What is Design Equity?

Design equity is an ideal.

It’s something that most designers don’t really think about. It’s elusive, but when you see it, you feel it. 

Equity Design Collaborative uses the definition: 

“ Equity design is a creative process to dismantle systems of oppression and (re)design towards liberation and healing by centering the power of communities historically impacted by the oppressive systems being (re)designed.”

For us at Alma Major, design equity is the concept of considering and researching the full audience at multiple stages throughout the design process. It’s being accountable for all of your stakeholders, not just the ones who are paying the bill. 

Often, we build to please those in leadership roles. But if we consider systemic oppression of people of color, LGTBQIA+, women, and people with disabilities we can see that those voices have often been left out of the decision making process. 

The impact of having such a limited set of voices in the rooms where design decisions are made has far reaching implications. We’ll look at a few examples of how these missing perspectives lead to design “solutions” that create unexpected negative consequences for many, and shortchange us all.

Female drivers are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash

When safety regulations were originally imposed on automakers in the 1960s regulators wanted to require the use of two crash test dummies, a 95 percentile male and a 5 percentile female meaning that only 5% of men were larger than and 5% of women were smaller than the crash test dummies. 

Automakers pushed back on regulators until the requirement was reduced to a single crash test dummy, a 50 percentile male (the average man).

This is starting to shift — in 2011, the first female crash test dummies were required in safety testing — but we are still building on 50 years of dangerous design practices for automobiles.

Medicine is also less safe for women

“Most biomedical and clinical research has been based on the assumption that the male can serve as representative of the species. This has been in spite of increasing awareness … [that] women and men differ in their susceptibility to and risk for many medical conditions, and they respond differently to drugs and other interventions. The close of the previous decade saw 8 out of 10 prescription drugs withdrawn from the U.S. market because they cause statistically greater health risks for women .”

— Viviana Simone, Science (June 2005)

Clearly, the lack of women as test subjects and target demographics have dangerous consequences. I began to wonder about repercussions that were less dangerous but nonetheless have a ripple effect on culture and careers.

Is your office too cold?

If you work an office in the U.S., you’ve probably noticed that women often find that they’re too cold, while men report being perfectly comfortable.

This is because the algorithms that dictate temperature regulation in many office buildings were designed in the 1960s for a 154 pound male. Women, who typically have smaller frames and less muscle mass, naturally feel a bit colder than men do. This, along with faulty climate control systems, leads to many women feeling uncomfortably cold at the office.

The effects of temperature go beyond comfort and have a measurable impact on performance. A 2004 Cornell Study found “that when ambient office temperature [was] increased from 68 degrees to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing productivity increased by 150%”.

Women in the U.S. on average make 78 cents to every dollar their male counterparts make. There are many factors that contribute to the pay gap but it seems the unintended effect of workplace climates designed for men’s comfort could be a piece of the puzzle.

What would the world be like if it were designed for and by its full demographic spectrum?

Our hope is a lot less biased. If we’re making design decisions based on biased data, we’ll thoughtlessly continue those biases to our collective detriment.

The first step is more diversity in the conference rooms, workshops, and research labs where decisions get made about how the world is going to be designed, engineered, systematized, and ultimately constructed.