Fast Company magazine has published an article detailing Microsoft’s adoption of inclusive design as part of an ongoing metamorphosis at the software company. According to the article:

The big idea is that in order to build machines that adapt to humans better, there needs to be a more robust process for watching how humans adapt to each other, and to their world. “The point isn’t to solve for a problem,” such as typing when you’re blind, said Holmes. “We’re flipping it.” They are finding the expertise and ingenuity that arises naturally, when people are forced to live a life differently from most.”

Jutta Treviranus, Director of the IDRC, also gets mentioned in the article for her role in defining inclusive design, and ultimately paving the way for mainstream organizations adopt inclusive design as a new approach to design and business.

Source: “Microsoft’s Radical Bet On A New Type Of Design Thinking“, Fast Company Magazine.

Update: Added Open Education Global 2016 Conference.

IDRC Director Jutta Treviranus will be speaking at the following conferences on topics crossing digital inclusion in education, to rethinking the role of technology in our institutions.

March 2016:

• March 15, University of Manitoba. “Information and communication accessibility”.

April 2016:

• April 12 – WWW2016 Workshop on Web Science and Technology for Education (WWW2016 Montreal). “Evaluating Educational Software in the Web Era”.
• April 12 – W4A Conference (WWW2016 Montreal). “Life-Long Learning on the Inclusive Web”.
  • Conference paper – “Life-Long Learning on the Inclusive Web“.
• April 13 – Edu-Fiction (WWW2016 Montreal). “What will the web bring [in 2030]?”
• April 14 – Open Education Global 2016. “[Action Lab] Salad dressing, pendula, navels, scraped knees and future-proof learning (Accessibility and OER)”.
• April 29 – OCULA Spring Conferece. “Creating Space: Expanding the Physical, Digital, and Mental Boundaries of the Academic Library”

May 2016:

• May 12 to 14 – UNIversal Inclusion Rights and Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities in the Academic Conext
  • The information about this conference is also available in this accessible PDF: http://en.unito.it/sites/sten/files/universal_inclusion.pdf
• May 26 – Think Conference

Visit the conference websites for individual times and details.

The paper titled “The Future Challenge of the ADA: Shaping Humanity’s Transformation”, authored by Jutta Treviranus, has been published and included in the Volume 4, Issue 1 (March 2016) Inclusion journal. The paper outlines the many growing challenges of the ADA as technology, economics, and demographics radically shift.