Universal Design

So I have been transfixed with the whole concept of universal design since I remembered it existed. What I mean to say, is I remember the concept of universal design from back in the day when I was enthralled with the social sciences and I truly believed (which I still do) in the design of things so that they are as usable by as many people regardless of age, ability, or circumstance.

Nevertheless, I forgot about Universal Design until about eight months ago when I was designing a two-factor authentication system that use biometrics as the second factor. At the time, iris scans were all the rage so I planned on going in that direction. However, someone in a wheel chair pointed out that iris scan devices were a potential problem. They reasoned that it would be difficult to place a retina scanner in such a manner that it was comfortably accessible by both someone standing and someone in a wheelchair. Either the person standing would have to stoop down or the person in the wheelchair would have to pull themselves up. Neither scenario, on a day to day basis, was feasible.

So in the end, I spent a bit of extra time looking for a biometric device that had a similar accuracy to an iris scan and would be accepted by the general population. In the end, I settled on a device that scanned the veins in the back of the hand. Such a device could be placed high or low enough (depending on your perspective) to use without contorting the body and the accuracy rate was about the same (And yes, in case you are wondering, it did work through surgical gloves).

Universal design is essential to the adoption of technology. If I would have gone ahead with the Iris scan, the client could have caused a great degree of inconvenience to their wheelchair bound employees and i would have probably never been asked to design a solution for them again.

But I don’t want you to think that universal design is only valid in the context of disabilities. Universal design is a practice that will make your technology solutions more usable and successful. It is so important that I am going to add a separate category for universal design. As a subject matter for this category, i am going to take a randomly selected concept from the best book I have ever seen on this subject “Universal Principles of Design” and apply it to the practice of IT architecture.