How to put nonclusion to work.

Products, services, buildings, digital things: pick one design you are working on right now and ask two questions of it. Is it built as if I am already here? Does it express that I belong? The newsletter edition Say “I Already Belong” walks through the whole move.

Then look at what your design asks of people before it lets them in. Why Getting from A to B Isn’t Enough is the story I use to show the difference between access and belonging.

And if you want to feel the problem rather than read about it, take the phone vibration study out with your team: a smartphone, some Velcro, and a stretch of cobblestones. More field exercises like it are on the workshops & experiments page.

The open resources exist for exactly this: diagrams and one-pagers under CC BY 4.0, in English and Swedish, made to be dropped into slides. The Bell Curve and the three-circle model of accessibility, usability and Universal Design are the two I reach for first in a classroom.

Pair a diagram with an edition as reading. For a first seminar, On Being Disablised gives students the verb form: not being disabled, but being made disabled by a situation.

For a session where students do rather than read, run the Universal Design photo workshop: the exercise I have run more times than any other, photographing what aligns with or breaks with Universal Design. Its one-page run sheet is ready to bring to class, and the other workshops & experiments work as course exercises too.

Start with the language, because the language is where the sorting happens. Who Are All These “Others” in Policy Texts? shows how policy separates a norm from its deviations, and how categorisation shapes design is the idea behind the reading. The practical move: find where your text names groups of people, and try describing situations instead.

People often ask me for good examples. These three guidelines gather them: places to begin designing from, not standards to audit against. Each guideline has its own page, holding a handful of moves: the design acts and text acts you perform as you build or write. Every move is shown through examples that already exist, photographed or quoted as I found them.

If you would rather start by doing, the workshops & experiments page collects field exercises you can run yourself, several with a one-page run sheet to bring along.

Some things are better done than read. These are field exercises from my own research and teaching: what each one is, what it captures, and how to run it yourself. Printable run sheets are on each exercise’s page.

The most common question I get. For me, nonclusion starts with human variation, and with choosing not to divide it into a norm and deviations. The “non” refuses that sorting step, the way non-violence refuses violence: a principled stance, not an absence. My experience is that the word puts its finger on something many people have experienced without having words for it. In the municipalities we work with, people start using it immediately. And if the term itself does not survive, that is fine. What matters is that we expose and challenge the pattern of norm and deviation. More in edition #2.

The opposite. “All” tends to gloss over human variation. Nonclusion starts from it. Human difference is a state we all share, and the question for any design is how it meets that variation. What I refuse is not difference. It is the sorting of difference into a norm and its deviations, because that sorting involves power: who is let in, under what conditions, and at what cost.

They are, and that is the tension. The signs help with wayfinding, and at the same time they tell of a society where some already belong while others wait to be let in. One way forward is to describe the environment instead of the person: “step-free access” rather than a person in a wheelchair. Best of all, of course, is to remove the division in the first place. More in edition #9.

Look at how categorisations are made and relied upon. That is the signal to watch. One reader put it sharply: if a design still depends on disclosure, exceptions, or separate pathways, it has not escaped the sorting logic. More in edition #7.

No, and the difference matters. Accessibility asks whether you can get in and use something. It is measurable and necessary, but a design can meet every accessibility requirement and still produce separation. Universal design is about meeting variation with variation. A reader once called them siblings, and I agree: we want the whole family. More in edition #8.

I understand the pessimism. I have used a wheelchair for almost forty years and I am used to being positioned as outside, waiting to be let in, expected to request access and meet conditions. That conditionality is exactly the problem. The flip I am describing refuses the inside and outside logic entirely: we have never been outside. More in edition #10.