Designing for cognitive diversity

Hi there

This month we're focusing on cognitive diversity and how to design services that work for everyone. Cognitive diversity is a fascinating field that covers everything from learning disabilities to short-term cognitive impairments like being drunk or being a sleep deprived parent.

Understanding the cognitive needs of your audience is a prerequisite to designing services that actually work!

This month there will be three talks:

How to design for cognitive diversity
Christine Hemphill from Open Inclusion will be providing a broad introduction to the subject to help us understand what cognitive diversity means and what types of approaches work best.

Inclusive content in service design and delivery
Jenni Parker and Ali Fawkes from Humanly will talk about how to create truly inclusive content that can be used in the design process. They will provide practical information on how to create workshops, research stimulus and more for a wide range of stakeholders.

Designing for Aphasia: Eva Park
Steph Wilson is a Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at City University London. She'll be talking specifically about designing for people with aphasia.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Love and peace
The Service Lab Team
Afsa, Charley, Jenni and Rupert

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More details

How to Design for Cognitive Diversity, Christine Hemphill
Christine is co-founder and Managing Director of Open Inclusion. She ensures that the client’s business objectives are understood, managed and fully met through great collaboration, clear focus, prioritisation and an uncompromising eye for quality and practical usability of work produced.

Christine has a background of over 20 years in designing and making products, services, teams or businesses, or making them better. The last 5 years have been solely focussed on customer and workplace inclusion, digital design and inclusive brand experiences.

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Inclusive content in service design and delivery, Jenni Parker + Ali Fawkes
During the service design process we need to convey complex information to participants of research and co-creation activities, such as the problem we're trying to solve; our process for tackling it; and the insights we've gained from research. The need to create inclusive content continues as we go on to build our solutions for implementation.

Humanly has a wide range of experience of creating accessible information in a variety of circumstances. We have created materials, tools and content for people with dementia, neurodiverse people and people with learning disabilities.

We will share practical techniques for creating engaging and inclusive communications on a tight budget and timescale. This will include methods for producing materials without any specialist equipment - for example, creating plain English video information using mobile phones or illustrated cards.

@jenniparker57 @ali_fawkes

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Design for Aphasia, Steph Wilson
Steph researches and teaches the design of usable and accessible interactive technologies and experiences. She is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at City, University of London where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for HCI Design.

Steph's recent research has been concerned with innovative UX design for people with aphasia, a language impairment that affects one third of people who survive a stroke. This has included GeST, a computer-based gesture therapy tool, and the award-winning virtual world of EVA Park. She has published widely in this area. Along with colleagues, she is developing and promoting UX design guidelines for aphasia known as "Language-Light UX".

@stephwilsoncity @EVAphasia