Inclusive Signs: A card-based toolkit to generate creative inclusive design concepts and research strategies

The design of inclusive and enabling artefacts (i.e.: products, services, systems of products, etc.) requires new creative processes able to interpret the complexity of Social Inclusion. Inclusive Signs is a card-based toolkit designed to generate creative and inclusive design concepts, meta-design insights and strategies. A set of 180 cards and a worksheet can be used to run creative brainstorming, workshops, discussions, as well as to find inspirational trajectories and meaningful values. Inclusive Signs employs semiotic patterns to produce meaningful inclusive-oriented design meanings – inclusive signs precisely. The creation of inclusive signs is operated through instinctive combination of descriptive and visual concepts. Therefore, both designers, stakeholders, and design students can imagine future inclusive scenarios and new generation of enabling solutions in a new way. This handbook provides useful instructions on how to generate inclusive meta-design concepts through the Inclusive Signs toolkit. The handbook is part of an open access project and is distributed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. For more information, please see: https://inclusivesigns.lincoln.ac.uk/