Revisiting the concept of Inclusivity - learnings from a project.

It all started out innocently as a response to community service project call by an ngo NOW PDP -working for people with disabilities. My IVS co-teachers and I were looking for projects to initiate our newly inducted Design and Art students to the idea of using their practice for service of people. Art is often an expression of the self as is the practice. Design on the other hand is supposed to respond a need or a problem. Though these polar views are neither always true nor often possible. However this binary often causes stress during the creative process when a project demands that you to explore an unfamiliar territory, in this case working with people with multiple disabilities.

The brief was vague to begin with but a visit to the site and meeting with the team in-charge revealed quite a bit. What ensued is typical of what most people will experience when they connect with a project....the heart connection. Needless to say it took more time than we had bargained for, had many more meetings than what we had initially thought we would need to put in, infringed on our life - I actually dreamed about it, and exhausted us mentally and physically. I must mention that it gave me the opportunity to visit areas of the city I had not explored before, like the truck 'chamak patti' markets. Also got to get my hands all dirty, worked and shaped plaster and fretted over material not responding to my design the way I wanted it to. Material often has a mind of its own.

                

                                                             Preps for the project

I would now like to speak about the learnings and challenges rather than branch of on a description of the project.  Our inspiration was a cleverly crafted slogan of NOWPDP, 'A Part not Apart'. The aim of the project was to help disabled students work on a mural painting to celebrate a day. The slogan made us think of working on creating an activity which could be participated in by people with multiple disabilities. The centre catered to people varying physical disabilities including hearing, speech and sight as well and mentally challenged. We looked at creating simple silhouettes which could filled in easily by students through using techniques like sponging, hand impressions as well as brushes etc. as we did not know what the students' disabilities would be. Then we had to look at scale of the imagery so as to be accessible for people on wheel chairs. How much could be left to students and how much should be done by us? The students should not feel that we were underestimating them due to their disability. How to communicate with students who were hearing and speech impaired? All these consideration were on our mind. And then the biggest challenge, when designing a visual activity - how do you include students with visual impairment? And after the implementation of the mural how do you include the people with visual impairment in the primarily visual experience. Our mural included tactile surface to be responsive to sight impaired, and we included chimes to create a sound element which would serve to attract the sight impaired towards the tactile part of the mural. However we decided against braille as the ones could see would be left out of the understanding process. With regards to writing in Urdu, we learnt that the blind can read english letters and therefore it is best that we write in english.
            

IVS team getting ready for the big day 

The pictures show our design response. However what i want to add is what the pictures don't show. Our concept of inclusivity underwent a change due to this activity. We learnt that ideas we celebrated as being 'zabardast', creating tactile surfaces, keeping the height of image in mind, adding chimes, were nothing new to them. But we in our narcissism felt the ideas were novel. We felt communicating with the ones who were hearing and speech impaired would be a problem. They made communication with us so easy. We pondered so much about finding imagery which would be easy for the mentally challenged to paint and they surprised us completely with their amazing skills. The word 'inclusive' meant us experiencing them as much as them experiencing us. Two of our team members, students of IVS also had speech and hearing impairment. They played a central role in this project as they became the key communicators between us and the primarily hearing and speech impaired team of volunteer students, a role we had never considered them for them before.

  

                       
                               Finale- co-creators working on the mural on the final day


Thank you so much for letting us be part of you and learning from you. The slogan 'A part not Apart' carries a new significance for us now.

IVS team