Balancing Act

Veera Fung and Sarah Mui discuss inclusive design

- Rachel Duffell

Inclusive design aims to understand and enable users of all backgrounds and abilities to participate, the power it has to disenfranchise or to empower, and how designers can do it better.

It was a lack of inclusivity for the elderly that opened Sarah Mui's eyes to inclusive design. "I witnessed how when my grandparents had to move out of a familiar neighbourhood into a new community, they couldn't get used to the new space and it caused a lot of problems, from mental to family to health issues," she says. "So, when we started One Bite [in 2014], we were thinking about a friendly city. The government kept talking about building Hong Kong as a liveable city, and we started to question what a liveable city is if we cannot be inclusive-how liveable can it be?"

Mui, co-founder and design director at One Bite, started looking at examples of liveable cities and examining what could additionally make a city "loveable". "The process [of inclusive design] is about how we empower and bring people together so that we are creating the loveable ingredients of a city together. [Considering aspects such as] age, gender and different capabilities, we try to find alternative solutions so that everyone can enjoy the city and we can have comparable experiences and eventually achieve spatial equality.