Some things are unfair. Not in a dramatic, headline-grabbing way but in the quiet, persistent ways that build frustration and wear thin. Everyday barriers that leave people feeling annoyed, overlooked, and excluded. You take your child to the park but there’s nothing for them to play on. You try to use a website, but it won’t work with your screen reader. For many disabled people and their carers, each one is a frustrating reminder that the world hasn’t been designed with them in mind.
Designability is a national charity that creates innovative products and services with and for disabled people, removing barriers and helping them to live with greater independence. They’ve launched The Unfair Index. This is a UK wide research study which Designability believe will help them to identify the areas of everyday life where unfairness feels most urgent and harmful, and where people are in most need of support.
Here’s what they have to say about this research:
Here’s where it gets tricky: the thing about unfairness is that it’s not the same for everyone. It depends on who you are, where you are, and what’s around you. And most research, if we’re being honest, tends to stop at ‘this is a problem.’ We want to go further. What are the solutions? Who are they designed for? And, just as importantly, who do they leave out?
To work that out, we needed to get a handle on what ‘unfair’ actually means. Which, it turns out, isn’t simple.
Developing the DSIGN framework to measure unfairness
We ended up with something called the DSIGN framework which looks at problems through five lenses:
Degree of unfairness: How much does this affect someone’s life? How many people flag it as a priority, and how often does it show up day to day?
Sense of urgency: How urgently do people feel that something needs to change?
Impact on independence: Does it stop someone from doing the things they want or need to do?
Growth potential: Could better design actually fix it, or are effective solutions already out there?
Nature of the problem: Is this mostly about products and services, or something bigger like policy, attitudes, or inaccessible information?
That last one matters more than it might sound. Some things like changes in policy or attitudes are beyond Designability’s immediate control, and we’re trying to find the things where design is genuinely the problem: where our skills, and the expertise of the people we work with, can really make a difference. While we can advocate for change, it’s not something we can achieve alone.
Bringing together lived experience to design a fairer future
In designing The Unfair Index, we spent a long time on this debating, questioning, going back and checking our assumptions. That’s where our ten Lived Experience Advisors came in: people from all different backgrounds and identities, helping us ask the right questions. Unfair for who? In what ways? What even counts as a solution?
The disability community already has no shortage of workarounds and homegrown hacks. So many disabled people have been solving these problems themselves for years, because they have had to. This project isn’t about ignoring that. It’s about gathering it all in one place, building on it, and thinking seriously about what better could look like.
The Unfair Index isn’t a scorecard. It’s a starting point: a way of working out where we can redesign, innovate and partner with other organisations to make products and services work better for everyone.
The Unfair Index is about designing a fairer future and we hope you will join us in making the change.