Ad Age is marking Disability Pride Month 2023 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, in which members of the disability community revisit some of their favorite creative projects. (Read the introduction here.) Today, Christina Mallon, director of inclusive design at Microsoft, writes about the importance of co-designing with users with different lived experiences than your own.

At the start of my professional career, my arms slowly became paralyzed. The transition to “disabled” was challenging but has never slowed me down for a second. As a young designer beginning my career with a “disability,” I felt underrepresented as a consumer. After studying design and disability history, I started to understand that my difficulties were caused by poor design decisions that made it difficult for my neurodivergent brain to learn or my paralyzed arms to engage with a product or experience. Rather than being discouraged, I recognized the opportunity to grow awareness and make a measurable impact.

I put my efforts into educating the world’s largest brands on inclusive design methodology so that they can leverage it to create more inclusive customer experiences. Have you ever been in a situation where a product or service didn’t quite work for you? Maybe it was designed for right-handed people, and you are left-handed or have no working hands like me, or you were using a self-service tool and the series of instructions and prompts didn’t quite make sense. When creating products or services, it’s important to co-design with users with different lived experiences than your own to avoid only your experience being reflected in the product or service. This approach is a process called “inclusive design.”

After 10 years of helping brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Unilever, I joined Microsoft to run its inclusive design program, as I wanted to help shape a more disability-inclusive future with generative AI. Our work toward creating a disability-inclusive Bing Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot is the most important work that I’ve been involved in because one in every eight people in the world use Microsoft products and one in five people in the world identifies as being disabled.

These new tools help with cognition and physical work, such as putting together a competitive report for work or building a PowerPoint presentation, which can be difficult for some people with disabilities such as ADHD and dyslexia, individuals who have problems typing and other disabilities. As we move into the fourth industrial revolution, creators must remember that disability inclusion is a fundamental human right.