Sponsored by Sanctuary Care
Background
Since 2000, the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art has organised an annual Inclusive Design Challenge that aims to inspire and educate professional designers in inclusive design practice and show how engagement with older and disabled people can be a direct route to product and service innovation.
The original Challenge model lasted five months and was organised in partnership with the Design Business Association. You can see some of the projects that resulted here.
In 2005 we introduced a much shorter version of the Inclusive Design Challenge, reducing the time frame to 24 hours. The first 24 Hour Challenge was held at Include 2005, the RCA's biennual conference on inclusive design. This new format was subsequently piloted internationally in places as diverse as Sarajevo, Boston, Kyoto, Singapore, Oslo and Seoul. You can read about 24 Hour, 48 Hour and one-week versions of the Challenge here. See a film about the 24 Hour 2009 Dublin Challenge here.
Include 2011
This year the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design ran a 24 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge at the Include 2011 conference at the RCA, London (18-20 April 2011). The event was open to the UK design community.
Design Week was the media sponsor and Editor Lynda Relph-Knight is the Challenge Patron.
Sanctuary Care, the leading UK care provider, generously sponsored the event.
Why people entered?
The Inclusive Design Challenge opens doors for publicity and new business development, tapping into topical issues and addressing design in a new and different way. As John Corcoran of Wire Design put it: "The Challenge provides invaluable case studies. We express what we care about and believe in, the thoroughness of our approach, our ideas and design output. Some of our best clients have been attracted to us by the Challenge projects."
The Challenge
Individual designers, groups of designers and company teams from all design disciplines took part. A workshop for all participants was held in advance of the Challenge where a briefing on the process was given as well as the opportunity to meet each team's assigned design partner from the world of disability. This enabled the Challenge to get off to a fast start on delivery of the brief on 18 April. The teams worked on ideas until the next day when they presented their proposals, in response to the brief, at a special event at the RCA on the Tuesday evening 19 April, held as part of the Include conference. Each team had six minutes to present.
Judging
Two prizes were awarded - the Judges Prize and the People's Choice Award. The first was selected by a panel of design industry luminaries, the second by the audience at the event.
Full report on the 24 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge here
Pictures of the Challenge here
