Reflective Report

Introduction

My report is about an online workshop for the Valuable 500 aiming to end disability exclusion in the workplace. The workshop itself intersects with my positionality as a white, northern British designer which has worked in the advertising, arts and cultural sector along with the retail and advertising sectors. By challenging my biases on race and disability in the workplace. I want to change the way  people think about accessibility (both physical and digital)so it’s integrated into their work, rather than an afterthought. It relates to my academic practice in that my DPS Students will naturally integrate the new ways of working inclusively into their work and therefore the design industry going forward. 

I teach on the Diploma in Professional Studies which is the sandwich year out in the design industry across a broad range of design areas including: 

• BA (Hons) Design for Art Direction
• BA (Hons) Design Management
• BA (Hons) Graphic Branding and Identity
• BA (Hons) Graphic and Media Design
• BA (Hons) Illustration and Visual Media
• BA (Hons) Interaction Design Arts
• BA (Hons) Service Design
• BA (Hons) User Experience Design

My intervention is an online design workshop that aims to brief the designers on inclusive design as part of the process rather than a reflection, by doing this online it includes international students, carers, people with hearing difficulty as you can use auto captions, be almost anywhere in the world, you don’t need to be physically mobile, and I’ll do it at a time that includes both my English, Chinese and Korean Students and any that are on global internships so I may need to cover a series of time zones to be fully inclusive. It can also be recorded for anyone with learning needs who may wish to watch it back again afterwards.

The goal is to create a campaign in Tokyo to ‘End Disability Exclusion in the workplace’. The campaign needs to be sensitive to international audiences so consider the intersectionality of both race, disability and age. It needs to avoid any racial stereotypes of Japanese culture and also disability.

I have learned in 20 years of working in the design industry how important inclusivity is within my discipline. This forms the rationale for my intervention design which is to teach students to embed inclusive design into their process, I’ll teach them about ableist language. 

Theories that have motivated me to teach this workshop are based on many practical lessons in industry from creating free, inclusive family trails at Tate, to large print label books at V&A to QR codes to access deeper learning in the Natural History Musuem, to revealing colonial stories on race we are often shy of tackling in British institutions. I have learned a lot about digital inclusion and accessibility in retail at Selfridges, where we have strived to promote social justice and equity. It’s not just about my own inclusive practice but foresting inclusive practice in the students. The intention is to make a sustainable transformation, they take it forward and bake accessibility into their concepts. It aims to discussfeelings, questions and general contributions to themes discussed.

The workshop will encourage the students to critically reflect on accessibility and the intersectionality of both this and race – for example a spatial designer may consider wheelchair access in an exhibition design from the outset of a project (2m wide thoroughfares) skilling up the cohort to take forward empowers them – the idea is that it’s breadth change, rather than just the one workshop. 

For the Tokyo exhibition design part of the project, a graphic designer will learn to consider the 1600mm high ‘eye height rule’ while also making sure that a wheelchair user can read captions at a lower level and we must add an angle to them, as they’re more difficult to read flat on a wall. A digital or UX designer will include key principals based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure inclusivity for all users, including those with disabilities.

Race must be considered as well – intersectional, internationally, and culturally for the global event – there should be no race exclusion and we must try to avoid stereotypes visualising other cultures eg the event is in Tokyo so as designers students must strive not to be reductive or use ableist language.

‘Digital accessibility is no longer optional—it’s a legal, technical, and cultural necessity for public, private, and voluntary sector organisations alike.’ 

Scott Fisher Government events.co.uk 

The students first round of design did use some stereotypical images (eg contrived stock photography) and we reflected on this – imagery should show positive representation and lived experiences, rather than just focussing on elite Paralympians and global success stories becuse this can feel really obvious and therefore excluding the global majority of people who identity as disabled.

Some of the students reflected on their own intersectionality, an autistic Koren student who had combined two briefs in one had really valuable feedback from the Live briefer from V500 that the sunflower symbol alerting management to people with disability in the airports is a different concept and activation to delivering a campaign on ending disability in the workplace. We all reflected on our individual biases and intersectionality in a really positive, inclusive way. 

We discussed the ‘system barrier’ that not enough CEOs or leaders put disability on their agenda deeming it unimportant and our campaign concept we discussed needed to use peoples live examples and experiences, we encouraged students to do the same, if they felt comfortable.

Some of the more successful campaigns used shape and colour to represent intersectionality in an abstract way and to make sure we included all forms of disability from mental health to physical disability. We spoke about language and copy writing to make sure that they used clever copy that wasn’t falling back on stereotypical or ableist language. Abelist language is:

‘language that devalues, stigmatizes, or excludes people with disabilities. It often uses disability-related terms or metaphors in a derogatory or dismissive way. This type of language can perpetuate negative stereotypes and reinforce the idea that typical abilities are superior to those of people with disabilities.’

A campaign must cover both graphic language and have strong, clear, copy and also be able to be read in 3 seconds from a moving vehicle, like a bus or train, in order to be a successful ad. I learned this at Wieden and Kennedy from Guy Featherstone. I make sure to relay this and the bold, clean sharp concepts the students began to develop showed that they’d considered this, reflected on it and taken it on board. See the work of Yobun Kee and Hilary Lam.

This brings me onto awarding gaps at LCC, after the IP lecture it made me really aware, as I marked in education, for the first time, of my own unconscious bias toward people I connected with eg a white northern student or someone with a similar design style aesthetic – a conscientious Korean student who joined all the meetings and calls. 

Some students might have had barriers to joining the calls which means you may have less connection or tutorial time, so you don’t get to know their work as well and marking took more investment in reading and ingesting their ideas than the diligent students’ that you know really well. 

This doesn’t mean the less regular attendees aren’t as hard working, often it was the opposite; they were in full time demanding work placements on their DPS (Diploma in professional studies ‘sandwich’ year out in industry) and / or second jobs to support their student finances. 

I made sure to mark based on the quality of the outcome and how it meets the brief and to remove my own unconscious biases from the equation. The Fig 1 awarding gap stats from UAL website dashboards.arts.ac.uk

ucpu@arts.ac.uk

made me feel angry and frustrated that our system is not necessarily unbiased and we need to all take responsibility for our positionality and make sure we are fair.

The murmuration bird video by Saffron, a branding agency, from V500 is a very moving example of this – a video I used to show the students a way to move people into actioning positive change in both themselves and their own work against disability exclusion in the workplace. 

Lyndsay Atkin a former LCC student headed up channel 4’s Paralympic campaign ‘Considering what’ and also the videos ‘Meet the Superhumans’ which we discussed in depth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuAPPeRg3Nw and the Zine exhibition at Wellcome had a thought provoking intersectional idea called ‘making from bed’ amongst many other great examples that documented the daily lived experiences of the disabled zine makers. 

As an ex swimmer I found the 4 creative campaigns so inspirational and exciting – but being critical – this is celebrating only people who have managed to make their disability work for them at the ‘top’ as an elite athlete, whereas for some people with physical or mental disabilities getting out of bed and into work makes them a Superhuman because of the number of hurdles the have to overcome just to do this. The essay Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer Comments on the fact that this questions our values and what is in fact considered ‘strong’ or ‘super’ Quadriplegics are not often presented as the embodiment of strength, but this sign suggests that, in Reeve’s case, such a designation is accurate. According to the billboard, although Reeve was no longer able to run or jump or climb, he remained a strong man; his strength simply lay more in his character than in his body. Prior to his injuries, Reeve was “Superman,” a fictional hero capable of leaping buildings and bending steel. Later, as a disabled person, Reeve was not Superman but a super man.

Another example that questioned and subverted the idea of a disabled person as a superman or hero was the Zine project I recently visited at the Wellcome collection – they shared various Zines by intersectional personas and their reflections on their daily struggles with disability and racial bias in London. They had also created a visual spectrum wheel of zines based on the neurodivergent spectrum diagrams. See images in bibliography.

A higher % of DPS students get a 1^st class degree, I hope the experience in industry and our balanced, practical and theoretical teaching which includes a very international, intersectional set of lecturers and guest speakers, and inclusivity in our lectures and talks series, contributes to this. We noted in our IP unit that there’s often a higher award for those with ECs and ISAs where almost an ‘overcompensation’ has been made, like a kind of positive discrimination. We also need to be aware of this when marking to keep a balanced fair, approach.

To conclude I believe we should reflect on our biases and make engaging lectures to discuss this giving space for the students’ voices and lived experiences to shine and I’ll continue to ‘be the change you want to see’ by making sure the guest lecturers are form intersectional backgrounds race and that we don’t exclude anyone with a disability from empowering our students. Digital shift is just one example of this along with brining in Chris B from our disability services to educate both ourselves and the students on this important subject.

Bibliography

Charlton, J.I., 2000. Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Channel 4, 2016. Meet the Superhumans. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuAPPeRg3Nw[Accessed 16 Jul. 2025].

Crenshaw, K., 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), pp.139–167.

Fisher, S., 2023. Digital accessibility is no longer optional. Government Events. [online] Available at: https://www.governmentevents.co.uk [Accessed 16 Jul. 2025].

Kafer, A., 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McIntosh, P., et al., 2019. Unconscious Bias in Higher Education: Addressing Racial Disparities. London: AdvanceHE.

Puar, J.K., 2009. Disability. In: B. Turner, ed. The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp.495–512.

Sins Invalid, 2019. Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People. 2nd ed. Berkeley: Sins Invalid Press.

Tate, S.A., 2018. Decolonising and re-centring intersectionality in (educational) research: Whiteness, Black feminist theory and African Caribbean women graduates. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(1), pp.103–116. [online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2018.1428718.

UAL (University of the Arts London), 2024. EDI Data Report. [online] Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0030/472836/UAL-EDI-data-report-2024-PDFA.pdf [Accessed 16 Jul. 2025].

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), 2018. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. [online] Available at: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ [Accessed 16 Jul. 2025].

Wellcome Collection, 2024. Making from Bed Zine Exhibition. [online] Available at: https://wellcomecollection.org[Accessed 16 Jul. 2025].