The Origins of A Very Serious Mission

Some of the most iconic strategic design outcomes aren't blue sky thinking – they begin as the most heavily constrained. In the field of Architecture there’s a theoretical design approach known as Universal Design (UD) which recognizes that when operating within heavily constrained bounds, designers can — perhaps unexpectedly — find the freedom to manifest utility in its purest and simplest forms, often born of the most imaginative anti-establishment thinking.

We’ve all experienced Universal Design time and again and seen it work for the greater good – curb cuts, escalators, stabilizing and grippy kitchen utensils, the iPhone, and laws stipulating accessibility of digital utilities like government services, banking, and healthcare – but what about other things many of us consider “utilities”?

Couldn’t e-mail, grocery shopping, audio and video education platforms, and calendar apps be considered utilities, too? In a world where our everyday interactions increasingly involve digital components, where do we draw the line between nice-to-have and must-have? Do we draw a line at all? Or can we just agree, finally, that digital experiences of all kinds should generally be accessible to everyone?

While User Experience design — designing for a particular target set of users — is a must-have to succeed in the marketplace, I make sure my team takes experiential design a step further. That's why Universal Design – good design, that matters, to real people – is an recurring theme underlying Serious Mission's work.

A BRIEF-ish HISTORY

Growing up, my best friend was my uncle Greg — an incredible human in so many ways who taught me to appreciate more in my first decade of life than lots of folks will learn to appreciate in a lifetime. He was super intelligent — he taught me how to be a good student, and the nerdy thrill of being one of the smartest people in the room; a cool nerd — in the early 80s he taught me to love emerging tech. They had two paper grocery bags full of Atari cartridges, and played with computers from the time they became available on the mass market. I wrote all of my school papers using DOS word processing, and dabbled in pc gaming before that was even a thing (YOOO Galactic Conquest); artistic — he taught me to love hand-craft and technical skill: painting and drawing as a form of beautiful, exploratory and unique expression; athletic — he taught me to play tennis, swim like a fish, and to appreciate diving because it was fun and feels good to push ourselves physically; and empathetic — to a degree that few peers would experience in their lives: communicating with one another through a combination of lip reading, sign language, writing, and using assistive technologies like TTY Relay.

Greg, who was deaf from birth, taught me the importance of empathy: putting myself in someone else’s shoes, and really striving to communicate well. He opened my eyes to experiencing how differently-abled folks operate in day to day life. While he passed suddenly when I was just 11, this relationship had set one aspect of my life’s purpose into motion: creating accessible experiences.

It was a blind developer who spoke at a small JQUERY accessibility seminar in 2013, Birkir (Dingba) Gunnarsson, who made it click for me. He demonstrated for the audience how he uses assistive technology to navigate websites — and, importantly how that technology fails — even when sites were purportedly AA compliant. In his closing remarks, Birkir said: “Understand that for most of you, technology makes things more convenient. For some of us, it makes things POSSIBLE.”

Boom. That was the Mic Drop moment. Everything made sense. My mission as a designer was crystal clear, and I knew this special take on design would be my super power — thanks to Uncle Greg, Birkir, and many others along my journey who have deepened my appreciation of this value.

A VERY SERIOUS MISSION

Since 2009 I has had the privilege of helping two of the largest banks in North America bring their digital properties into WCAG compliance, and that triggered a thirst to replicate those successes by applying the same easy principles to every experience I've had a hand in architecting. It became clear that, through giving special attention to process, structure and hierarchy, the things we create could have utility and purpose for the people to whom it has the greatest impact.

All these years later, I still carry that torch, and it led me to Service Design — finding solutions at the intersection of business, its stakeholders, and its community. Projects in the health and human services and health and wellness spaces have afforded me & the teams I've led incredible opportunities to push, pull and produce new standards of excellence in accessible experiences. One core value we operate by is:

*Accessible design doesn’t ask for permission Creating accessible experiences for everyone must be an unspoken mission that designers bake-into our process and build-into outcomes from the very start.*

Check out the Panorama project and the Helix Innovation Lab to see some neat work that elevates accessibility, making it the backbone of everyday human experiences.