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91��ɫ's Shital Desai is advancing a more inclusive approach to how technologies, research and learning environments are designed, driven by a core question: What would change if inclusion was treated as a starting point rather than a correction at the end?

In recent years, accessibility and inclusion have gained growing attention across education, technology, design and policy. That shift has brought renewed focus to inclusive design, an approach that asks how courses are taught, technologies are built, research is conducted and systems are organized to account for a wide range of human needs.

For Desai, an associate professor at the (AMPD), the challenge is that inclusive design is often treated an issue to address later, rather than key factor that guides decisions from the beginning.

“From my perspective, accessibility and inclusivity are often used as aspirational terms but not always treated as obligations that must shape design, teaching, research, policy and implementation from the beginning,” she says.

Desai is working to create that shift through her teaching, research and a newly co-authored book to advance an approach that treats accessibility and inclusion as baseline responsibilities in any work that affects people.

A member of AMPD's Department of Design, she leads courses that examine how people interact with systems, environments and emerging technologies including AI, mixed reality and physical computing.

She asks students to consider who is included, who might be left out and how those decisions inform designs, and applies this approach directly in the classroom.

Rather than treating accessibility as an afterthought, she approaches courses as systems that can either create or reduce barriers. Her classes offer multiple ways for students to complete assignments and demonstrate learning, whether through speaking, making, sketching, prototyping or reflective documentation.

This approach, she says, allows barriers to be anticipated and addressed early, rather than treated only after a student encounters them.

“A student may not have a formal diagnosis, may not disclose a disability, or may be experiencing barriers that are temporary, technological or cultural,” Desai says.

Beyond the classroom, this perspective extends into Desai's research. Her work focuses on developing technologies and systems that support a range of needs, particularly among older adults, people living with dementia, people with disabilities and communities that are underserved by conventional approaches.

Using participatory and co-design methods with those communities, she aims to understand how everyday practices, relationships and environments can enhance designing interventions. Those insights shape technologies that respond to people’s needs, rather than forcing users to fit to systems not designed around their needs.

“It means not simply recruiting people with disabilities or older adults as participants, but considering how they shape the research itself,” she says.

Desai extends these ideas in a new co-authored book, , with colleagues whose research extends across accessibility, Deaf studies, education and technology. The book examines how inclusive design can be applied across teaching, research, business, policy and implementation.

The book responds to a common gap, she says: many people agree inclusion matters but lack guidance on how to apply it in practice, from running inclusive meetings to designing accessible research. In response, it presents examples for embedding equitability in different contexts, as compliance or usability requirements, but also as part of how systems are shaped.

“Phrases such as ‘designing for accessibility’ can sometimes make accessibility sound like a specialized domain or a project-specific choice,” Desai says. “They should be understood as baseline responsibilities in any work that affects people.”

This perspective also reshapes how inclusive design is often evaluated. Accessibility is frequently framed in terms of compliance, usability testing or accommodation. These are important steps, she notes, but limited ones.

“Accessibility and inclusion should not depend on whether a particular designer, instructor, researcher or organization chooses to prioritize them,” she says.

Compliance can show whether something meets a standard, and usability testing can show whether people can complete a task. But inclusive design, she argues, requires deeper consideration of who is included, who may be excluded and how systems enable participation.

This challenge is increasingly visible in the technologies Desai studies. Systems powered by AI, extended reality and other data-driven tools can reproduce exclusion when built on narrow assumptions or datasets. At the same time, they can support communication, memory, engagement and participation when designed with accessibility and lived experience from the start.

The issue, she says, is not whether these technologies are inclusive or harmful, but how they are designed, with whom, for what purpose and under what forms of accountability.

For Desai, the question of accountability extends beyond individual projects. “One unresolved issue is how inclusive design can be made mandatory without becoming reduced to minimum compliance. How do we create systems where accessibility is not optional, but also not treated as a checklist?”

Across her teaching, research and collaborations, Desai is working to put that shift into practice, shaping how designers think, how technologies are built and how institutions approach accessibility and inclusion.

“For me, the most important shift is from thinking about inclusion as adaptation to thinking about it as responsibility,” Desai says. “Inclusive design is not only about making things usable for more people. It's about recognizing diverse bodies, minds, experiences, cultures and ways of participating as central from the start.”

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