In order to reach net zero emissions by the mid-century and achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, society needs radical new models, mindsets and practices. We need to make wise economic, social and political choices today, so that digital innovations work in the service of us all, tomorrow. And, we must do so at speed.
With this in mind, I have been speaking with leading figures who work at the intersection of people, place and sustainability, to share their ideas about what can be done to achieve sustainable urban futures.
Christine Hemphill is the founder of Open Inclusion, a disability and age inclusive research, design and innovation consultancy. Alongside this, Christine is the co-chair of the Market Research Society’s disability-inclusive research group, Unlimited, and teaches disability inclusive research practices at the Institute of People-Centred AI to doctoral students at the University of Surrey.
Prior to research, Christine’s career spanned consulting, banking and professional sport, where she competed as an elite triathlete.
In this interview, Christine discusses her journey into disability-inclusive design, how to minimise risk when innovating, and the powerful role of research in creating more inclusive futures.
From your experience in banking and as a professional triathlete, what led you into the accessibility sector, to start Open Inclusion?
My career has spanned many different environments – mining, consulting, banking, professional sport, and now research – but most of them have been connected in one way: understanding and solving problems through the perspectives of customers. Whether improving efficiency or delivering better experiences, my focus has always been creating customer or organisational value through informed problem-solving.
My journey into disability-inclusive research came from a mix of personal and professional insight. Between 2002 and 2010, my sister and I had several children, some with lived experiences of disability. That personal connection, combined with my background in design and innovation, made me increasingly aware of how the world doesn’t work well for everyone.
Professionally, I was working in a digital design agency which prioritised accessibility. At the time, digital experiences were seen as either beautiful or accessible, but there were very few examples of beautifully accessible. That felt like an unnecessary contradiction; it was a lack of creativity, competence and practices not capability and potential that underpinned it. We challenged that by engaging directly with people with disabilities to understand what great design meant for them, which, along with improving the skills of the design team, led to better, more inclusive and more creative outcomes.
Once you’ve seen how powerful disability-informed design can be, it’s hard to unsee it. That gap inspired me to found Open over a decade ago – to make it easier for the people who wish to design, deliver and manage better products, services and environments to more easily connect with and understand the experiences of people with under heard and under considered needs, particularly those related to disability and older age.
How has Open’s mission changed from when it started to where you are now – or has it remained the same? Has the environment in which Open is operating changed?
Our mission is very central and stable: Open exists to bring the perspectives of a disabled and older individuals to inform better design and more useful innovation. The way in which we do that, however, has changed profoundly over that time.
Before Covid, we were already leaning into using online research methods, adapting them to make it easier for disabled and less digitally confident participants to engage in research remotely, particularly because travel and physical access are often major barriers for people with disabilities. Public transport networks aren’t consistently accessible and asking people to come to a research facility can add friction and take energy, so remote methods made participation easier and more inclusive of a wider pool.
Since Covid, online research methods have become far more widespread. Tools have improved dramatically and expectations around digital engagement have shifted. That’s made inclusive research even easier and allowed us to develop a North American community and research capability.
A decade ago, there was little demand for disability-inclusive research; few brands recognised how their traditional research practices excluded people – whether by limiting who gets asked, how they’re asked, or who interprets the responses. Too often, disabled participants’ insights were filtered through non-disabled researchers, losing vital meaning along the way.
Today, there’s greater awareness that disabled people represent an underserved but valuable market. Organisations like the Market Research Society and its EDI Council are actively addressing how the research sector can evolve to better represent all of the market, not just a consistently distorted subset. While there’s still a long way to go, progress is real. Our clients tend to be ambitious, innovative organisations that understand how inclusive insight leads to better decisions, services and design, and as a result, greater organisational value.
Photo: Tricia Nolan
Open Inclusion seeks to bring together ‘creative renegades’ – what does this mean in the area of accessible and inclusive research and design?
Creative renegade is a term I coined to describe the people I’m most drawn to. It describes those who understand and are frustrated with the level of exclusion and limitations of today. That’s the renegade: there is grittiness and friction within their lives or they see it close at hand so that they deeply understand the need for change and they genuinely desire it.
The creative part is how they do it – always looking for better options. They remain optimistic that we can proactively catalyse and effect change together. Rather than getting frustrated or angry, creative renegades use their energy productively and creatively to generate progress. They understand the value of progress over perfection to maintain strong positive momentum and reduce fear. Our team including the board of advisors, many clients, collaborative partners and of course our community are full of creative renegades!
Our insight community of over 3,000 people – about half based in the UK and the other half in North America – turn up to complete research with positive intent and integrity, sharing their perspectives and in doing so helping us help our clients make environments, experiences, products and services that are better. Although they are paid for their time, most are also strongly motivated by the inclusive change they can help engender.
Can you describe how Open Inclusion works with disability communities?
The Open insight community is the heart of everything we do. All our work is grounded in the insights this community shares. The original community was set up in 1998 by Mary-Anne Rankin, who built a vibrant pan-disability community motivated by her family’s experience. Mary-Anne and her community joined Open in 2015, and although she has since retired, her legacy lives on strongly.
We work hard to make sure the community experience is welcoming, rewarding and genuinely valuable – not just transactional. We prioritise fair incentives, ease of participation, co-design and transparent feedback so contributors feel respected, heard, understood and appreciated.
Importantly, the community isn’t just a source of insight, it’s a space for peer learning. Members share creative adaptations and solutions with each other, building a supportive, innovative ecosystem.
We also embed lived experience into the research process. Our 15 Community Leads collaborate with the research team to ensure questions are meaningful, methods accessible, and interpretations not misconstrued along the way. They enrich our work with differing personal experiences of disability that between them cover mobility, dexterity, long-term health, mental health, neurodivergence, ageing, sight or hearing related needs – both in the UK and North America.
What dangers are there in designing innovations – in digital and built environments – without diverse user input, and accessibility consultation?
To design for people, you have to recognise and design to include the beautiful natural spectrum of human differences including how we move, sense, think or communicate, across any community. If we design without engaging with the breadth of people who use a place, space or service, we will fail many. Our past practices have not served the whole community well or equitably.
Historically, design has been shaped by narrow demographics and norms that often exclude many outside the dominant group. Limited research reinforces this and limits design. When terms like “hard to reach communities” are used, they reveal who’s being centered and who’s not as they put the responsibility of being ‘easier to reach’ on the community themselves, rather than recognising the role of cultural and practice based limitations of the sector.
There are so many accepted norms in design, but everything that led us here is quite distorted. Our environments, tools and technologies have been built on gendered, racist, ableist and socio-economic biases. The wonderful thing, as an innovator, is once you realise the situation, there is this enormous opportunity to see differently and create differently. There is substantial competitive advantage because few organisations are looking at the world in a more inclusive way.
When we look at the world around us, a huge amount of breakthroughs happened on the back of understanding and meeting disability-informed needs; touchscreens, wheeled luggage, electric toothbrushes and even the keyboard. Now, new formats of technology are providing opportunities to solve unmet needs that have been underlooked in the past. This is how innovation happens.
Photo: Elizabeth Woolner
How can design for urban futures and innovation be made more inclusive?
There is so much opportunity to design more suitable and adaptable urban spaces that work well for the diversity of humans living, working, moving through and enjoying them.
First, we need to understand what access barriers are stopping people being able to use different urban environments. It could be something as simple as curb cuts in the wrong place, crossings that rely on a single sense, or wayfinding that people can’t perceive or understand. It could be picnic tables in a park that don’t make space for someone who wants to roll into that table rather than sit on the seat. It’s creating space, in that case quite literally, for differences.
It’s also about bringing more delight into people’s lives. Disney, for instance, has designed its theme parks with sensory experiences very consciously woven in, which means when people return they reconnect with scents and sounds of their childhood.
That’s designing for delight; thinking about things in a more nuanced way. Firstly, how do we not fail people? Secondly, how do we craft and create joyful environments? How do we create urban environments that enable healthier, more equitable and connected urban communities? We need that now more than we’ve ever needed it.
Innovation and/or work-arounds are routine for many people who have additional access needs – every day there are challenges to overcome. Have you found that working with the Open Community supports innovation beyond merely accessibility feedback?
Absolutely. There are so many ways that the built environment can be made better.
We’ve recently been researching and supporting training for a quiet hours pilot for Sephora, a beauty retailer. While quiet hours were initially considered to be helpful for neurodivergent individuals, especially autistic people, when we did research with our community, we found that many benefitted from reduced sensory load, including those with chronic health conditions, sight loss, severe allergies (confidence that they won’t be touched by someone with product on their hands) and more. Small changes can have a significant impact on shopping experience. Colleagues benefit from the experience too, because it’s a couple of hours of the day that are a little less intense than the rest. That’s what we call the long-tail benefit of inclusive design. Although you might design initially thinking about one community, there are many others who benefit from the changes made that were anchored in that experience.
Much emphasis around innovation is at the ‘exciting’ instigation phase – is more attention needed for monitoring outcomes, and taking responsibility for negative outcomes?
Starting with intent is important, but at the end of the day you need to know how people’s experiences are impacted by the solution and how? If you haven’t continued to work with a broader community throughout the design, development and delivery phases, you don’t know if your intent was delivered to that intent or not.
AI is an example of an area where we’re under-considering this last stage in the innovation cycle. The process typically starts with intent: “Could AI solve this problem?” Then you assess data – what’s available, how accurate and useful it is, and is it representative of the community the AI will serve? I think people often forget to ask that last question. Yes, you need to be able to create the solution, build the algorithm and sell it, but people are forgetting who’s monitoring the impact of that, particularly the differential impacts.
There’s a lot of risk; in fact, not just risk but the current reality of failures of AI enabled solutions. I’m not anti-AI, I’m anti-inequitable AI. We need to be monitoring and managing it, looking at different characteristics of humans and seeing when outcomes of this tool are not what we planned, and don’t match the intent, let alone how it was marketed and sold.
How can consequence scanning support inclusive design?
Consequence scanning is a hugely important practice. In essence it is looking forward and asking how we might harm or enable people with various solutions or interventions we are considering. What unintentional consequences may it trigger?
In the urban environment, if you don’t enable people to safely stay on a pedestrian footpath and can’t know if they’re going to accidentally wander onto roads – as can happen when we start to lose the distinction between pedestrian footpaths and roads in mixed urban environments. The consequence is we’re putting people’s lives at risk, particularly those of people who are blind or low vision, or people looking down at their phones rather than up at the street.
Consequence scanning should improve and shape rather than stop innovation. It’s about asking: if we’re going to do this, have we considered possible consequences through a range of perspectives, what can we do to minimise any negative consequences and who might incur those consequences? The only way we can know this is by engaging across the communities that could be impacted, who between them have the inclusive intelligence that exceeds anything a single person can know, designer or not.
Getting an expanded range of voices with lived-experience involved at the early stages and throughout a project is highly beneficial, but also has resource implications. When innovation budgets are squeezed, how does Open Inclusion make the case for involvement?
One in four people in the UK has a disability, yet this segment remains largely overlooked by the creative industry compared with other segments of society, like Millennials and Gen Z.
At the same time disability rates are rising – especially alongside a growing population of older individuals, who also happen to be the wealthiest demographic. Unlike the “Silent Generation”, born between the wars, Baby Boomers born after WW2 expect very high levels of service and will not settle for subpar products or environments. It takes time, care and yes money to create things that are desirable to segments and create great products, but this is a huge commercial opportunity.
Additionally, traditional insight methods often centre on the minority not the majority of the population when they exclude historically marginalised voices. Interestingly the mainstream of focus (once you combine the characteristics of majoritised gender, age, race and ability) make up well less than half the total community. So if you are designing for the “majority” you may find that you are designing for a very limited subset of the overall community.
Given we are built on an environment with a history of exclusion, without proactive intent we will exclude diverse perspectives. This isn’t valuable to anyone, least of all an organisation trying to create something for a commercial market, or a government trying to put out services for its population.
There is a real enthusiasm for data-driven decision making in the public sector, increasingly calling upon quantitative data. From your professional sports, research and accessibility roles, have you seen parallels between bias in limited, under-representative datasets?
As an older female professional triathlete, I quickly realised most sports science data focused on younger male athletes. Standard research, coaching advice and performance benchmarks were irrelevant to my body. To progress, I had to track and analyse my own numbers – heart rate, power, speed, time, perceived effort and performance – and learn from others like me. Numbers became essential to optimising my performance.
The same applies to organisations and governments, who also want high performance. They depend on good data and research, by nature, carries some degree of distortion. Like pointillist paintings (check out Pissaro if you are not sure about this), each data point adds to the others gathered to provide a sense of the picture. The sense is not the full reality. We may see the parts we’ve measured well, but blind spots remain where our data is thin or missing.
Understanding those gaps is critical. If you’re trying to improve outcomes, whether in sport, business or public services, you need to ask which humans are represented in the data and which groups aren’t? Human-centered design often forgets to ask “which” humans are at the centre of the design. Humans are remarkably heterogeneous, shaped by intersecting identities like age, gender, race, disability. Equally within any single characteristic, such as disability or even specific disability type such as limited dexterity, people remain remarkably diverse, not simply defined by that single shared characteristic.
To truly optimise commercial or societal value, we need to connect data to differences, barriers and characteristics. Only then can we see meaningful patterns and identify the best next point of intervention. Right now, our data is skewed and lacks depth across diverse populations, which makes it hard to direct resources wisely or measure true impact.
Realising the opportunity requires deeper understanding, better data practices and a more inclusive lens on performance and design.
Is there any latest work at Open Inclusion you’d like to share as examples?
We’ve recently worked on a few exciting projects that highlight the value of inclusion through creativity and innovation. One is the new Curry’s ad, The Sigh of Relief, which won Channel 4’s Diversity in Advertising Award. The ad centers around interactions between disabled customers and colleagues in-store, but unlike many disability-focused ads that lean toward a moralistic heavy tone, super hero or pity tropes and narratives, this one embraced Curry’s signature humor and fantastical style.
It was created with disabled co-creators from start to finish, ensuring authenticity and depth. It is proof that inclusive storytelling doesn’t require a singular narrative style but is adaptable to the full breadth of good creativity.
We’ve also been working on helping our clients better understand and improve customer experiences in the built environment, specifically in bank branches. These are vital for people excluded from digital services or where in person support can be specifically helpful. Given visits often involve sensitive financial matters, designing branches that consider sensory needs, physical and digital accessibility and layout is essential to reduce stress, enable safe and confident in-branch banking activities and engender trust.
Another key project is a research we have been working on for the Royal Society exploring the experiences of disabled STEM academics in higher educational institutions across the UK. Representation matters; when disabled students see people like themselves working and teaching at the heights of science, tech, engineering and maths, it fuels aspiration. More importantly, bringing diverse lived experiences into STEM enriches innovation and leads to breakthrough thinking, which can shape a stronger, more inclusive future for the UK’s scientific and technological advancement.
Thank you Christine for sharing your inspiration, experience and insights!
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