Kaat Kenis
Inclusive Design has gained significant institutional traction over the past three decades, yet despite its emancipatory intentions, the field risks reproducing the normative frameworks it claims to challenge. By conceptualising diversity through single axes of identity and operating from an implicit assimilation logic, asking how people can fit into the world as it exists instead of what kind of world we want to design, Inclusive Design remains methodologically underprepared for the growing complexity of contemporary design challenges.
This paper proposes intersectionality as a critical and justice-oriented framework to reorient Inclusive Design beyond these limitations. Intersectionality is mobilised here as a complexity theory that attends to the overlapping systems of oppression producing exclusion, rather than positioning exclusion on individuals’ identities alone. This places the research at the intersection of Inclusive Design and Systemic Design, arguing that genuinely just design requires both a broader conception of diversity and a systemic understanding of how power and lived experience interact to produce exclusion.
Drawing on a critical analysis of Inclusive Design discourse and engagement with feminist theory and critical disability studies, the paper presents a preliminary analytical and generative framework engaging with systemic complexity along two dimensions. Both of these dimensions are grounded in reflexive positionality as a precondition for ethical collaboration. The width dimension draws on Collins’ matrix of domination to map how structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal systems of power shape patterns of inclusion and exclusion in design. The depth dimension draws on feminist standpoint theory to position the situated knowledge of those most affected by exclusion as an epistemically privileged and generative starting point for design, structured across three layers: social and political identity, affect and embodiment, and lived experience and narrative. These dimensions are operationalised through two sequential run-throughs: a diagnostic phase working from width to depth to uncover how systemic mechanisms of exclusion are produced and lived, and a generative phase working from depth to width that translates experiential knowledge from the margins into co-design interventions oriented towards pluriversal outcomes.
The framework is explicitly preliminary. This paper closes by posing open questions on theoretical blind spots, empirical tensions, and the ethics of justice-oriented design with vulnerable communities.
Keywords: inclusive design, systemic design, intersectionality, pluriversal design