Exploring Research Methods: Understanding Accessibility in Design through a Live Brief
Introduction
As part of my PGCert in Academic Practice, I have been looking more closely at how design students engage with accessibility and whether they can meaningfully embed it into their work, rather than treating it as an afterthought. Accessibility comes up regularly in teaching, but I have noticed that many students struggle to move beyond surface-level understanding, often framing it as a set of rules rather than a design mindset. This project grew out of that observation, and from my own desire and personal industry experience in the cultural, retail, entertainment and advertising sectors, to find better ways of teaching accessibility through practice rather than explanation alone.
The research question I set out to explore was:
“Can students explain or embed accessibility into their design work after completing the Live Brief – a campaign based on the Design and Disability exhibition at the V&A?”
The project was built around a Live Brief delivered at LCC in collaboration with Dom Whooley and Kirsten Abligaard at the V&A. Students were asked to design a campaign or hack, inspired by the Design and Disability exhibition, which gave them a real, tangible context in which to explore accessibility and inclusion.
I used a mixed-methods research approach: a Microsoft Forms survey before and after the brief, and the Live Brief itself as a practice-based intervention. I wanted something that would give me both a sense of change over time and insight into how students were actually applying ideas in their work. Mixed methods felt appropriate here because accessibility is as much about values and judgement as it is about knowledge, and no single method would capture that fully (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018).
In studio-based teaching, a lot of learning happens through making, discussion, and critique, and it is not always easy for students to articulate what they have learned in words. Orr and Shreeve (2018) describe this as ‘tacit learning, knowledge’ that is developed through practice rather than instruction, and this really resonates with what I see in the online lessons. The Live Brief created space for that kind of learning to emerge, while the survey helped me capture what students could explicitly explain.
What the Survey Did and Didn’t do
The survey was used both as a diagnostic tool and as a way of evaluating learning after the brief. Before starting, students completed the survey to give me a baseline sense of how they understood accessibility. After the brief, they completed the same survey again, which allowed me to see where confidence and understanding had shifted. This kind of pre/post design is commonly used in educational research to evaluate specific interventions (Bryman, 2016).
I deliberately included open questions as well as scaled ones, because I was interested not just in whether students felt more confident, but in how they talked about accessibility. That gave me much richer insight into their thinking than numbers alone would have done (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2018).
One clear limitation was that the survey responses were anonymised. This was important ethically and encouraged honest answers, but it also meant I couldn’t track individual students’ development or link survey responses directly to their final outcomes. In hindsight, this is something I would change next time by using a consent-based system, so I can better understand how learning develops across the project (Bell & Waters, 2018).
Learning by Doing
The Live Brief itself was the most important part of the project. Design students tend to understand things most deeply when they have to make decisions, test ideas, and see the consequences of those decisions in their work (Gray & Malins, 2004). Working with the V&A exhibition gave the brief a sense of reality that students responded to, and it shifted accessibility from a theoretical concept to something they had to actively design for. I’ve attached some slides of their work – from workshops, to an interactive game to illustrated posters.
Orr and Shreeve (2018) talk about studio learning as a process of becoming, developing judgement over time through repeated engagement with messy, open-ended problems. I saw this happening in different ways: some students began to rethink their assumptions about audiences, and created workshops, while others struggled but became more aware of the gaps in their thinking via illustration. Both felt like valuable learning.
From a research point of view, analysing design work is always subjective, especially when you are also the tutor. I tried to be conscious of this by using clear assessment criteria and reflective notes, but it is still a limitation of practice-based research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018). At the same time, I don’t think this kind of learning can be fully captured through survey responses alone it needs to be seen in the design work.
Using the survey alongside the Live Brief helped me see a gap between what students could say technically about accessibility and what they could do with it. Many students expressed less awareness and confidence in the survey, but this often did translate it into fully accessible design decisions, so they showed they had actually understood it visually. That gap felt important.
This reflects Orr and Shreeve’s (2018) point that tacit studio knowledge takes time to develop and needs repeated practice and feedback. One brief is a start, but it is not enough on its own. This has made me think more critically about how accessibility is positioned across the course, and how often students are given opportunities to revisit and apply it.
What would I change
This was a small-scale project, limited to one live brief and one small cohort, and time constraints meant there was limited space for iteration. If I were to develop this further, I would:
- introduce accessibility earlier and revisit it across multiple live briefs
- build in structured reflection to help students articulate ‘tacit’ learning
- track learning more carefully over time (with consent)
- bring in more external voices to help evaluate outcomes
- compare this approach with more traditional lecture-based teaching
Reflections
This project has shifted how I think about teaching accessibility. It has reinforced for me that accessibility can’t be taught as a checklist, it has to be embedded in how students think, make, and reflect. The combination of survey data and practice-based work gave me a much richer picture of student learning than either method would have done alone.
More importantly, it has pushed me to reflect on my own teaching. If I want students to take accessibility seriously, I need to make sure it is consistently visible, assessed, and revisited, not just introduced once and hoped for. This research has been as much about developing my own practice as it has been about evaluating student learning, and it will continue to shape how I design briefs, critiques, and learning activities in future.
Bibliography
Bell, J. & Waters, S. (2018) Doing Your Research Project: A Guide for First-Time Researchers in Education and Social Science. 7th edn. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Bryman, A. (2016) Social Research Methods. 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2018) Research Methods in Education. 8th edn. London: Routledge.
Creswell, J.W. & Plano Clark, V.L. (2018) Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. 3rd edn. London: SAGE.
Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (2018) The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. 5th edn. London: SAGE.
Gray, C. & Malins, J. (2004) Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Kolb, D.A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Orr, S. & Shreeve, A. (2018) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
AI Used for SPAG and polishing
Leave a Reply