In the past few years, we’ve seen several documents released that address inclusive design. First there was the British Council for Offices “Designing for Neurodiversity” in 2022. Followed by the British Standards Institution published PAS_6463 (“Design for the mind – Neurodiversity and the built environment – Guide”). Most recently, RIBA published their Inclusive Design Overlay which presents best practice in implementing inclusive design into the RIBA Plan of Work.
Good design is inclusive design and inclusive design is good design. For everyone.
The inclusive design process
Any design process starts with a brief and let’s not over-complicate matters, a rubbish brief will tend to result in a workplace design that neither client nor designer are truly happy with. A good designer can salvage an okay brief, but to allow a designer to fully capture the vision and ambition of the client, there needs to be a robust brief and a thorough understanding of who the end-user is.
In one of our recent projects with The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for their Penguin Café at Edinburgh Zoo, we received a good initial brief from the client, and through engagement with their project team, ironed out any grey areas. Good design in this respect resulted from understanding movement patterns of all users both public and staff, thinking of the activities taking place within the space, as well as considering the importance of signage and communication.
How much movement is there in a workplace? Probably not as much as there should be if we’re being honest. The space per person rush to the bottom has been reversed and we’ve tried to create spaces where there is more room to breathe, more room to manoeuvre. In a café environment, accessibility takes on a whole new imperative. Buggies and wheelchairs are very much part and parcel of daily visitor activities at the zoo, and the café’s design needs to ensure there is room to adapt dining layouts to suit the inclusion of a buggy or wheelchair, in addition to parking spaces and creating appropriate turning circles.
How do you achieve inclusive design?
Acoustic treatments in offices often fall into the nice-to-have category. But a café that is too noisy won’t encourage repeat business. That’s why we paid even greater attention to flooring, soft furnishings and ceiling rafts at the zoo. Creating just the right amount of ambience needs to take into account that there will be busier and quieter periods during the day. This inclusive design consideration is particularly necessary in a space like the Penguin Café, where users can move tables and chairs to suit their group size, point out the windows and express excitement at the surrounding enclosures, chat about their food offer. Basically, it can be a very noisy place depending on the time of day.
For obvious reasons, simplicity amongst complex systems is a necessity. Within a busy café environment, simplicity in signage allows for ease of reading in an environment where more senses are being engaged compared to a typical workplace. Creating truly inclusive signage involved working in partnership with the zoo’s internal engagement team and external graphic designers. The objective was to engage with the user through two senses (minimum), such as written text and graphics. Here, simplicity translated to mean simple, plain English in short sentences, and simple graphical cues; having a legible font seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number of instances where someone has designed a sign because it looks good and hasn’t even considered as to how legible it is. The last thing you want is a queue outside toilets, not because there aren’t enough, but because people can’t work out whether the overly fussy icon depicts a man, a woman, gender neutral or is in fact denoting the cleaners’ cupboard. And on the subject of toilets, a high contrast in the toilet seats against the floor finish was required to aid the visually impaired. Simple measures, maximum impact.
So, what is inclusive design?
Inclusive design need not mean boring, safe design. It should mean good design, interrogating the brief, analysing the users, and proposing the solutions, and there is no reason that inclusive design can’t be stylish. Form follows function; it doesn’t need to overpower it.
The Penguin Café was our first in a series of three projects for the RZSS. Our partnership was a success, thanks to our inclusive design, and we were appointed to redesign the Mansion Bar and The Grasslands Cafe, where we applied all of our learning from our initial project with the zoo.
