 Welcome, everyone, to Cooper Hewitt's National Design Week celebrating its 20th year. Today's winner salon, 2020, shares the National Design Award winners from this year with all of you in 20, 20-minute programs. I'm Kara McCarty, Director of Curatorial at Cooper Hewitt, and it is my honor to share today's panel with you. We have Patricia Moore, winner of the Design Mind Award, and Pinar Guvenk and Christina Malin of Open Style Lab, winners of Emerging Design Award, and this is the first year we have offered the Emerging Design Award category. The title of today's talk is Why Inclusive Design Matters. This is a very exciting and important and meaningful topic to me, and before we launch this conversation, I just want to say that we often say here at the museum, design matters, design is an agent of change, design improves lives, but to me there is no better description of that than the type of work that today's designers are doing. I just have to thank them all, congratulate them for winning the award, and also to say that I think it's very much a sign of our times that finally the type of work that they've been devoting their careers to is finally getting the important recognition that it deserves. So thank you, and let's get started. When I was starting my career in the early 1980s, I remember reading an article in the New York Times that has really been indelible, and it was about this young woman who was 26 who disguised herself as a woman in her 80s, and she embarked on an experiment living in New York City. That young woman was Patricia Moore, and I remember the article was accompanied by a photograph, a very large photograph of her crossing a street, hunched over New York City, and I first of all think that that was really risky, courageous of you, and I would just love to have you describe that experience a bit, and what inspired you to do that? You know, Carol, it wasn't so much an inspiration that came in a moment. There wasn't white lightning and bells going off, and anything where I just had a recollection of, oh, I must do this thing. But rather, I think I'd been trained from the moment of birth to be aware of my elders. I'm from Buffalo, New York, I come from a very small Irish family, and my friends in my early years were all my neighbors, and they were primarily elder widows, and I was just their baby doll, and I learned early on that there was nothing wrong with spending a happy afternoon with a neighbor who just wanted to squeeze the stuffing out of me and give me jelly, jam, bread, and all sorts of treats, and just talk with me and tell me stories, and it was just heaven on earth, and I think because I did have such loving relationships within my own home with my grandparents, it never occurred to me, as I matured and went through school and started here in New York with Raymond Lowe's office, that we would exclude our elders, but we did. They were never part of a design brief, and so when that kismet moment came where I met Barbara Kelly, who was the makeup designer for Saturday Night Live, doing prosthetics, turning Belushi into a cone head and all these things, I asked her if she could make me look like an elder, and she said, sure, you know, because she's from Brooklyn, and she was matter of fact about it. I was quite innocently matter of fact about it, and it only took about two weeks before my first appearance, which was at a conference in Ohio State of architects who were planning to design residences for our elders, and I went as an elder, and what I found was nobody paid any attention to me, and these were the informed gatekeepers, and it wasn't until the second day of the conference when I came out as myself that people said, oh Patty, you missed the first day, it was fabulous, and then someone said, you know, there was an old lady here, maybe we should have asked her some questions, and then we told them it was me, and the whole tone of the conference, the meeting changed to focus on where are our prejudices coming from, what is this all about, what is the exclusion of design all about, so through that whole experience I realized I had tumbled into my path for my entire career, so now nearly 50 years of fighting for inclusivity, and we're still at it. So do you think that if you were to embark on that same experiment today, that you would encounter a lot of what you experienced before, or do you think things have changed, what has changed? Well things have changed significantly, but globally the numbers of elders have risen at such startling rates. We have governments and communities unable to care properly beyond family structure, so I just spent 10 years before this current presidency making sure that the people in China could have resources for caring for elders, and it was an initiative from our government looking at actually the impact of the One Child policy, which by the way I have to say is a meeting you know no women attended. There's simply some types of governance that are so clearly wrong because of the exclusion of the female voice, and I say that as not just a proud feminist but a realist, no one was right, you have to have two of everything on the arc or someone's going to get left out, and so this work really taught us that it wasn't just China that had a problem, and a critical problem, but countries all over the world are going to struggle with the presence of elders and the lack of what we call elder care, which really is just looking at design sensitivity for the lifespan. We all of us deserve a high quality of life, and that necessitates appropriate design. Yes, I read this really staggering statistic recently that in the United States, every day 10,000 people turn 65. Wow, if you think about that and you multiply it by like 40 or 50, that's a town, and it is the white elephant in front of us that I'd love to get back to in this discussion because it really is, I mean, it's a topic that we're all facing, and I don't think we're really prepared for, and I know you all have something to say about it, but I'd love to just hear a little bit about your background OpenStyleLab. What inspired you to start OpenStyleLab? Well, OpenStyleLab first started as a social service project at MIT and really seeing how technology and science could only go so far, but at hospitals, for example, you wouldn't even see people being able to dress themselves. And Grace, who's our other board member, she was quick to realize, well, okay, we're doing this, but why don't we have fashion designers or any other designers on board to manage that. So we created this structure of teaming up with engineers, designers, and occupational or physical therapists to co-create with people with disabilities, and seeing the lack of awareness around it, we moved OpenStyleLab to New York City in 2017, which is, I guess, when I met Christina. And on my day-to-day, I managed an architecture and design studio outside of OSL, and I was appalled by my own lack of awareness around the subject. In architecture, we talk about ADA compliance, but inclusion is far greater than just accessibility in buildings. And I grew up in Turkey when, I guess, in a developing country, inclusive design is not even a topic to discuss. And I was amazed how, you know, growing up, I never perceived something as a design fault, but always as, oh, you know, he's not able to wear it, or I'm not able to do it. Like, it was always like, you know, blaming ourselves and having something not work. So meeting Christina, actually, was very eye-opening to me, and you can tell your story, I guess, like joining. Yeah, so about eight years ago, my arms started to become paralyzed. They still actually don't know why. So I couldn't really join an advocacy group. I tried going to the White House, talking to Trump, trying to get things changed for people with disabilities, but then really realized that I could possibly make a lot more impact by creating products and advertising that are inclusive of all. And my background is I work at Wonderman Thompson, it's the world's largest agency, and none of the brands were talking about inclusive design. So one day, I thought I'd have to quit my job, because I couldn't put my coat on by myself, and I lived alone and had no use of my arms, and I was referred to Open Style Lab. And from there, became an active board member with Pinar and Grace, because I felt like I could really make a change from making these physical products that allow people to live their everyday lives. And then what I do at Open Style Lab is I help them market it. There's actually more redheads in ads than people with disabilities. There's more fashion lines for dogs than people with disabilities, but one-fifth of the world identify as having a disability, and it's a $8 trillion market. So it's really just kind of bringing that awareness and getting Open Style Lab's voice out there has been so important and kind of what I've done on my day-to-day, but it really is life-changing. I used to feel like I didn't matter and I was broken, and now I feel like I'm a part of the team changing really how design is done. So how do we get to the CEOs? I'm starting to see little cracks in that area where there is interest, but how do we get to the CEOs to really embed this, not even just in the products, but just making their whole work environment that extends to just our environment more accessible, more inclusive? Yes, she said it dollars, right? Unfortunately, we were talking about this earlier. You would expect for them to be like, oh yeah, this is common sense or human rights, we should be doing this, but in business it doesn't work like that really. You only get their interest when you start talking about how big of a market this is that is untapped, and I think whenever we go into more corporate consulting, we suggest first we should come in and give workshops to the team to get everybody on board and have the same level of awareness on this, and then we move on to, okay, what do you want to do? What is the research that we need to do together and what are we developing? But really having all interests aligned or even having the departments talk to each other, that takes forever. So I think most of the corporations see the value of teaming up with more of a lean team that could help guide them, but having them take action I think takes forever, but dollars interest them. So let's back up a moment because the word inclusive design is not something that a lot of people really understand. So I'd love to hear from you, Patty, how you define inclusive design. Well, in the 70s when we were trying to just brand what my philosophy was emerging to be, we were using universal design. So Ron Mace at North Carolina State University as an architect had used it. I actually had used it on a housing project I did as a senior project at the Rochester Institute of Technology. And when we met one another we became fast friends because I had always argued we need to have the architects on our side and he always said we have to have product designers and so, you know, clearly Noah's Ark was filling up nicely. So in broadening the scope of the family it did become very frustrating when you mentioned the ADA actually felt my heart sort of flopped because even though I was one of the authors of the bill, I felt it was one of the worst disappointments of my career that we actually were having to mandate a law that said every citizen in this country deserves access to every community and opportunities for jobs. And some days I just put my head on the pillow and think that's how ridiculous we are if we don't have a law we don't do just the right thing. So I'm thrilled though to see Gen Z especially and the younger millennials totally understanding this need for universality, inclusivity and recognizing how plain stupid it is to exclude anyone from any opportunity either as a consumer or as a fellow human on the planet to have the best life that they can lead. I mean kind of how I get CEOs to really act and get people to talk about is they really don't know what inclusive design is so I email them in the header it says the $8 trillion market you're missing question mark and then I give them an example of what inclusive design is and that's really kind of how I'm able to get people to actually care and understand because you know a lot of people don't know what inclusive design is and that's definitely an issue because it's not in the curriculum today. Well when we're looking at a future that is today it's $89,000 a year median price to place a loved one into assisted living in some parts of the country it's double that and now that we have so many people with power who have elder parents facing that end of life they're waking up to the fact that this is completely wrong so in interior design we've been doing aging in place we need to rebrand that it's a terrible phrase but it speaks to the fact that all of us at least deserves to have a nest of our own and then a place where we can stay for the entirety of our life and it shouldn't be a pseudo hospital. Right so the as I said earlier this is like the elephant the white elephant in the room and we're spending a lot of money resources to keep people alive as long as possible but we're really not adjusting our cities to accommodate that so what would you say would be the next two or three steps for us to start really moving and acting on this to become more accommodating for this huge wave of older adults? I think we've all touched on the edification and the education piece I'm surprised that we have to go back and study this yet again and introduce it yet again but I would go as early as possible in schooling to literally preschools I've lectured at Google preschools on what I do and the students just are so enamored because they love their grandmother and they love their granddaddy and they can't wait to go home and tell everyone they met a lady who used to be 85 and you know you can imagine they're wondering what are they teaching these kids but it's so important for us to be edified and I think that really is going to be the primary step it's already too late when a family has a crisis and certainly as we all look to our own families my mother's end of life came after a fall and I'll make myself very emotional Stephen Colbert, whom I admire had Sir Paul McCartney on recently and he did a piece, I guess his writers maybe weren't aware of how cruel it was to create children book covers that showed I've fallen and I can't get up jokes and I really thought we had gotten past that and I still have to calm myself enough to write to Stephen about how wrong that was but you could see Sir Paul McCartney was looking at him like he wasn't pleased, I'm certain of it you could just read his face so sorry that got me a little emotional but to have your own mother die from a fall and then to turn on the television and see that it's disheartening at the very least and I think one out of three people 65 or older have falls so another staggering statistic so what, just as we just have a couple more minutes left and we've got a lot of students I can see here what advice would you give to young students today? I mean I think sort of being the emergent designer ourselves we've benefited a lot from strategic collaborations and really finding your people to collaborate with I mean you're always only as good as your team and this is given, you can only achieve so much on your own and having a diverse group of people a diverse team really helps you get far and whether you have an idea or product design or a mission, whatever that is you cannot make impact on your own so I think our generation is very keen on social impact but it happens with the most tedious tasks maybe and with a lot of work with a great group of people and another thing that is really important and I see it in a lot of design work today particularly the areas that you're all working in is really working with the users that is, it's a game changer and I think that we're seeing a lot better products because of it and we are learning many of their needs because of it Yeah, everyone says well I don't know someone that's disabled I have literally gone on my Instagram and said does anyone have a friend with cerebral palsy I need to talk to them and I get ten replies so it's really putting yourself out there to get to know people that are not like you and I think that's probably one of the biggest advice I would say Yesterday we met with students and I wore a t-shirt that was the design of a little boy from Florida and you might recall this summer this very sad story that it was at his school the day you wore your favorite college team colors and he didn't have a t-shirt so he tried making one and he was bullied long story short the t-shirt I was wearing was one of a hundred thousand that have been sold the funds are being raised for an anti-bullying app that started and then the University of Tennessee the school that he was trying to support is giving him complete education for free once he gets out of the fourth grade and I was explaining to the students that I was meeting with how important it was to recognize now the power of design to be an ambassador for change so in the 70s when I trained and when I began my career that wasn't our focus but I'm so grateful today that it is because literally every moment of our day is about design Well that's I can't think of a more poignant way to end and also and on the topic of empathy Thank you very very much It's been a real honor to be with you