Inclusion in Service Design: Seeing the Invisible
I still remember the uni campus courtyard — students rushing to lectures, the shuttle bus idling at the curb, the noise of conversations all around.
Amid the bustle, a student who was blind turned to me and asked: “Where is the shuttle?”
Without thinking, I pointed with my hand and said, “Here.”
In that instant, my answer dissolved into silence. He couldn’t see my gesture. My well-meaning response was meaningless.
In that moment, I realised how blind I was — blind to the reality of his experience. My well-intentioned answer was useless.
It was a lesson I’ll never forget: we rarely notice the barriers until we collide with them.
The Elephant in the Room
In cultures like Turkey, disabilities are often treated as a hidden topic — a pink elephant in the room. Families keep it private, institutions overlook it, and society rarely creates the conditions for true participation. The result? Most of us grow up without meaningful encounters with disability — and without the awareness to act inclusively.
But this is not just a cultural issue. Around the world, services and systems are still designed with the assumption of a “default user” — able-bodied, neurotypical, speaking the dominant language. Everyone else has to adapt, or gets left behind.
From Awareness to Action
That moment at uni stayed with me. Later in my career, I had the opportunity to put inclusion into practice.
- I worked on Video Contact Centre, a service that connected hearing-impaired customers with sign-language-trained representatives through video calls. It wasn’t an add-on — it was a redesign of the contact centre to ensure equal dignity of service.
- I also helped design the first versions of an “accessible store” concept, rolled out in years in over a hundred locations across the country. These stores combined tactile floors and Braille labels for visually impaired customers, sign-language support and video access for the hearing-impaired, and ramps, wheelchair charging points, and ergonomic counters for those with physical disabilities. With a clear “Barrier-Free Shop” icon on the storefront, the model turned inclusion into a standard — one that was later recognised with international awards.
These weren’t side projects — they were service design in its truest sense: designing systems where everyone can participate, not bolting it on afterwards.
When the World Isn’t Designed for Everyone
EDF France captured it perfectly back in 2005 with their campaign: “The world is tougher when not designed for everyone.”
Exclusion in design may look small but has huge consequences:
- A form field that rejects different surname structures.
- A public building without audio cues.
- A website that breaks a screen reader’s flow.
For some, these are minor inconveniences. For others, they mean total exclusion from participation.
What Service Design Can Do
The UK Government Service Manual makes it clear: “If you don’t design for accessibility, you’re excluding people.” Its accessibility and inclusion guidelines provide a strong compass for service designers everywhere:
- Put people first: design for the needs of users, not for the convenience of systems.
- Do the hard work to make it simple: complexity in design always hurts those at the margins first.
- Design with data and empathy: combine research evidence with lived experience.
- Iterate and test with real users: especially with people who face barriers most often.
- Make accessibility a core requirement: not an afterthought or a compliance tick-box.
These principles echo a truth: inclusive design is good design.
The Responsibility of Service Designers
We are the ones mapping touchpoints, surfacing hidden pain points, and challenging “default assumptions.” Inclusion isn’t a checklist. It’s about shifting perspective — learning to see what we once ignored.
Because the real shame isn’t in getting it wrong once. The real shame is when systems keep getting it wrong, over and over.
✨ Closing thought: My journey began with shame in a uni campus, but it taught me the hardest and most valuable lesson of service design: unless you learn to stand in someone else’s shoes, you will always be designing blind.
Now in the UK, I see people with disabilities fully present in daily life — on buses, in workplaces, in shops. This visibility is not charity; it is design. It shows what happens when inclusion is built into the system, not patched on the edges.
And here lies the challenge: if a service excludes even one person, is it really designed at all?
