IWD: A Spotlight on Female Expertise @ The Hague Tech

There were numerous events to choose from on Friday 8 March 2024 – International Women’s Day. I have very mixed feelings about this day. I absolutely believe we need to focus on and address the ongoing gender gaps in our world. However I feel uncomfortable at events with only women – inclusion is so important to me, and personally feel that we need to actively appeal to and include all genders in the quest for change for women.

So I was happy to see that this event at The Hague Tech not only scheduled a male speaker, but also had several male attendees. Thank you to the organisers and participants for creating this gender diversity – even if we are focussing on women’s issues and challenges, male voices in this conversation are crucial.

That said, I also greatly applaud and appreciate the wonderful women’s voices too of course. I’m also learning more about and keen to hear from all genders.

Asako Osedo

The first session I attended was “How can we promote inclusive design under constraints”.

This interactive workshop was well organised and interesting. Asako Osedo walked us through the design process, and the main takeaways for me were:

Inclusiveness is a mindset
Inclusiveness in design does not necessarily have to cost significant amounts of additional money – though it should also be recognised that getting from where we as a society are often very NOT inclusive, it does take much time and often financial investment to get us to where we really should already be.
There will always be constraints – time, financial and more – but we can still create amazing things.
Design principles can be applied incredibly broadly to almost any aspect of our environment
Designing for inclusion not only means that minority groups can have needs met, but that even more people can usually benefit in a positive way.

Inclusive Design

We worked together in two groups with some useful templates from Asako to choose a random object to redesign more inclusively.

The other team chose coat hangers, and we chose a chair. Then, we were given a great website with random user’s needs, so we could consider whether redesign was necessary, and in which way/s.

This process was fascinating. Just a quick insight was that the other team added a hook to a coat hanger, so that people who may not be able to use both their hands/arms to hang a coat could more easily do so. Our team realised that a blind person may have trouble finding a chair in a room, so considered additions/features such as making it very stable so that if bumped into, it would not topple, and perhaps adding things like textured fabric, or having a sensor make a sound for it to be located more easily. Of course all these ideas are us just guessing what these users may need – a future step would be to validate these. However even this short workshop got us taking new perspectives, so valuable.