Thinking inclusion through making

Today we are witnessing the growth of bottom-up initiatives, innovative projects, and wide networks of people and labs engaged in a collective response to the environmental barriers and accessibility issues pervading our society, notwithstanding the huge effort in defining standards, rules, and recommendations for human-centric inclusive design. In this scenario, Fab Labs (fabrication laboratories) and maker spaces are playing a role as innovation labs both for their skills in rapid prototyping and as participatory design spaces involving people who can bring various skills and expertise throughout the development of human-centric solutions. This paper presents two design cases developed at the Fab Lab of the University of Siena, Italy, and offers a reflection about engaging people with a disability in hands-on activities grounded on the making practice. In the cases, we adopted a particular stance on making based on co-creation and joint reflection. This approach, known in the design literature as “thinking-through-making,” shows that cross-competence, collaborative teamwork, inspiring design contexts, rapid iterative prototyping activities, and joint reflection on intermediate prototypes are quintessential to scaffold participants’ knowledge and creativity and to design innovative and inclusive solutions.