i'll never forget
the sound of laughing with my friends
i'll never forget the sound of my
mother's voice
right before i fell asleep
and i'll never forget the comforting
sound
of water trickling down a stream
imagine my fear pure fear
when at the age of 10 i was told
i was going to lose my hearing
and over the next five years it
progressed
until i was classified as profoundly
deaf
but i believe that losing my hearing
was one of the greatest gifts that i've
ever received
you see i get to experience the world in
a unique
way and i believe that these unique
experiences
that people with disabilities have is
what's going to help us
make and design a better world for
everyone
both for people with and without
disabilities
now i used to be a disability rights
lawyer and i spent a lot of my time
focused on enforcing the law ensuring
that accommodations were made
and then i had to quickly learn
international policy
because i was asked to work on the un
convention
that protects people with disabilities
as the leader of the ngo there
i spent most of my energy trying to
convince people about the capabilities
of people with disabilities
but somewhere along the way
and after many career transitions that
my parents weren't so happy about
i stumbled upon a solution
that i believe may be an even more
powerful
tool to solve some of the world's
greatest problems
disability or not
and that tool is called design
thinking design
thinking is a process for innovation and
problem solving
there are five steps the first is
defining the problem
and understanding its constraints the
second
is observing people in real life
situations
and empathizing with them third throwing
out
hundreds of ideas the more the better
the wilder the better
fourth prototyping gathering whatever
you can
whatever you can find to mimic your
solution
to test it and to refine it
and finally implementation ensuring
that the solution you came up with is
sustainable
warren burger says that design
thinking teaches us to look sideways
to reframe to refine to experiment
and probably most importantly ask
those stupid questions design
thinkers believe that everyone is
creative
they believe in bringing people from
multiple disciplines
together because they want to share
multiple perspectives
and bring them together and ultimately
immerse them to form
something new
design thinking is such a successful and
versatile tool that has been implied
in almost every industry
i saw the potential that it had for the
issues that i faced
so i decided to go back to school
and get my master's in social design
this looks at how to use design to
create
positive change in the world
while i was there i fell in love with
woodworking
but what i quickly realized was
that i was missing out on something as
you're working with a tool right before
it's about to kick back at
you which means the piece or the tool
jumps back at you
it makes a sound and i couldn't hear
this sound
so i decided why not try and solve it
my solution was a pair of safety glasses
that were engineered to visually alert
the user
to pitch changes in the tool before
the human ear could pick it up
why hadn't tour designers thought of
this
before two reasons
one i was a beginner i wasn't weighed
down
by expertise or conventional wisdom
the second is i was deaf
my unique experience of the world helped
inform my solution
and as i went on i kept running into
more and more
solutions that were originally made for
people with disabilities
and that ended up being picked up
embraced and loved by the mainstream
disability or not
this is oxo potato peeler it was
originally designed
for people with arthritis but it was so
comfortable everybody loved it
text messaging that was originally
designed
for people who are deaf and as you know
everybody loves that too
i started thinking what if
we changed our mindset
what if we started designing for
disability
first not the norm as you've seen
when we design for disability first we
often stumble
upon solutions that are not only
inclusive
but also are often better than those
when we design for the norm
and this excites me because this means
that
the energy it takes to accommodate
someone
with a disability can be leveraged
molded and played with as a force
for creativity and innovation
this moves us from the mindset of trying
to change the hearts
and the deficiency mindset of tolerance
to becoming an alchemist the type of
magician
that this world so desperately needs to
solve some of its greatest problems
now i also believe that people with
disabilities
have great potential to be designers
within this design thinking process
without knowing it from a very early age
i've been design thinker fine tuning my
skills
design thinkers
are by nature problem solvers so
imagine listening to a conversation
and only understanding 50 of what is
said
you can't ask them to repeat every
single world
they would just get frustrated with you
so
without even realizing it my solution
was
to take the muffled sound that i heard
that was the beat and turn it into a
rhythm and place it
with the lips that i read
years later someone commented that my
writing
had a rhythm to it well this is because
i experienced conversations as rhythms
i also became really really good
at failing quite literally
my first semester in spanish i got a d
but what i learned was that when i
picked myself up
and i changed a few things around
eventually
i succeeded to similarly
design thinking encourages people to
fail
and fail often because eventually
you'll succeed very few great
innovations
in this world have come from someone
succeeding
on the first try
i also experienced this lesson in sports
and i'll never forget my coach saying to
my mom
that if she just didn't have her hearing
loss
she would be on a national team
but what my coach and what i didn't even
know at the time
was that my hearing loss actually helped
me excel
at sports you see when you lose your
hearing
not only do you adapt your behavior but
you also adapt
your physical senses one
example of this is that
my visual attention span increased
imagine a player a soccer player coming
down the left flank
imagine being a goalkeeper like i was
and boss coming down the left flank
a person with normal hearing would have
a visual perspective
of this i had the benefit
of a spectrum this wide so i picked up
the players over here
that were moving about and coming down
the field and i picked them up
quicker so that if the ball was passed i
could
reposition myself and be ready for that
shot
so as you can see i've been a design
thinker for nearly all my life
my observation skills have been honed
so that i pick up on things that others
would never pick up on
my constant need to adapt has made me a
great ideator
and problem solver and i've often had to
do this within
limitations and constraints this is
something that designers
also have to deal with frequently
now my work most recently took me
to haiti design thinkers often seek out
extreme situations because that often
informs
some of their best designs in haiti
it was like a perfect storm i lived and
worked
with 300 deaf individuals
they were relocated after the 2010
earthquake
but five and a half years later
there still was no electricity there
still was no safe drinking water
there is still no job opportunities
there is still
rampant crime and it went unpunished
international aid organizations came one
by one
but they came with predetermined
solutions
they didn't come ready to observe
and to adapt based on the community's
needs one organization
gave them goats and chickens but they
didn't realize that there was so much
hunger in that community that when
the deaf went to sleep at night and they
couldn't hear
people broke in to their yards and their
homes
and they store these chickens and these
goats and
eventually they're all gone
now if that organization had taken the
time
to observe deaf people to observe
the community they would have realized
their problem
and perhaps they would have come up with
a solution something like
a solar light lighting up a secure pin
to put them in
at night to ensure their safety
you don't have to be a design
thinker to insert the ideas i've shared
with you today
you are creative
you are a designer everyone is
let people like me help you
let people with disabilities help you
look
sideways and in the process solve
some of the greatest problems that's it
thank you