Inclusive design in the U.K. and its U.S. counterpart, universal design, present opportunities and challenges to industry. In order to encourage manufacturers and design companies to adopt more inclusive design practices, the research has been carried out to gain an understanding of why and how companies adopt inclusive design practices, what are the barriers when implementing them and what are the key strategies for facilitating inclusive/universal design in an industrial context. Based on interviews with a number of U.K. design consultancies and an investigation among manufacturers in the U.S., a comparison between U.K. consultant designers and U.S. consumer product manufacturers' perspectives on inclusive/universal design was made. It was found that designers are reluctant to sacrifice the aesthetics of the brand to design for inclusion, but nevertheless would like to have practical tools to help them develop more inclusive solutions. For manufacturers, the key motivation for such practices is that of government regulation and legislation requiring the accessibility of products and services.@en

An inclusively-designed product should accommodate the widest possible range of user capabilities. Consequently, it is important for designers to know about the full range of potential user capabilities found across the general population when assessing product attributes prior to redesign or new concept development. A mapping between user capabilities and product assessment is thus required. This paper aims to find such a mapping through the application of a severity of impairment scale to product assessment.@en

'Design exclusion' arises when a product cannot be used effectively because of choices made during the design process. Understanding the causes of such design exclusion is essential if better products, which accommodate the widest range of user capabilities, are to be designed. This paper investigates the prevalence of multiple minor impairments among older users who are most vulnerable to design exclusion. Effective ways of representing these impairments are also discussed, with the aim of helping designers better understand user capabilities, and thus reduce design exclusion.@en