[Music]
[Applause]
I’d like to talk about inclusion and how
the innovation that it inspires benefits
all of us
now some of you may be wondering what an
english-speaking educated heterosexual
cisgendered Caucasian male is doing up
here talking about inclusion I’ve really
never been excluded from anything in my
life but I’m an advocate for a huge
group of people who have largely been
ignored and excluded from many aspects
of our society and I’m talking about the
40 million people in the United States
who have at least one disability that
number grows enormously if we talk about
the worldwide population and now we all
understand the concept of a disability
but by applying such a negative label to
folks who have one we’re doing them a
disservice so let’s get rid of that
prefix dis which literally means a part
and instead focus on able or ability and
call our friends differently abled I’d
like to share with you my journey with
the differently-abled an inclusion and
inclusion enabled design see I’ve been
teaching engineering design at Stanford
University for 14 years and in the past
I did that by looking at historical
failures and I would have students
analyze them and then I would teach them
a process to follow
and if they did presumably disasters
would be avoided in the future and as
part of that work I just realized that I
love to teach and so I thought I’d give
back to the local community here and I
volunteered to teach engineering
concepts in the community high school in
the STEM program science technology
engineering and math and it was there
that I met a young man named Zach
Crichton zach has cerebral palsy he’s
wheelchair abled and he can’t speak and
I’m ashamed to say that when I first met
Zach that I made some very incorrect
assumptions about his intellect why is
it by the way that when we see someone
who’s wheelchair abled or who looks
differently than us that we so often
make incorrect inferences about them why
is it that we tend to focus on human
struggle and human challenge rather than
human potential is it because when we
see someone who is not whole that we
somehow assume they’re incomplete I’m
not sure why we do this I sadly did it
was AK and I know that we can change it
so while I continue to work with Zach
through his para educator we bonded on
some great topics like recycling and
sustainability and mathematics in fact I
was doing some math with Zach the other
day and he never ceases to amaze me
how quickly he can solve problems in his
head and at the same time I was working
with Zach I was teaching my students at
Stanford and I had this realization that
they really weren’t that much different
that Zach just lacks a means of
self-expression and by that I mean all
of his
and vision and wisdom there’s no simple
way for him to get those out of his head
and communicated directly to us I
further thought that my students would
benefit from this realization that
there’s a young man just like them
except for this lack of means of
self-expression so I set up a Skype
conference call between Zach and my
class at Stanford the students got to
meet Zach over the Internet and I gave
them a problem an engineering problem
related to his wheelchair they loved
trying to solve this problem they really
enjoyed it and that inspired me to
create a new class at Stanford that
looked at the concepts of engineering
design not through examination of
historical failures but by looking
through the lens of the
differently-abled so I ran this idea by
my teaching assistant Danielle Lucas
Danny was majoring in behavior design at
the time a senior and she said she was
all in you see Danny has a brother
Justin who’s also differently-abled and
she said I will give you whatever
support you need to make this class
happen so after she finished with her
final exams last fall we sat down we
hammered out a syllabus a course
description I submitted the requisite
paperwork and our new class there to
care compassion that design was born
taught it for the first time at Stanford
last spring and I’m teaching it right
now this fall this is a true engineering
course and in fact it’s one of the first
in the School of Engineering at Stanford
that meets Stanford’s requirement for
all undergraduates on engaging diversity
so we teach the concepts of engineering
design by challenging the students to
solve problems that are confronted by
the differently-abled but beyond the
concepts of engineering design we wanted
to teach the students to approach design
with empathy we wanted them to embrace
the notion that they should consider how
all humans interact with designed
objects and we wanted to do that not by
showing them slides on a screen but by
having them interact face-to-face
hand-to-hand hand to prosthesis if
necessary with differently abled people
we wanted them to live this experience
and we also thought what better way to
launch the class than to have a young
man who inspired it travel from Friday
Harbor to Palo Alto and meet these
Stanford students so they could
experience his spirit now I knew
logistically that this would be very
difficult C’s ACK needs to travel with
his wheelchair
it’s his home base it’s his comfort zone
and doing that by a commercial air
service would be super difficult
so after long search I found a wonderful
man who donated his time and his
aircraft and he brought Zack Zacks
mother Zacks paraeducator Zacks stem
teacher and myself down to Palo Alto and
back Zack was a star at Stanford his
mother told me that this trip literally
changed the trajectory of his life and
one of the reasons she said that
happened was cuz when she saw him and
what he was capable of in front of all
these students there was no way he was
getting away with so much in the future
the students asked Zach lots of
questions and of course they all had to
be formulated with yes or no answers
because that’s the only way that Zach
can respond I gave them a design problem
related to the headrest on Zach’s chair
you see that headrest sometimes doesn’t
support his head well and when that
happens his head droops and when his
head droops Zach drools and Zach has
told us that’s demeaning to him that’s a
problem that he wants all students did a
great job came up with some wonderful
designs and I hope to see them someday
on wheelchairs legs axe in the future
now our students didn’t just get to meet
Zach they met many other wonderful and
inspiring differently-abled people one
of whom was Adrian Rodriguez Adrian’s
low vision he’s completely blind in one
eye and 2400 in the other so what that
means is what you can see from 400 feet
away Adrian has to be but 20 feet to
have the same experience oh and he
graduated in 2016 from Stanford with a
degree in computer science he did this
through hard work and perseverance he
had to sit in the front row of his
classes with a telescope so he could
look up through it and just see a small
portion of what the professor was
transcribing on the board Adrian told
the students a story about when he when
he was young and his parents were trying
to get him into public schools and one
administrator said okay but he has to
have a glass eye his parents complied
with the request and Adrian wore the
prosthesis but it was incredibly painful
in fact it was so painful that after a
short amount of time he refused to wear
it
and isn’t it sad that someone’s notion
of inclusion was to make Adrian’s
outward appearance different for their
own comfort this is not what’s next
indeed if our idea of inclusion is to
make the differently-abled look normal
then I submit it’s we who are disabled
we gave the students an assignment to
design a device to help Adrian with
certain tasks they did a wonderful job
Adrian is actually headed to Thailand in
a few weeks he’s going to teach blind
people computer programming using
tactile aids just amazing
so why inclusive design I can think of
four main reasons why we should be
inclusive in our designs the first thing
it is unquestionably the right thing to
do
who on earth wants to be excluded number
two regulatory there are actually laws
that say we must be inclusive in certain
aspects of our design mostly from the
architectural perspective the third
reason is the market forty million
people in the United States alone that’s
fifteen percent of the population and by
the way by looking around this room I
can tell that by virtue of aging and
then not-too-distant future some of us
are going to be differently abled we’re
gonna be want to be part of that market
the fourth reason is untapped intellect
by being inclusive in our designs
we can tap into the knowledge and wisdom
of the differently-abled
and you’ll see shortly that that
produces benefits for all of us but no
matter what the reason one thing that’s
clear is inclusion needs to be in the
forefront of design it cannot be an
afterthought and to that end a group of
companies have started a program called
teach access teach access got wind of
dare to care and they invited Adria and
I over to the accessibility lab at Yahoo
to see what the latest and greatest was
and there we saw the efforts that teach
access was engaging in to teach
professors how to teach students the
industry Beck’s best practices in
inclusive design encoding all of these
companies participate in teach access
these are household names they want
students that are coming out of the best
universities to already know to already
have these tools in their pocket to
already know what the best practices are
an inclusion and accessible coding so
what happens when we’re inclusive in our
designs I think you guys are going to be
really surprised about the tools that
you use every single day that had their
Genesis and inclusion texting texting
was started in the mid 1970s by Vinton
Cerf the father of the internet he was
looking for a better way to communicate
between himself and his friends who were
all hard of hearing speech synthesis was
actually developed in the mid 1930s at
Bell Labs as a means to help the deaf
speak more intelligently optical
character recognition OCR this is the
feat of taking typewritten text and
getting it into a computer
in a format that it’s more usable this
was developed in the mid-1970s as a way
to give the blind access to more types
of media but beyond the realm of
computers there’s many tools that you
use every day that I’m sure you had no
idea had there Genesis and inclusion the
telephone Alexander Graham Bell invented
the telephone in the late 1870s his
mother and his wife were both deaf he
was doing research on how to enable the
deaf with better means of communication
how came the telephone recorded music
was developed in the mid 1930s as a
means to give long playing music and
literature accessibility to the blind
the device called the Reid phone was
developed and later turned into 33 and
1/3 rpm records and you know what
happened after that the huddle on
weekends this time of year we see
football players gathered in Huddle’s
the huddle was developed at Gallaudet
University a school for the deaf so that
deaf football players could call place
amazing so we can see what happens when
we’re inclusive in our designs and the
same way that Martin Luther King did not
want his children to be excluded when he
said that one day he has a dream that
one day his children will not be judged
by the color of their skin but rather by
the content of their character I have a
dream
I have a dream that Zak Crichton will
not be judged by the posture of his body
rather by the strength of his spirit I
have a dream that Hadrian Rodriguez will
not be judged by the cloudiness of his
eye but rather the clarity of his vision
to help others and I have a dream that
people who cannot speak and they have a
voice that will let them express their
wisdom to us and now Zack is gonna tell
you about his dream
my dream hi my name is Zach Creighton
and maybe speaking in someone else’s
voice but these are my thoughts my dream
is to be able to talk to people to let
them know that I’m an intelligent person
with thoughts and feelings just like
them and to share by wicked sense of
human I’ll leave you with this quote
from Charlotte Bronte I am no bird and
no net ensnares me I’m a free human
being with an independent will thank you
thank you
you
[Applause]
I’d like to talk about inclusion and how
the innovation that it inspires benefits
all of us
now some of you may be wondering what an
english-speaking educated heterosexual
cisgendered Caucasian male is doing up
here talking about inclusion I’ve really
never been excluded from anything in my
life but I’m an advocate for a huge
group of people who have largely been
ignored and excluded from many aspects
of our society and I’m talking about the
40 million people in the United States
who have at least one disability that
number grows enormously if we talk about
the worldwide population and now we all
understand the concept of a disability
but by applying such a negative label to
folks who have one we’re doing them a
disservice so let’s get rid of that
prefix dis which literally means a part
and instead focus on able or ability and
call our friends differently abled I’d
like to share with you my journey with
the differently-abled an inclusion and
inclusion enabled design see I’ve been
teaching engineering design at Stanford
University for 14 years and in the past
I did that by looking at historical
failures and I would have students
analyze them and then I would teach them
a process to follow
and if they did presumably disasters
would be avoided in the future and as
part of that work I just realized that I
love to teach and so I thought I’d give
back to the local community here and I
volunteered to teach engineering
concepts in the community high school in
the STEM program science technology
engineering and math and it was there
that I met a young man named Zach
Crichton zach has cerebral palsy he’s
wheelchair abled and he can’t speak and
I’m ashamed to say that when I first met
Zach that I made some very incorrect
assumptions about his intellect why is
it by the way that when we see someone
who’s wheelchair abled or who looks
differently than us that we so often
make incorrect inferences about them why
is it that we tend to focus on human
struggle and human challenge rather than
human potential is it because when we
see someone who is not whole that we
somehow assume they’re incomplete I’m
not sure why we do this I sadly did it
was AK and I know that we can change it
so while I continue to work with Zach
through his para educator we bonded on
some great topics like recycling and
sustainability and mathematics in fact I
was doing some math with Zach the other
day and he never ceases to amaze me
how quickly he can solve problems in his
head and at the same time I was working
with Zach I was teaching my students at
Stanford and I had this realization that
they really weren’t that much different
that Zach just lacks a means of
self-expression and by that I mean all
of his
and vision and wisdom there’s no simple
way for him to get those out of his head
and communicated directly to us I
further thought that my students would
benefit from this realization that
there’s a young man just like them
except for this lack of means of
self-expression so I set up a Skype
conference call between Zach and my
class at Stanford the students got to
meet Zach over the Internet and I gave
them a problem an engineering problem
related to his wheelchair they loved
trying to solve this problem they really
enjoyed it and that inspired me to
create a new class at Stanford that
looked at the concepts of engineering
design not through examination of
historical failures but by looking
through the lens of the
differently-abled so I ran this idea by
my teaching assistant Danielle Lucas
Danny was majoring in behavior design at
the time a senior and she said she was
all in you see Danny has a brother
Justin who’s also differently-abled and
she said I will give you whatever
support you need to make this class
happen so after she finished with her
final exams last fall we sat down we
hammered out a syllabus a course
description I submitted the requisite
paperwork and our new class there to
care compassion that design was born
taught it for the first time at Stanford
last spring and I’m teaching it right
now this fall this is a true engineering
course and in fact it’s one of the first
in the School of Engineering at Stanford
that meets Stanford’s requirement for
all undergraduates on engaging diversity
so we teach the concepts of engineering
design by challenging the students to
solve problems that are confronted by
the differently-abled but beyond the
concepts of engineering design we wanted
to teach the students to approach design
with empathy we wanted them to embrace
the notion that they should consider how
all humans interact with designed
objects and we wanted to do that not by
showing them slides on a screen but by
having them interact face-to-face
hand-to-hand hand to prosthesis if
necessary with differently abled people
we wanted them to live this experience
and we also thought what better way to
launch the class than to have a young
man who inspired it travel from Friday
Harbor to Palo Alto and meet these
Stanford students so they could
experience his spirit now I knew
logistically that this would be very
difficult C’s ACK needs to travel with
his wheelchair
it’s his home base it’s his comfort zone
and doing that by a commercial air
service would be super difficult
so after long search I found a wonderful
man who donated his time and his
aircraft and he brought Zack Zacks
mother Zacks paraeducator Zacks stem
teacher and myself down to Palo Alto and
back Zack was a star at Stanford his
mother told me that this trip literally
changed the trajectory of his life and
one of the reasons she said that
happened was cuz when she saw him and
what he was capable of in front of all
these students there was no way he was
getting away with so much in the future
the students asked Zach lots of
questions and of course they all had to
be formulated with yes or no answers
because that’s the only way that Zach
can respond I gave them a design problem
related to the headrest on Zach’s chair
you see that headrest sometimes doesn’t
support his head well and when that
happens his head droops and when his
head droops Zach drools and Zach has
told us that’s demeaning to him that’s a
problem that he wants all students did a
great job came up with some wonderful
designs and I hope to see them someday
on wheelchairs legs axe in the future
now our students didn’t just get to meet
Zach they met many other wonderful and
inspiring differently-abled people one
of whom was Adrian Rodriguez Adrian’s
low vision he’s completely blind in one
eye and 2400 in the other so what that
means is what you can see from 400 feet
away Adrian has to be but 20 feet to
have the same experience oh and he
graduated in 2016 from Stanford with a
degree in computer science he did this
through hard work and perseverance he
had to sit in the front row of his
classes with a telescope so he could
look up through it and just see a small
portion of what the professor was
transcribing on the board Adrian told
the students a story about when he when
he was young and his parents were trying
to get him into public schools and one
administrator said okay but he has to
have a glass eye his parents complied
with the request and Adrian wore the
prosthesis but it was incredibly painful
in fact it was so painful that after a
short amount of time he refused to wear
it
and isn’t it sad that someone’s notion
of inclusion was to make Adrian’s
outward appearance different for their
own comfort this is not what’s next
indeed if our idea of inclusion is to
make the differently-abled look normal
then I submit it’s we who are disabled
we gave the students an assignment to
design a device to help Adrian with
certain tasks they did a wonderful job
Adrian is actually headed to Thailand in
a few weeks he’s going to teach blind
people computer programming using
tactile aids just amazing
so why inclusive design I can think of
four main reasons why we should be
inclusive in our designs the first thing
it is unquestionably the right thing to
do
who on earth wants to be excluded number
two regulatory there are actually laws
that say we must be inclusive in certain
aspects of our design mostly from the
architectural perspective the third
reason is the market forty million
people in the United States alone that’s
fifteen percent of the population and by
the way by looking around this room I
can tell that by virtue of aging and
then not-too-distant future some of us
are going to be differently abled we’re
gonna be want to be part of that market
the fourth reason is untapped intellect
by being inclusive in our designs
we can tap into the knowledge and wisdom
of the differently-abled
and you’ll see shortly that that
produces benefits for all of us but no
matter what the reason one thing that’s
clear is inclusion needs to be in the
forefront of design it cannot be an
afterthought and to that end a group of
companies have started a program called
teach access teach access got wind of
dare to care and they invited Adria and
I over to the accessibility lab at Yahoo
to see what the latest and greatest was
and there we saw the efforts that teach
access was engaging in to teach
professors how to teach students the
industry Beck’s best practices in
inclusive design encoding all of these
companies participate in teach access
these are household names they want
students that are coming out of the best
universities to already know to already
have these tools in their pocket to
already know what the best practices are
an inclusion and accessible coding so
what happens when we’re inclusive in our
designs I think you guys are going to be
really surprised about the tools that
you use every single day that had their
Genesis and inclusion texting texting
was started in the mid 1970s by Vinton
Cerf the father of the internet he was
looking for a better way to communicate
between himself and his friends who were
all hard of hearing speech synthesis was
actually developed in the mid 1930s at
Bell Labs as a means to help the deaf
speak more intelligently optical
character recognition OCR this is the
feat of taking typewritten text and
getting it into a computer
in a format that it’s more usable this
was developed in the mid-1970s as a way
to give the blind access to more types
of media but beyond the realm of
computers there’s many tools that you
use every day that I’m sure you had no
idea had there Genesis and inclusion the
telephone Alexander Graham Bell invented
the telephone in the late 1870s his
mother and his wife were both deaf he
was doing research on how to enable the
deaf with better means of communication
how came the telephone recorded music
was developed in the mid 1930s as a
means to give long playing music and
literature accessibility to the blind
the device called the Reid phone was
developed and later turned into 33 and
1/3 rpm records and you know what
happened after that the huddle on
weekends this time of year we see
football players gathered in Huddle’s
the huddle was developed at Gallaudet
University a school for the deaf so that
deaf football players could call place
amazing so we can see what happens when
we’re inclusive in our designs and the
same way that Martin Luther King did not
want his children to be excluded when he
said that one day he has a dream that
one day his children will not be judged
by the color of their skin but rather by
the content of their character I have a
dream
I have a dream that Zak Crichton will
not be judged by the posture of his body
rather by the strength of his spirit I
have a dream that Hadrian Rodriguez will
not be judged by the cloudiness of his
eye but rather the clarity of his vision
to help others and I have a dream that
people who cannot speak and they have a
voice that will let them express their
wisdom to us and now Zack is gonna tell
you about his dream
my dream hi my name is Zach Creighton
and maybe speaking in someone else’s
voice but these are my thoughts my dream
is to be able to talk to people to let
them know that I’m an intelligent person
with thoughts and feelings just like
them and to share by wicked sense of
human I’ll leave you with this quote
from Charlotte Bronte I am no bird and
no net ensnares me I’m a free human
being with an independent will thank you
thank you
you
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