Research in Academia

1. Research Background and Definition of Inclusive Design

Inclusive Design originated in the mid-20th century, particularly evolving in the post-war context as society began to pay greater attention to the needs of people with disabilities. It was first applied to meet the demands of disabled veterans returning from the Vietnam War, emerging as a novel design methodology aimed at addressing a broader spectrum of user needs. Inclusive Design is not solely intended for people with disabilities; rather, it emphasizes creating accessible, user-friendly solutions for all, particularly including the elderly, pregnant individuals, and children. The core objective is to eliminate exclusion and limitations in design, thereby improving the quality of life for every individual through thoughtful design solutions.

Inclusive Design goes beyond serving disabled individuals—it is a methodology that enables adaptability to diverse groups through design, emphasizing universality, accessibility, usability, and equity. While it shares similarities with the concept of Universal Design, Inclusive Design focuses more on addressing the differences in behavior, culture, and physical conditions among various user groups, aiming to build a more inclusive social environment. The concept was first developed in Europe and North America and has since gained momentum, particularly driven by efforts to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities.

2. Practical Applications of Inclusive Design

At the practical level, Inclusive Design has been applied extensively across various fields. For example, in rural sanitation design, ecological toilets must address the needs of elderly users while also accommodating the habits of younger individuals. Designers have conducted research across different age groups and physical conditions, ultimately proposing a combined design incorporating both squatting and seated toilets. This approach not only satisfies the efficiency and familiarity required by younger users but also provides comfort and safety for the elderly. Additionally, the specific needs of vulnerable groups—such as older adults, people with disabilities, and children—have increasingly been acknowledged, leading to successful examples of Inclusive Design in products like specialized kitchen utensils and assistive devices.

3. Challenges at the Social and Policy Levels

The promotion of Inclusive Design extends beyond the design discipline and involves complex challenges at both the social and policy levels. Currently, public understanding and institutional support for Inclusive Design remain insufficient. In particular, the design, construction, and maintenance of public infrastructure often suffer from poor planning and execution. For instance, while improvements have been made in tactile paving for the visually impaired in some cities, there are still widespread issues such as impractical layouts, broken or obstructed paths, and lack of systematic management, which severely impede the mobility of users with visual impairments.

In many cases, public facilities fail to comprehensively address the needs of diverse user groups. Some projects consider these needs during the initial planning phase, but lack sustained follow-up or maintenance, resulting in incomplete implementation. This fragmentation is partly due to poor coordination between government departments. The absence of effective communication and collaboration during policy execution has led to broken implementation loops and limited long-term impact. For example, urban planning departments may propose accessible infrastructure designs, but construction and maintenance departments may fail to follow through, resulting in a disconnect between design and real-world usability.

China’s current policy framework also lacks explicit and unified support for Inclusive Design. The absence of specific laws and regulations has made it difficult to fully implement inclusive principles in design practice. Moreover, the lack of oversight and enforcement mechanisms has limited the effectiveness of related policies, which often remain at the theoretical or planning stages, falling short of expected outcomes in practical application.

4. Education and the Cultivation of Future Designers

Education plays a critical role in promoting the widespread adoption of Inclusive Design. By integrating inclusive principles into design education, future designers can develop heightened sensitivity to social diversity and inclusivity, leading to the creation of products and services that better meet the needs of varied user groups. For example, Professor Zhong Fang of the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University offers research-oriented courses related to Inclusive Design. Her curriculum involves field investigations and direct engagement with the lives of people with disabilities, as well as communication with relevant government agencies, fostering a deeper understanding of the societal significance of design.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is key to the diversification and in-depth development of Inclusive Design. The integration of design, sociology, and engineering provides new perspectives and innovative solutions, supporting more comprehensive and effective approaches to inclusive practices in design research and application.

5. Interviews of Teachers

Dr Fang Zhong

Social Innovation and Sustainable Design Laboratory
Institute of Ecological Design
Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University

Inclusive Design in Transitional China: A Multi-dimensional Discourse

As an important issue within the broader social transformation of contemporary China, inclusive design was explored from multiple dimensions in this discussion. Dr Zhong began by clarifying key concepts, distinguishing inclusive design from traditional design approaches. While the latter often caters to a singular user group, inclusive design seeks to overcome such limitations by creating solutions that accommodate people of all ages and abilities. The rise of this design philosophy is shaped not only by social realities—such as accelerated ageing and increasing advocacy for the rights of disabled communities—but also by a wider shift within the design industry from commercially driven outcomes to socially responsible practice.

At the level of product innovation, Dr Zhong illustrated how inclusive design generates social value across diverse scenarios through case studies including noise-cancellation optimisation in wireless headphones, ergonomic chair iterations, and the development of accessible kitchen tools. Of particular note was a case where a team designed a dual-purpose squatting/sitting toilet for rural communities in western China. The design, although locally appropriate, faced public criticism from urban audiences unfamiliar with the realities of water-scarce regions. This reaction revealed a cognitive gap shaped by urban-rural disparities and highlighted the need for a more nuanced and multilayered communication framework for inclusive design.

Elder-friendly home adaptations emerged as a key focus area, exposing systemic challenges in China. A lack of specialised service providers, high renovation costs, and cumbersome procedures have left many elderly individuals facing basic difficulties in toileting, mobility, and daily safety. Although the tactile paving system at Beijing Massage Hospital showcases the potential of specialised design, widespread issues such as poor planning, inadequate maintenance, and encroachment in urban tactile path infrastructure underline deeper deficiencies in public facilities. Compared with mandatory design standards in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, China's policy implementation and supervisory mechanisms still require significant improvement.

Addressing the particular challenges of rural areas, Dr Zhong expanded the scope of the discussion. In the case of dry toilet retrofitting in Tengchong, Yunnan, multiple factors—arid climate, low population density, and economic underdevelopment—combine to complicate the process. Solutions must simultaneously consider efficient water usage, physical decline among the elderly, and generational differences in usage habits. Such examples suggest that inclusive design cannot be transplanted wholesale from urban contexts; rather, it must be deeply rooted in local cultural traditions and lived wisdom.

On the level of public awareness, understanding of the needs of disabled communities and the complex realities of rural life remains limited. Dr Zhong mentioned that some researchers are now using short-form video platforms to disseminate knowledge by translating specialist terminology into accessible language. These efforts at two-way communication open up promising new avenues: only when research institutions take the initiative to break down knowledge barriers can inclusive design truly find fertile ground in society.

In terms of cultivating design professionals, Dr Zhong advocated for a rethinking of educational paradigms. Young practitioners often fall into the trap of “designing to move themselves”, disconnected from real-world needs. She recommended training perceptiveness through close observation of everyday life—for instance, designing care-focused features for children using public transport during the summer. More fundamentally, there is a need to dismantle the mindset of "dominant-group centrism": as any able-bodied urban resident may unexpectedly become vulnerable, the potential for role reversal should serve as an ethical cornerstone of inclusive design.

The discussion concluded with a shared consensus: the advancement of inclusive design relies on a fourfold foundation—policy frameworks, technological innovation, cultural adaptation, and educational transformation. From elder-friendly housing to rural sanitation reform, each concrete case reaffirms the essential value of design—not in constructing utopian ideals, but in building bridges of compassion amid imperfect realities.

Prof. Dong Yumei

Associate Professor
Product Design at the School of Design, Jiangnan University.
member of the DESIS Lab

The subtle rise of inclusive design is quietly reshaping the landscape of social innovation in China. This paradigm of “deep user co-creation” is epitomised by a group of university students who developed a range of cosmetics for visually impaired users. By reaching out to blind influencers via the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, these young designers reconfigured product packaging with tactile markers and embedded voice-guided instructions. Their work underscores the central ethos of inclusive design: that goodwill in design must be grounded in sustained dialogue with real needs. Ultimately, design must concern itself with human dignity. When a visually impaired influencer livestreams the process of applying makeup independently, what scrolls across the screen is more than just a stream of likes—it signals a gradual shift in social perception. When a team redesigning dry toilets in Tengchong, Yunnan explains their plans in local dialect at a village assembly, design ceases to be the exclusive language of the elite. Scattered sparks of practice are beginning to weave a new value network—where the toileting habits of rural elders and the aesthetic preferences of urban professionals are granted equal respect, and where the lived knowledge of disabled communities intersects with the innovative capacities of tech companies.

Ground-level breakthroughs in inclusive design often arise from small but persistent efforts. One design team from Hunan embedded themselves in the Wuling Mountains to document how Tujia stilted dwellings facilitate intergenerational cohabitation: hearths are positioned to balance heating needs and child safety, while stair railings are angled to accommodate the grip strength of elderly residents. These localised insights are now being shared via short video platforms. One clip explaining the ergonomic logic behind traditional carpentry tools unexpectedly attracted over a million views, with audiences supplementing it with architectural wisdom from their own regions via live comments. This form of grassroots knowledge sharing may well prove more vital than any standardised design manual. In parallel, universities are recalibrating educational pathways: Tongji University's College of Design and Innovation has made “Urban-Rural Walks” a compulsory module, requiring students to develop design proposals in real-life contexts such as markets and urban villages. Jiangnan University, meanwhile, has partnered with industry to establish an “Inclusive Design Lab” that exposes students to the financial and manufacturing constraints of real-world production.

In the field of urban regeneration, the transformation of Tancun in Guangzhou offers another layer of insight. This area, once a traditional village, is now undergoing a dual reconfiguration of both physical space and social relations as it morphs into a metropolitan community. Designers have deliberately delayed infrastructural upgrades, instead initiating what they term “cultural acupuncture”: staging local opera performances, running oral history workshops, and inviting residents to create installation art from old objects. This soft intervention strategy has unexpectedly rekindled community identity. Madam Li, an 80-year-old lifelong resident, taught younger participants to weave traditional bamboo wares; meanwhile, newly arrived white-collar families spontaneously compiled a local cultural archive. Yet tensions surfaced when student teams attempted to translate these cultural elements into permanent spatial features. One sculpture proposed as a “Wall of Memory” met with resistance for occupying a communal activity space. This incident lays bare the central paradox of social design: idealised visions often require complex, situated negotiation before they can take root.

Exploration within the educational sphere is equally charged with tensions. The China Academy of Art is set to launch a new “Futures Studies Card Game” course, in which students are asked to imagine everyday life in Asia twenty years from now. One group responded to the twin challenges of ageing populations and technological ethics by designing a self-adjusting intelligent retirement community, featuring intergenerational shared gardens and tactile navigation systems. This type of temporal and speculative training is gradually dismantling the technology-centric bias of traditional design education. However, real-world constraints persist. One student project, a barrier-free kitchen for blind users that won an international award, has struggled to reach mass production due to a fragmented supply chain. Another design—a dual-function dry toilet aimed at rural areas—was mocked online by urban users unfamiliar with the challenges of water scarcity. Such setbacks are prompting educators to reflect: has design education become too enamoured with conceptual innovation, at the expense of nurturing broader societal acceptance?

On the ground, practical challenges remain. In Hangzhou, one team organising an accessible board game workshop had to approach several government departments without success, and ultimately relied on grassroots disability advocacy groups to recruit participants. The absence of systemic support is even more stark in infrastructure: the tactile paving outside Beijing's Massage Hospital is carefully designed, yet just a hundred metres away, a section of the same pathway is blocked by a cluster of shared bikes—exposing the fragmented reality of inclusive design implementation in China.

Cross-cultural collaborations are opening up new possibilities. In one Sino-Dutch initiative focused on ageing, participants rejected conventional product exhibitions in favour of data visualisations charting the daily routines of rural elderly people, complemented by immersive installations that recreated the intergenerational tensions found in age-friendly urban renovations. Underlying this narrative strategy is a deep sensitivity to cultural difference. When Western audiences expressed surprise at Chinese elders’ preference for squat toilets, a juxtaposition of datasets revealed an underlying generational shift in physical mobility—highlighting the rising incidence of spinal disorders among young urbanites, which is quietly reshaping perceptions of toileting practices. Such two-way cultural translations may well offer more profound insights than the unidirectional export of technology.