 Good morning. The first beta zone is about designing for all. I find that quite thrilling. Thank you for being here. It is delightful to be representing the Smithsonian. We're here for the third year here in Davos, and it is my privilege to represent the museum where I am director, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Some of you are nodding, that's great. As you may know, we're located right on Museum Mile on 91st and 5th Avenue, and our purpose is to inspire, educate, and empower people through design. What's really exciting us is who's coming to Cooper Hewitt. Our demographic is the millennial audience, and what does that mean? That means that our content is reverberating for the younger generation. And why is that important? Because the younger generation are our future leaders and our future designers. Shanaid, you were just incredible. Thank you so much. And all of you should know that Shanaid was one of our earliest inspirations at Cooper Hewitt for our focus on accessibility and inclusive thinking and working. Design is all about empathy, and keeping the user at the center of the design process. So when the German idea for a design product is there, the user is brought in, but not just at that moment, at every stage of development of the design product. I'm here today to really share with you just how powerful design can be, intangibly and effectively improving how the world works. So to tell you a little bit about myself, my passion for design began very early. We moved from Paris to a suburb north of Boston when I was very small, and my Swiss father, who was a professor of engineering, transformed our basement into a laboratory of creativity and experimentation. So any given afternoon, there would be telescopes in the making, and we had a dark room where we developed film. There were oscilloscopes in the basement as well as red lasers bouncing off prisms and strobes. It was really something. But my favorite thing was setting type on my grandfather's printing press. So yes, I did have business cards when I was five. Not exactly useful, but quite an inspiration for my love for design. The importance of design really hit home for me at Bates College, where one of my peers, Eric Condo, was injured in a very serious motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the mid-chest down. Now, Eric was and is a keen athlete, and he was not going to let this accident or his being in a wheelchair restrict him. So he began adapting his wheelchair into a completely different type of mobility piece of equipment. So many of us like to hover board and skateboard. So does Eric. Being in a wheelchair doesn't restrict him. So he is enjoying that freedom of movement while gaining a sense of balance, coordination, and confidence. Eric uses a quote, uses a phrase that really resonates in my mind, which is we are the pilots, not the passengers. We are the pilots, not the passengers. When he's describing the relationship between himself and his equipment or the wheelchair. Equal access is a human rights issue, right? Shanae had mentioned there are a billion people in the world with a disability. Diversity is humanity's greatest asset, but inclusion is our greatest challenge. So I'm happy and proud to say that at Cooper Hewitt, inclusivity is part of our core and our exhibitions are embedded with accessibility as our education programs. So some of these images are showing you our high school students who are learning empathy. So we give them design tools like suits, age suits, as well as glasses that simulate poor vision so they can empathize with their elders around them. We also invite design thinkers that focus on designing for disability to Cooper Hewitt on a very regular basis. Here at a recent symposium you see Cat Holmes on the right hand side of the image. Cat Holmes is director of user experience at Google and the author of this wildly popular book entitled Mismatch. This book has been a great inspiration to me and what really is important here is the title because it's so apt. Mismatched human interactions is where the problem lies. That is where the problem lies because when something is not being designed for the user it's excluding that user. So Cat talks a lot about inclusion and exclusion to give you a few simple examples. The ice cream scoop. So you're trying to get the chocolate chip ice cream out of the gallon container but you're left handed and it's not made for a left-hander. Or you're at the grocery and at the digital checkout it's all in English. You don't speak English. The type is too small. You don't have 2020 vision. There are all these things where people are not thinking about the end user. At Cooper Hewitt we're a team of about 90 people and we're working together and with communities representing several different disabilities so that we can learn from them but also integrate people into the Cooper Hewitt experience from the very start. I was really excited the other day when someone in our design shop waved me down and said Caroline come here come here and I said what and he said I just learned universal sign language so I can communicate with our deaf visitors. I hope that you've seen our marvelous exhibition Access Possibility which is right outside this room and if you haven't this is my invitation to jump into the exhibition after the beta zone. What you'll see right at the entrance is this terrific accessible icon. So the designer Sarah Hendren and her friend and professor of philosophy Brian Glene. So Brian and Sarah worked on this gorilla street art campaign a couple of years ago where they would put stickers over the 50 year old accessible icon. Why? To show that people in wheelchairs are not statically sitting down in their wheelchairs they're dynamic they're moving forward they're making change. So what's exciting about this gorilla campaign is it's now all over the world individuals are using it governments are using it companies of all sizes are using it and it is so important to show that inclusivity must be a core value. It's also an emoji on your phone by the way so as you tweet today about our exhibition you can actually use the emoji it's part of the public domain. Now let me grab a prop for a second. This is a little big for me and you may be wondering why I'm holding this but it fits in perfectly with the theme of this talk. So Matthew Walzer is a teenager from Florida with cerebral palsy and his one dream was to have a shoe a basketball shoe that would give him the proper support that he needed where he wouldn't have to tie it but he would have easy access in and out. So he wrote to Nike and said you know LeBron James has this super cool pair of basketball sneakers I'd love something like that where there's no tying mechanism so I can go in and out with no problem and that's exactly what this is with this weird access his foot can just go in and out you can try this in the exhibition as well. The point here though is Matthew got the shoes thanks to a wonderful partnership with the legendary shoe designer Toby Hatfield and the stigma was gone. He had the cool shoe like everybody else so that's a beautiful example of an athletic company working with the community in need and coming up with something that represents design for all. So depending on the year of your births this playground picture may bring back memories or not but my point here is many playgrounds are not accessible and oftentimes they're even downright dangerous right. So in Palo Alto there was a mother of a child on the autism scale who was experiencing exclusion everywhere they went and she had the idea to create a magical playground and that's exactly what she did. So there are slides called dignity slides so some children have trouble dismounting at the bottom of the slide they simply move to the left or the right and the child behind them can slide down. There are also hideaway huts so many people on the autism spectrum would find the frenetic atmosphere of the playground just too much but they can go into a hideaway hut. All of these experiences were built and designed in collaboration with the children this was an inclusive design project. I'm going to share a video with you of the magical harp so we have brought the chandelier harp with us to Davos for all of you to enjoy today and what's so meaningful about the harp is and the entire playground it is a joyful incubator for a more tolerant society right where people with disabilities people without disabilities can come together and enjoy being outside enjoy playing together and respecting one another. So I'm going to take a little shift after sharing these three great examples of design and disability to point out how design can make such change in the arena the themes that we so often discuss here at West from poverty to equal access to water access. So starting with user centered design in Rwanda enter zipline so Rwanda mountainous terrain frequent rains that just completely flood the streets result in blood and vaccines not getting to the hospitals in time. So zipline which is an automated logistics company in California came up with this drone which is the fastest commercial drone delivery system in the world and they've done nearly 5,000 trips just in Rwanda alone. It's going so well that it'll be expanding across Africa and even to the United States in the coming year and what's so important here is the doctors and their teams can text the team at zipline and they quickly prepare the blood or the medicine it gets into the zipline and it goes straight to that hospital making a difference and saving lives. In South Africa it is often the women and the children who fetch the potable water and they'll walk for kilometers and kilometers to find that water and then often bring it back in ways that are uncomfortable perhaps with the water on their heads resulting in all sorts of neck and spinal injury. Enter cue drum. It's durable, it's cheap, it's fast, women can roll it with ease as can children. So what does that mean? That means more time and freedom for the women and children to make a difference in their communities and learn. Lastly the worka water tower in Ethiopia. The worka water tower is named for the worka tree which is an endangered fig tree in Ethiopia where community members come together because the tree provides prodigious shade. Now this tower weighs about 75 kilograms and it's 15 meters high. It's made out of hemp rope, polyester, very easy to construct and the beautiful thing about this tower is it's harvesting water in a sustainable way. What kind of water? It is collecting fog, water from fog and mist and dew and rain and you might think oh well they get you know a cup a day, not at all. We're seeing massive amounts of water every day collected from the worka water tower and the architect has given all of the plans to the world. So it is open source and he's also leading trainings so that communities nearby can also have a water tower. In conclusion, inclusive design to advance human experience is really focused on one thing and that is we need to better understand the human experience together right. Going forward it is not enough to design for some people or most people. We need to design for diversity and we need to do that now. It's a great opportunity to bring in diverse voices into the design process, to learn from what we do not know and most importantly to come together as a community and expand those people who believe in inclusion. So today we ask you join the circle. Thank you so much.