can we make it really joyful and amazing for them? If you're being as broad, inclusive and expansive as you can, then you have to be thinking, well, it's also for the environment, it's for the climate, it's for nature, it's for Mother Nature, it's for the birds and the bees. So in a way it's part of... it's an extension of inclusive design. 

And a big interesting question that has come up fairly recently in design... is that for years we've been talking about people-centered design, and actually I passionately believe we've got to move away from people-centered design, because people-centered design implies that people are at the top of the hierarchy above animals and plants and insects, and we're not. We are part of nature so I think we've actually got to start talking about planet-centered design or nature-centered design,  to smash this kind of hierarchy that we tend to think of. 

It brings some interesting complexity with it, but I think they're on a kind of continuum. 

“The Design Council arguably, throughout its 80 years, has partially existed to champion good design and to encourage, foster, and celebrate good design. ”

Oh, that's so nice, the planet on the top of the pyramid.

Well, actually a lot of the people who are just really brilliant talking about this at the moment are saying it's a circle, it shouldn’t even be a pyramid which always suggests hierarchy. 

Couldn’t agree more, I love that. I've recently seen a lot of people talking about how we all prioritise convenience over things being a little bit more inconvenient but building community and supporting each other in exchange. And I really see that this people-centric drive for convenience and speed over everything actually creates a lot of division and problems. 

That's a really interesting example, if you sort of look over the last 20 to 30 years, some of the things that have got us in this dire state have been these kinds of businesses. Looking for competitive advantage. Let’s do this even faster.  Let’s make this even quicker. 

Thinking about the way you can order something and have it delivered to you the next day. The escalation is absurd and we haven’t ever stopped to think about the implications, we aren’t very good at asking ourselves ‘at what cost?’ past the financial.

When I was at uni I did my FMP about AI, and I remember discussing with my tutor how every new technology gets touted as the solution to everything but historically, every invention also creates a new accident: cars brought car crashes, electricity brought electric shocks, the internet created anonymity and cyberbullying. Even AI, which we know is so bad in terms of environment and IP, but also it's supposedly helping us get more done and work faster. We've just raised the bar on productivity rather than actually reducing our workload. And regulation never keeps pace with any of it.

Again, this goes back to the designer. I think we’re at a moment of reckoning, for designers that not very many years ago they could design then go "My job's done. I've designed that. There you go." But really designers are having to take responsibility for what happens to that product when you've finished with it. Where does it go?

This notion of throwing away, there is no ‘away.’ 

I think a lot of the supposed innovations and improvements, like getting things faster, that's actually part of strategists, innovators and marketing people’s work too, they’re thinking  "Yay, isn't that brilliant? That's a competitive advantage. Woo, tell everyone." And actually it's not written into their job spec to think about what the issues are with pushing for that advantage. 

Let’s not even go down the AI rabbit hole - that can be another conversation. 

Let’s not even go there.

Big question: what could designers or users thinking about to make their designs more inclusive? I asked this to a fashion designer once and he said "I don't know how to answer this 'cause every disabled person has different needs." And it’s true, there is no quick answer - maybe rushing for a quick ‘fix all’ is a problem in and of itself. 

There isn’t a quick answer. 

So firstly, I think, to answer the question properly you have to unpack what we mean by inclusivity. And inclusivity really means everyone.

I think that a designer, when they're setting out on a design project, they do need to just properly stop and think. Again, it's all that part of discovery. Don't even pick your pen up or your pad. 

Really think, who is everyone involved  n this? And that can't be absolutely everyone on every single thing, but you need to at least think about everyone then make your choices.  With disabilities - is it a physical disability, is it an invisible disability? There is also just general age, where you don't have any particular actual disability but you are 80 and you don't get around as fast. 

I think it's really good to think about inclusivity as more than just disability. One of my examples of that is I wasn't disabled when I was the new mother of two small twins. But boy did I struggle pushing a double buggy round a lot of places. 

I wasn't disabled, I was a mother of two small children. But that, to me, is an example of inclusivity. So I think it's quite good to have quite a broad sense of what we mean by inclusivity. I would even go back to, are we being gender-inclusive from the outset as well? Can I give you a couple of examples of that?

Please do - I recently found out toothpaste is formulated for the pH balance of men's mouths, which means women get more cavities. Are your examples going to make me angry?

Well, some should make you angry, for example the fact that crash test dummies for decades have been based on the male torso. Which without question would have had an impact on the number of women seriously injured in car crashes because of how the seatbelt works. 

But a comical example from a few years ago a trip to space was very exciting because they’d got two women going. They were doing a load of, "Woo, woo, we're putting women in space and doing the space thing." 

They'd only got one womens space suit. And all the rest were designed for men, and so only one of the women could go. 

Another one I notice, when no woman has been involved in the designing of a hotel room, and putting the fixtures in. I'm not that tall, so if I look in the mirror and literally only see the very top of my head, or the nearest plug to the mirror is so far that actually you can't use the hairdryer and be in front of the mirror. That's a much more cosmetic thing, but there are all kinds of examples. 

For years, lots of public realm spaces from pubs to museums, the women's loo; really, really far away and never enough of them. 

Never enough. 

Because women do take longer going to the loo for different reasons. They're sometimes taking a child - there's all kinds of reasons. But that’s never factored into the design.

But I digress, I digress. So I think first of all though is really thinking about inclusivity in a really quite broad sense. You can't do user research for every single thing you design. But you can absolutely think about, depending what it is, maybe there's a particular couple of user groups it would be really smart to, to include. For designers to also spend time going to exhibitions like the Design & Disability one on at the V&A, going to online forums and just generally listening to the challenges and issues presented to people with disabilities. 

“I think it’s really good to think about inclusivity as more than just disability.”

I find that the only people who actually listen to what I need, remember to check in, or make the adaptations I ask for are people who are disabled themselves or have a disabled family member or friend. That closeness to the experience really matters. But in defence of others, it's not always their fault. If you're not exposed to it, you might be completely oblivious, and disabled people are so excluded from adverts, film and TV that there's very little representation or public conversation to bridge that gap.

There's a saying I find myself repeating a lot: the disabled community is the only minority that anyone can join at any time, and most of us probably will, if we're lucky enough to grow old. When people don't seem to care, I remind them they could become disabled tomorrow.

I think that’s so wise. I think .. listen, it's not being critical 'cause everyone's got stuff going on in their lives. We're leading our lives at such a pace and there's, sort of, barely space to think about anything that doesn’t immediately impact us. So it's not about criticizing those people, but I think what you say is true. And I do think that if you don't have someone in your family or something close, the time when it does start hitting everyone is when their parents get elderly.

That's when they then become quite indignant because they then realize, ... "Oh, I took my mother out yesterday and it was really hard to get in anywhere," and so on and so on. So we get angry middle-aged people because they're actually starting to experience it. 

Taking us back to what I was saying about the East of England Co-op, that’s why it's so powerful to try and make something experiential for someone, when you learn something through experience, you don't forget it. There’s a number of things I think designers could do to experience things outside of their day to day walk of life, and incorporate that broader experience into their work. 

Now, I know you have references up your sleeve. Tell me some people who are putting inclusivity first. 

Okay! Somebody who I had the privilege of meeting, Richard Seymour, he's just a god in Seymour Powell, I really respect him, he has got the brain the size of a planet. I know personally that he does have a son with a disability. He's always been someone who's been very opinionated years ago talking about inclusive designs. And he was talking about simple things like taps for older people with arthritis, or cutlery, tin openers, you name it.

Another is Patti Moore, who I think is the goddess of inclusive design. She was particularly interested in how people just don't design for older people. And she had a makeup artist friend and she dressed up as an old person, full makeup and everything, and she went and did this as an experiment in different cities around America. What happens if you go and walk around the city as an old person? How people behave to you, what it's like to go into places and so on. And she had all kinds of weird, difficult experiences, as well as good. In one city, a group of young lads beat her up and kicked her so badly in the stomach that she was left unable to have children.

What? That’s crazy, and so sad. 

The most shocking story. 

It makes such a good point though, we all forget about elderly people, and forget we will be them one day. 

I made a big point at, at the World Sewing Congress about this, 'cause people go on and on about diversity and so often it, it ends up being just all about color and people are ticking boxed about how many Black or Brown faces they have. It feels like a tick box rather than a genuine desire for inclusivity, and in focusing on one element we're completely forgetting age diversity.

Agree. Totally agree, in fashion we’re so bad for tokenizing people of different ethnicities and using them as the faces we represent to look good, then ignoring everyone else in terms of different ages, different sizes, different disabilities. It’s really frustrating from a human perspective. But also trying to look at it from a business perspective - it still doesn’t make sense! The spending power of the purple pound is significant, like these are groups that businesses could make successful sales to if they bothered to try.

Through your work at the Design Council, have you come across examples of design that actively excludes or disables people and on the flip side, design that's done well and really opens the world up?

Actually I can start you off with my own example. You were hosting a panel talk, and one of your guests told a story about being temporarily in a wheelchair due to injury. They went to an exhibition and upon entering realised they literally couldn’t see on top of the podiums to see any of the works! 

I can share an example of amazing design, at this intersection of inclusivity and sustainability actually.  When I went to COP in Glasgow there was a really interesting film and it was actually talking about climate justice. So of course all the fundamentals, you know, the northern hemisphere created the mess and the south hemisphere suffer. 

Which is why anyone in the UK who thinks that we're only a tiny impact and can’t be bothered about it needs to remember the industrial revolution, and show leadership in repairing that space. 

The film was showing lots of flooded areas in the southern hemisphere, and if you're in a community with dreadful flooding, or any other extreme weather, guess what? You are in far more danger and you are far more vulnerable if you have a disability.

Everyone else is trying to swim, some people are trying to jump into little dinghies. If you're in a wheelchair or you've got significant disability, the chances of you dying are so much higher than the chances of there being anyone who's going to be able to to help you. Exactly the same if you think about all the fires going on. 

That is a really scary correlation, one I’ve never thought about before. With the barriers that prevent more inclusive design, we’ve touched on capacity, time, money. How do you think we combat those? 

I think it's about the questions we ask. I think that various people are not asking the question, "What, what would we have to do to make this accessible for someone in a wheelchair?" Would it have to make it more expensive? Possibly not. 

To take your example - make the plinth lower. A lower plinth would actually be cheaper, and a tall person can bend down or look down. 

‘How might we..?’ is an important design question. I think step one is having an inclusive mindset, step two is ‘how might we’ and third is questioning the brief - or not questioning it but just coming back with solutions. 

So imagine I’m designing a kettle. I can take it upon myself to add a really easy on off switch and add a really legible measurement. That’s not more expensive it’s just good design, it’s another example of more inclusive design actually being better for everyone. 

“It feels like a tick box rather than a genuine desire for inclusivity, and in focusing on one element we’re completely forgetting age diversity.”

Leave us on a high. 

Well, something that just happened, but we’re very excited about recently hosting the World Design Congress here in the UK at the Barbican, for the first time in over 50 years. That was a big moment to just really get the design community together, very much focused around Design for Planet which is our key focus for the immediate future, because it is urgent. 

One other thing I would push for those who haven't ever come across The Double Diamond to explore it, it is the design framework that is most embedded in design education around the whole world, created by The Design Council. And another immediate goal is sharing this and encouraging its use, it is so beautifully and brutally simple. It is this notion of expansive and then deductive thinking, and there's these two diamonds standing on their heads to guide you through it.

I think that all parts of the process are important but I think the discovery first phase is where the real secret lies. Because human beings, we're all tempted to take the brief, whatever the brief is, and jump into solutions. The discovery phase is all about not doing that. It's about thinking about, "How can we make this inclusive? Before we get going, how can we make this inclusive? How can we co-design with nature? How might we make this amazing? How might we make this, um, truly joyful for people?" 

We tend to race ahead and not give ourselves the time to stay in the discovery phase. So I think that is something I feel incredibly strongly about. And that is where designers have this incredible ability to reframe the brief. 

Let me finish with one of my favorite stories recently of how design reframes the brief. A story I heard about a part of Africa where there was a real issue with the mortality rate of newborn babies. And there were a lot of premature babies being born, and then a lot of those babies were dying because there were not enough incubators to keep the babies alive. So the brief was created for a team, including designers, to design a much more affordable incubator so they could save more lives.

What the designers did was reframe the brief and really think about, "What is it we're actually trying to do?" The brief is not really to design a cheaper incubator, the brief is how do you keep premature babies alive affordably? And so when they reframed the brief in that way, what they actually did was they designed a little heated sleeping bag at a fraction of the cost of the incubators. 

To me, that's one of the beautiful things that really describes what designers do or why design is so important and so powerful. So actually when people are designing anything, staying in that discovery stage and asking that all important question "How might we…”

credits

words — daisy riley

design — gloria ukoh