Design Week Project with Big Motive

This week we were introduced to our Design Week brief by Big Motive, which immediately gave the project a clear focus:

How can we encourage designers to take accessibility more seriously in their work?

My group was assigned the type section, so we began by thinking through the different forms type can take in digital spaces.

Early concept direction

Our idea started to move towards type and perception, particularly how people experience written content differently depending on their visual or cognitive needs. We were interested in designing something that made accessibility feel more immediate and visible, rather than keeping it as a set of abstract rules or guidelines.

A lot of our discussion centred around:

• visual impairments
• reading related learning difficulties such as dyslexia and dyscalculia
• AAA level thinking
• how interaction, sound and motion could be used to communicate these challenges more clearly

Our project idea

The idea was to create an experience that explores how typography and media are perceived by people with different accessibility needs.

Some of the directions we explored included:

• breaking down letterforms to show how text can become difficult to process
• using colour and contrast intentionally
• showing altered user perception, such as tunnel vision
• incorporating motion graphics