Researcher and entrepreneur: We need to include the lives and experience of users into design

_{By Thomas Bjerg}

Kristian Moltke Martiny, a cognitive scientist and entrepreneur working at the research and change centre Enactlab, is involved in a wide range of projects, including all sorts of co-creative endeavours where he involves users with disabilities - which is a recurring theme in his work. One such example is REIMAGINE 2019, where he reached out to people with disabilities from around the world to help with redesigning Shakespeare’s play about the tyrant Richard III, who also lived with a disability.

The new performance posed the question of who really are the ones with the disability and offered a reinterpretation of the concepts of disability, inclusion, and accessibility. The process included workshops, consultations, and art installations about living with a disability, and Martiny and his team laid out orange plastic plates from Denmark’s famous Roskilde Festival across Elsinore’s cobblestone streets, allowing everyone to see and feel themselves what accessibility means in practice.“It really made sense to the locals. Usually, people don’t interact with people with disabilities, as they don’t typically see them. But it was a lot of fun with the floor, meetings, and theatre performance, and I noticed that we opened people’s eyes to what living with a disability entail. In fact, we designed the whole event to be universal without being aware that it was universal design.”

From nursing at Oxford University to a new housing community in Kolding

For two years now, Martiny has been part of a project at Oxford University that translates researchers’ findings in the fields of philosophy, psychiatry, and cognitive science into something that practitioners - especially nurses - can use. This has included organising co-creative workshops with both researchers and practitioners, revolving around patients who receive nursing care.Now, he and the Enactlab are involved in designing a process for a new housing community in Kolding (Denmark), which is envisaged to house students with and without disabilities, modern families, and seniors over the age of 55. The idea is to obtain knowledge about the lives the future residents live through qualitative interviews and participatory observations. That knowledge will hopefully allow the planners and architects to design the building and environment in a way that motivates all the residents to participate in the community.

Film is a kind of bodily, universal language
- _{Kristian Mltke Martiny, Enactlab}

From university to the lived life

In general, the lived life and inclusion of people with disabilities and other special needs are the focus areas of Martiny’s work. After obtaining his business PhD and a 10-year stint at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Subjectivity Research, he felt an urge to step outside academia.“I needed another way of doing research that looked more like universal design, where you involve users early in the process. It’s so incredibly important to bring the users into the process and create something based on their lived experience and knowledge. And everyone has experience and knowledge they can contribute with,” said Martiny.While he does believe that universities’ in-depth research holds value, Martiny’s focus is to work with users to design processes that lead to products, treatments, or environments that everyone can contribute to and use on equal terms.“We also need to get out of the head and into the body. It’s hard for me to incorporate the perspectives of users and practitioners if I only work with other researchers, such as philosophers, psychiatrists, and cognitive scientists. That makes blind spots a near certainty. I want to get out of siloed disciplines and linguistically closed spaces. The problem is that researchers, architects and people with disabilities all speak different languages.”

Films can create a shared understanding of lived life

His first foray into the world of disability occurred in 2011, when the Elsass Foundation contacted his professor, Dan Zahavi at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Subjectivity Research. The foundation wanted to incorporate cognitive science into ways of working with children, youth, and adults with cerebral palsy, also known as spastic paralysis. Zahavi, facing time constraints, opted instead to send Martiny, who then together with the Elsass foundation established a business PhD on the subject.Martiny decided to incorporate film into the process to create a common language between the practitioners and create a concrete understanding of the lives the children lived. Among other things, this entailed recording videos of the children when they were spending time with their parents. Those videos created a foundation from which the practitioners - doctors, psychologists, and cognitive scientists - were better able to discuss and understand each other’s approaches.

“Film is a kind of bodily, universal language that can create a common starting point. What’s the boy doing - is he laughing? Crying? A psychologist will look at how he relates to his mother and father, while a physiotherapist will look at how he puts weight on his foot. My focus was on how we could use film to work together to design the best rehabilitation process.”

A pivotal meeting with his partner

A month into the project with the Elsass Foundation, Martiny met the comedian, journalist and disability activist Jacob Nossell, who has cerebral palsy. That meeting changed his career track.“I became really fascinated by his way of looking at the world. As a researcher, I joined the process developing his documentary film called Nature’s Disorder. A lot of my later work was based on meeting Jacob in 2011,” said Martiny.The film shows how Nossell wanted to create a provocative theatre performance at the Royal Danish Theatre about being a ‘spastic’. Nossell’s contentious approach to the concept of normality and the reality of having an inspiring, innovative intellect in a body with limitations inspired Martiny. In 2018, they co-founded the research and change centre Enactlab, which today designs social change and co-creative processes for major international companies, organisations, and foundations such as the British Welcome Trust, the American Ford Foundation and the Danish Group M.“We are focused on creating equitable processes where people contribute experiences from their lived lives.

This allows them to take part in designing meaningful solutions for their own lives. For example, if you want to involve people with disabilities, you have to devise platforms where they can contribute on equal terms with tech experts, for example, as people with disabilities often feel unequal and looked down upon.”

The concept that opened up a whole new world

The concept of universal design has given Martiny other perspectives and new avenues to co-creation, especially in relation to involving users.His collaboration with the Bevica Foundation, which is one of the involved parties in the projects in Kolding and Elsinore, opened his eyes to the possibilities of universal design. In reality, he’d been practicing the concept and method for years without being aware of it. Today, he works with architects on universal design projects such as the housing association in Kolding.“It uses different terms for involving people in the design process. We used to call it co-creation and collaboration. Universal design opens up new worlds that offer incredible possibilities.

We are learning a lot about translating knowledge into needs when working with people in other professions, such as architects.

Market products with the inclusive design angle

Martiny sees an ‘enormous potential’ in universal design, which he wants to help develop. Often, it’s simply a matter of avoiding or working through misunderstandings, e.g. with developers and architects in a construction process.“Some people claim that it’s a hassle to involve users, because doing so makes them lose control of the project. They think that the users need to be involved in deciding all things. But in reality, users don’t necessarily need to have a seat in the boardroom. Their knowledge and perspectives just need to be included so that the developers can make their decisions on a more diverse foundation of knowledge.

Economy plays a role too, of course. We can end up making a recommendation, but if implementing it would cost 10 million extra, the decision-makers may reject it.”Nevertheless, he encourages developers and manufacturers to think about including people with disabilities in their target groups when designing buildings or tech products, as designing for other than the most coveted customer segments can result in benefits to the product and marketing of it.“People with disabilities expand your reach when you design. And in your marketing, you can let people know that your product is open to everyone; that it doesn’t exclude people. In addition, you get lots of real-life knowledge incorporated into the project when you stop exclusively designing it for 37-year-old, white Danish men like myself.”