With new technology, design systems and behavioral patterns continually changing the way we interact with the world, we face the challenge of making education inclusive and accessible.
The Spark Festival is Australia’s largest event for startups, innovators and entrepreneurs. The Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion participated this year, in collaboration with Remarkable Technology, Canva and The Centre for Inclusive Design, with a workshop that offered educators, industry leaders and students the opportunity to develop creative solutions for the future of ethical education. We hosted 80 attendees in an engaging and thought provoking event.
Sally Woellner, Creative Director and Product Designer at Canva.
Sally Woellner, Creative Director and Product Designer at Canva, opened our event with a speech on the future of inclusive and accessible education. We have included a transcript of her speech below.
The tech industry is building the foundations for the future today. We’re fast approaching new frontiers of tech, design systems and behavioural patterns that will shape our world.
But often, there isn’t a diverse mix of voices in the room when building new digital products and services - creating a widening digital divide, and greater inequality for people with diverse needs - from hand driers that don’t respond to different skin colours, through to AI systems trained on data with human biases and prejudice ingrained.
How do we ensure that the new world we’re building is one where everyone is welcome? This is inclusive design - designing with people with diverse needs, to create a better and more equitable product and world for everyone.
We set out to work with designers, technologists, engineers, and ethicists, to build the design practices that will build a more equitable future - encouraging and challenging the tech and startup industry to consider diversity as a necessity for success.
We began by sharing practical knowledge about inclusive design practices, so that interested designers could make their teams and their work more accessible to everyone.
We then worked with UTS accessibility ambassadors and a range of industry experts to pioneer an Inclusive Design methodology, that could be shared to help design teams build inclusive practices into everything they do.
But we knew that to have real impact, we would need to think bigger. We’d need to start at the beginning - how do you make inclusivity the norm, rather than an exception? How do you create a future class of designers who know how important inclusive design is from the beginning? We knew we had to start with inclusive education - equipping educators, lecturers and students with an understanding of the fundamental importance of designing and creating a world where every voice can be heard, and every person can participate to the fullest.
Which is why we’re here. Now of course, this isn’t a problem we’re going to solve in a single workshop. But the outcomes from this workshop will be used to develop a resource, or credential, that will empower educators to make their course material more accessible to everyone - regardless of ability, culture, gender or age.
This workshop process may be unfamiliar to you - but the techniques are based on time-tested methodologies used by Google, IDEO, Pixar and many other large world-changing firms.
We have the chance to change the future of education. So we want you to think big - to be creative, and to be visionary. Think of the future you want to create - and dream big, come up with the most creative thoughts you can. Nothing is impossible.
Educators, industry leaders and students coming together to develop creative solutions for the future of ethical education.
We will take the output from today, and conduct further research and investigation to develop a resource that helps educators be more effective, and all students to contribute equally.
So it’s extra important that today, we listen to the voices we wouldn’t normally hear. Allow everyone space to speak, and give time to people whose voices we may not always hear. That’s what we’re here for.
And if yourself or anyone at your table needs some extra support to be heard, just let someone in a pink shirt know. We’re here to make sure everyone has the same opportunity to participate.
And without further ado - let’s change the future of education!