Criteria

We seem obsessed with criteria and this idea of proving something to access an experience.
Even when we’re trying to speak to specific audiences, ie. those who might have barriers to participation as is the case in this project. We designate ourselves the arbiters of this and that feels deeply unfair and uncomfortable to me.

Being able to advocate for your needs and even declare your barriers is complex and involves a degree of agency. I was keen from the get-go to allow students to self-identify and to not have to provide any evidence to support it. Many neurodivergent and disabled folk don’t have access to diagnosis for many reasons and I feels strongly that this shouldn’t affect their ability to take apart. Who am I to decide whether or not you have barriers to participation, and why should it need a piece of paper to prove it.

I wanted to design a more inclusive application process that had little to no criteria, but then as highlighted in the focus group how do we select (there is a need to select because we have capacity)

I have to keep reminding people to lean into trust on this process, which is something lots of them seem to struggle with. “what if people complain they weren’t selected” focus group participant – there is a safety in criteria that we can refer back to.
But the nature of this project is to reach people at the very beginning of a product design journey – even those who haven’t even considered it yet but could benefit from a risk free exploration. So how can we invite them in is we have too strict a criteria – or like most applications processes insist that they prove something.

People have a really desire to make people prove their commitment in application processes – tell us why you’re passionate – I have questions about being able to articulate your enthusiasm as being a skill not everyone at early stage has. Being able to convey passion for an area you don’t yet know about is hard!

After much debate and back and forth we opted for random selection, as long as they met the very narrow criteria which was little more than ‘has studied or is studying at UAL’ we used a random generator to select. We even debated this at length! Is it more or less dissapointing to be told you just weren’t randomly selected vs you didn’t do a good application?

I will be asking a lot of questions around this in post project interviews to measure imapct