Designing for designers: insights into the knowledge users of inclusive design

Over the last twenty years, research on inclusive design has delivered a wealth of publications and initiatives, forming an emerging knowledge base for inclusive design. The inclusive design knowledge base breaks down into two discrete areas - understanding end users from many different perspectives, and understanding the information needs of the knowledge users (e.g. designers) who are involved in promoting and delivering inclusive design solutions. Much research has focused on the end users, but in recent years, understanding the needs and the characteristics of knowledge users has added a new dimension to the research task. This paper focuses on the knowledge users of inclusive design. It discusses the different types of knowledge users and their knowledge needs. The research programmes undertaken by the Inclusive Design Research Group (IDRG) are used to illustrate the process of understanding knowledge needs of designers, developing different types of tools to meet those needs and evaluating their effectiveness. The paper concludes with a discussion on how to adopt an inclusive design research methodology to effectively engage the knowledge users in the development of inclusive design tools.