Milan – Masters students from Danish university KADK put universal design on the agenda at this year’s Milan Design Week.
Working in collaboration with the Bevica Foundation, an organisation that works to improve social inequality of people with disabilities, the Different Bodies exhibition highlights how no body is the same, yet designers often cater to a standardised, average human being. This often excludes those that don’t fit the mould of this non-existent ‘perfect body’ and goes against one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals: leaving no one behind.
The students personally experienced how those with disabilities navigate such surroundings through a series of workshops, applying the learnings to the exhibition. Its Skin Hunger area addressed how a lack of human-to-human touch can be detrimental to our wellbeing, with visitors invited to interact with a large, tactile membrane-like wall that reacted to their touch.
Different Bodies highlights how brands across all sectors need to ensure that inclusivity is not an add-on to innovation and design development, but engrained in all aspects of design from conception. For more on how creative practitioners are tacking inequality in design, read our Implicit Inclusivity design direction.