“I think the difficulty lies in the economics of trying to supply something for everyone. For clothing, I think stores like Big and Tall are a great start. These types of stores specialize in proper clothing. But how can you possibly apply this to airlines, for example? Is it even possible to make a seat that is completely customizable while still maintaining cheap flights? I think there will always be a gray line that everyone must come to grips with. As humans, we have an uncanny ability to adapt to varying environments. The real question is where to draw that gray line?” (Male, white, age 39, 5´11˝, 230 lb.)

It's time for a seismic shift in the world of fashion, product, and building design, one that is long overdue.

In his preface to A Woman's Nation Changes Everything, John Podesta argues, “Our policy landscape remains stuck in an idealized past, where the typical family was composed of a married-for-life couple with a full-time breadwinner and full-time homemaker who raised the children herself.”1 The same is true for design. As our society becomes increasingly diverse in gender, age, and body size, it's time to become unstuck.

You can help make that happen.

You can help improve the design of products, spaces, and places to keep up with today's changing times. Designs that reduce, minimize, or eliminate gender, age, and body biases can provide equal opportunities for all. Together we can help create safer, healthier designs that better respond to diversity. Together we can help stamp out future fashions, products, and buildings that disadvantage us by design.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE THE DESIGN PROFESSIONS

If you are anything other than an average-sized, college-age white male, if you use a wheelchair, cane, or other mobility device, or if you are visually impaired, contact the design department at your local college or university and volunteer to serve as a sample consumer. You can be involved in the students’ design process from the outset, as a desk critic throughout the term, or during their review process in the middle or at the end of the term. Design schools need more diverse consumers to critique students’ work. You can play an important role in students’ design education.

If you have daughters, ethnically underrepresented children, or children who are exceptionally petite or large, or happen to be transgender, encourage them to become designers. We need people of all genders, shapes and sizes to become industrial designers, architects, builders, contractors, and other members of the building professions who can shape the design of future products, spaces, and places.

WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR CHILDREN

Routinely check the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website, Parents.com, and ConsumerWatch.com for product recalls and news alerts for products currently on the market or previously available worldwide. The CPSC has a Google+ Hangout as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Monitor Safekids.org, the site of Safe Kids Worldwide, a global organization of more than four hundred coalitions and chapters in the United States that partners with organizations in thirty countries dedicated to preventing injuries in children. Unintentional injuries are the number one killer of kids in the United States; around the world, a child dies from an unintentional injury every thirty seconds.² Safe Kids Worldwide brings together health and safety experts, educators, corporations, foundations, governments, and volunteers to educate families in order to prevent injuries at home, at play, and on the way.³ Sign up for a monthly e-mail alert that tells you the latest juvenile-product recalls.

Consult the wealth of information found in Child Product Safety Guide: Potentially Dangerous Products published by the European Child Safety Alliance. It lists dangerous products and summarizes relevant literature and available data from EU countries, the CPSC, and Health Canada documenting injuries and deaths. For each product, the following information is included: why the product poses a problem, how it can be dangerous for children, what to look for when buying or prior to using, and how to use it safely.4

Exercise caution when buying secondhand children's toys or play equipment. Recalled items may still be found in homes, in secondhand markets, and in e-commerce venues such as eBay. Hand-me-downs are especially vulnerable.

If you own a recalled product, follow the government's instructions that may require you to stop using the product, repair it, or return it for a refund or replacement. And be sure to inform friends or family members who may own it, too. Share recall info on your social networking sites.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO IMPROVE FASHION AND PRODUCT DESIGN

When shopping for a purse or bag, purchase one made of lightweight material and avoid overstuffing it. Empty out your purse at least once a week. If your bag needs to carry heavy contents, alternate shoulders every ten or fifteen minutes or carry it in front with two hands.

Men should downsize their wallets, carrying only the minimum number of credit cards and necessary cash.

Call upon manufacturers to eliminate “wrap rage” and dangerous clamshell packaging that needlessly injures thousands each year. Tell them you refuse to buy their products if they can't find a safe way to package them. Designing packaging that's safe for everyone—not just able-bodied adults—to use should be a greater priority than the efficiency of shipping and stacking. If the European Union can regulate packaging design and waste, so can we. A more immediate solution: If you think you'll have difficulty opening something that you're about to purchase in a store, have the cashier open it at the cash register right after you pay for it. Say that otherwise you won't buy it. That's what I do!

Ask for safer product design and more rigorous safety standards from the American National Standards Institute/Outdoor Power Equipment Institute to prevent more than nine thousand children from needless injuries while mowing their lawns each year.

Call for the safer design of snowblowers, which cause more than fifty-three hundred emergency department visits and one thousand amputations per year.

Speak out for power saws and tools to be designed to accommodate both left-handed and right-handed people. No longer should power-saw accidents be the most common cause of amputating hand injuries.

High-end designer beds that perch sleepers high above the floor must be equipped with warning labels about falls that can injure people for life. Product descriptions both in stores and on websites should include the height of beds with different-size mattresses. Consumers must be aware of just how high off the ground they'll be when they wake up in the middle of the night to find their way to the bathroom in the dark.

Parents must lobby car-seat manufacturers to test child car seats at higher speeds and in side-impact collisions, not just simulations of front-end collisions at thirty-five miles per hour.

New federal safety regulations are needed to require vendors to include anchoring attachments with the sale of flat-panel TVs and heavy furniture, to prevent serious injuries to children who inadvertently knock them over. Parents should do a walk-through of their home to check for tipping hazards and anchor them, just as they would to protect their home from an earthquake.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN YOUR COMMUNITY

If you live in a suburban neighborhood without sidewalks, ask your local governing agency to consider installing them to encourage more pedestrian activity and reduce obesity. Cite some of the findings from active-living research.

If you live on a busy street in an urban neighborhood, suggest that your street become a candidate for traffic-calming devices that can make it safer for children.

Call for changes in the timing of traffic lights, to allow pedestrians more time to cross the street without fear of getting run over. Make suburbs safer places for pedestrians of all ages.

If your child has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, try to integrate more green time into his or her daily activities. Spending time outdoors can reduce children's need for medication by one dose per day.

Participate in the design-review process for proposed new residential and school buildings, and stress the need to pay greater attention to the view out the window, as it can have an enormous effect on people's competence and civility. As environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan have argued, views of nature provide cheap remedies to many social problems and are linked to many positive psychological outcomes for children.

Learn about laws governing your city and state to assist you in asserting your restroom rights. Some business establishments may prohibit customers from using their restrooms. Depending upon where they're located, those businesses may be breaking the law. As a business owner, you should be aware of those laws. If you're required to provide toilet access to customers, you need signs clearly indicating where restrooms are located.

If you're a parent of a child in diapers, try to plan your trips in advance. Call ahead to find out whether diaper-changing stations are available at your destination, and if so are they in both men's and women's restrooms? If they're not, ask to speak with the manager and explain why you and your friends will boycott their business.

Inform your civic leaders about the importance of making attractive public restrooms available in your city or town. Point out the success of Japanese public restrooms, the best in the world. Public restrooms can play a major role in revitalizing America's downtowns.

If a new public restroom is proposed for a park or other public facility in your area, ask city officials to see the preliminary designs before they issue a building permit. Get involved in the design-review process.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN YOUR SCHOOLS

Inform teachers and school administrators of the need to stamp out infrastructure bias in classroom settings from preschools to universities. Ensure that furniture replacements serve left- and right-handed students equally.

Propose a nondiscrimination policy for classroom design and desk-purchase criteria that stipulate that no side-biased tablet-arm desks be purchased.

Ensure that left-handed students sit at a full desk or table for important timed tests such as the SAT, GRE, and TOEFL.

Call upon classroom-furniture manufacturers to design and distribute classroom desks and chairs that provide a healthy fit with students’ bodies, preventing musculoskeletal disorders later in life.

Protest school administrators who propose eliminating school lockers without understanding the serious health consequences of millions of children forced to carry heavy backpacks to and from school every day. Ask administrators to either maintain existing lockers or replace them with new clear acrylic materials.

Raise money or make a donation to your local school to remedy minor but annoying noise problems that can interfere with students’ and teachers’ ability to concentrate. Simple short-term solutions such as placing felt pads under desks and chairs and lubricating squeaky drawers, desk covers, and door hinges can go a long way.

As public schools face ever-increasing budget cuts, start a local campaign to raise funds to redesign school restrooms, making them safer and cleaner for boys and girls alike and discouraging restroom bullying. Simple changes such as full-length partitions between urinals or entrances with an open maze rather than a closed doorway are good starts.

If restrooms in your child's school are poorly maintained and barely usable, seek out your city, county, or state legislators to craft an effective ordinance clarifying enforcement provisions to school restrooms in bad repair. Point to Tom Keating's efforts at Project CLEAN and the new law in DeKalb County, Georgia, as a model for how to do it.

If you're the parent of a school-age child and you're moving to a new school district, check out both the quality of the school as well as its location relative to serious noise or odor problems. Avoid sending children to noisy schools along busy streets, under flight paths, or near trains and industrial noise.

If your son plays football, check to make sure that he and his teammates are no longer forced to wear helmets that don't protect them properly and that make them vulnerable to concussions and traumatic brain injuries that can last a lifetime. If he's wearing a reconditioned helmet, be sure to ask how long it has been since it was reconditioned, and make sure that it has been reconditioned within the past year. Newer, safer helmet design should be required of all football players, whether they be in the National Football League or a peewee league.

If your daughter plays sports, call your school administrators to make sure that she and her teammates are treated fairly, and as is legally required by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.5 Female high school and college athletes must no longer lag behind males in the provision of equitable resources like equipment, uniforms, and facilities.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN YOUR WORKPLACE

Become more aware of how space and resources are allocated—how they influence your ability to do your job. Raise your antennas and make sure that you are assigned a workspace design that treats you fairly compared with others on the job. Here are some questions to ask yourself and your employer:

Do those of us doing the same kind of work have workspaces relatively equal in size?

Do some people work in thermal comfort while others do not? If some workstations are too hot or too cold, how are these issues addressed?

Do any employees show symptoms of sick building syndrome? If so, what steps are taken to remedy the issue?

Are some people given proportionately greater access to daylight than others? Who decides and how?

How are resources such as computers and printers distributed? Who decides and how?

How do the age, size, and speed of computers compare? Who decides on computer replacement cycles and how?

How do chairs, desks, and other amenities compare?

Do new mothers have easy access to lactation spaces on the job? Is your workplace located in a state whose law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations—other than a toilet stall—where mothers can express their milk? If so, is that law being enforced? If your workplace is in a state without such a law, can you and your coworkers bring this issue to the attention of your state legislators—and to your employer?

Can your workplace be designated “infant friendly?”

If you believe you're being disadvantaged by the design of your workspace, ask your employer to remedy the situation. Federal employment-discrimination laws prohibit employers from disparate treatment of employees based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Many employers unknowingly engage in disparate treatment when the design of their physical work environment systematically disadvantages one or more of these groups.

If your place of employment requires a uniform, smock, or apron, make sure it fits. If it doesn't come in your size, ask whether your apparel can be altered. Regarding occupational health and safety issues, call for new laws worldwide mandating that manufacturers design and produce clothing and tools that fit everyone properly.

CALL FOR NEW LEGISLATION AND REVISED BUILDING CODES

Find out what building codes are in effect in your state or municipality and when they're due to be updated. Get involved in that process by voicing your opinion to building-code officials. Use the power of social networks to encourage family and friends to join in.

Call for legislation similar to that passed in 2000 by San Francisco that prohibits discrimination based on weight. Legal cases must continue to ensure that diverse constituencies are treated fairly in built environments for workplace, healthcare, and sport.

Ask for the incorporation of better ventilation standards in hairstyling, manicure, and pedicure salons to prevent stylists from being at increased risk of serious respiratory illness. Improve working environments for historically female-dominated jobs.

Call for the incorporation of large-scale exercise and fitness facilities in fire stations, to encourage greater physical activity and to reduce the numbers of firefighters with serious heart conditions. New fire-station designs should offer flexibility, privacy and more unisex facilities, to accommodate increasing gender diversity on the job.

Prod your legislators and building-code officials to improve our nation's infrastructure by designing and building twenty-first-century public restrooms that make cities safer, friendlier places for all people to enjoy—regardless of gender, age, and body size. The award-winning unisex restrooms at Kellogg Park in La Jolla, California, are prototypes that can be replicated in warm climates. Space-saving unisex restrooms like these must become the norm in indoor environments as well.

Stress to your legislators and building-code officials that potty parity for women and girls is a right, not a privilege. Pregnant women and young children who have frequent need and sudden emergencies for restrooms must be able to relieve themselves without waiting in long lines. Recognize late-term pregnancy as a serious form of disability for women. Just as is the case with the Americans with Disabilities Act, laws and codes about potty parity are needed at the federal level. Our biological needs do not vary by state or by country.

Push for child-height toilets and sinks in new public restrooms or for the installation of products like Step ’n Wash that allow children to be more independent and keep their parents from getting splashed during hand-washing. Just as men's rooms often include low urinals to accommodate young boys, women's rooms need to accommodate young girls.

Call for building-code changes providing greater privacy between urinal stalls to reduce bullying behavior among young boys and teenagers and to provide greater dignity for males of all ages.

Call for increased family restrooms not only in major places of assembly such as sports stadiums but also in smaller venues like restaurants and libraries. A grandmother should no longer have to send her young grandson alone into the men's room. A single father or a gay father should not have to take his young daughter with him into the men's room.

Renew the call to legislators and building-code officials for diaper-changing stations in both men's and women's restrooms in most or all public places. Parents should no longer be forced to change their children's diapers on dirty bathroom floors, in parking lots, or in their cars. Double standards in design that assume only mothers, but not fathers, change babies’ diapers, should be dropped.

Request more physical activity–friendly buildings that feature attractive, safe, and accessible stairways. Adding lighting, music, artwork, and air conditioning into existing fire exits can transform them into pleasant spaces to be enjoyed daily, just like the subway exit in Stockholm. Incorporating stairways into light-filled atrium spaces promotes increased physical activity. Designing stairways filled with natural light, even along the edges of building facades, can make them pleasant, welcoming spaces.

Press for mandated minimal natural-lighting requirements in work and school settings and greater access to the outdoors during the workday. Time spent outdoors is critical to our mental and physical health. Medical staff, the office secretarial pool, and sales associates who work in indoor shopping malls and big-box stores should no longer be forced to spend years on end in cavernous spaces that can cause seasonal affective disorder and vitamin D deficiency. Widespread daylighting legislation would benefit everyone, not only the disproportionately large numbers of women and ethnic minorities who work in windowless environments.

Mandate greater access to natural light through more slender building profiles that place more workers closer to windows, and more skylights and atrium spaces to allow light from above to promote a much healthier workforce.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN THE REALM OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

Call for the redesign of a small portion of replacement seats on subways, trains, and buses to accommodate overweight passengers and their seatmates, increasing comfort for all.

Urge the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to recognize the aircraft cabin as a workplace and to design better-proportioned galleys, service carts, latch handles, grips, overhead bins, handholds, and shock-absorbing seating to make them safer for flight attendants, who come in different shapes and sizes. Injury and illness rates of flight attendants should no longer be double that of construction workers.

Call upon the FAA to regulate the accepted decibel level in airline cockpits, as is the case in Europe, in order to reduce industrial deafness in airline pilots.

Implore your local transportation authority to replace dangerous turnstiles and decrepit, rusted-out stairways in our nation's antiquated subway systems and replace them with state-of-the-art features that encourage people to take public transit.

Support efforts to create more child-friendly public-transit design that can make taking a trip just as fun as riding the monorail at Disneyland. Be willing to pay taxes to modernize our nation's trains and subways so that we can match the high standards found across Europe and Asia.

If you live in a large city where taxicabs have floor-to-ceiling partitions separating drivers from passengers, call upon your local taxi company to replace these with digital cameras.

Whether it's the design of safe car seats or toys for children, or packaging that even the elderly can open—as with so many other instances of disadvantaging by design—complying with the minimum standard requirements is simply not enough. We must demand that designers go well beyond the minimum to provide safe, high-quality products and buildings that work well for an increasingly diverse set of people, regardless of gender, age, and body size.

We can celebrate those products, spaces, and places whose winning designs already advantage us all. We simply need more of them: more 3D body scanners that provide clothing to fit our diverse body types, more walk stations so that we can all exercise during work, more Segways to take us on short trips and out of our cars, more infant-friendly workplaces so that new mothers can enjoy going back to work, more workspaces that spark creativity and innovation on the job, more super designs for supermarkets so that at any age we can continue to shop for ourselves, more TOTO Washlets so that at any age we can continue to take care of our bodily needs by ourselves.

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” So said Sir Winston Churchill. Throughout the world, designers will continue to create the spaces in which we live and work, from those where we're born to those where we die. The built environment remains one of culture's most lasting and influential legacies.

Fashion, product, and building designs shape our lives every day in surprising, powerful ways. And whether we're aware of it or not, they affect everything we feel, think, and do. We must all continue to question, to challenge, and to no longer settle for designs that favor and empower one group of people over another through hidden gender, age, and body biases.

As French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued, “Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space…new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.”6

Be aware of your rights. Remember that design is only a tool. But it has the power to transform our lives. For better or for worse, we can be disadvantaged—or advantaged—by design every day. Nonetheless, we must no longer be defined by design. Design doesn't make changes. People do. And with your new set of lenses, so can you.