Nothing About Us, Without Us: Why We Stopped Designing For People

There is a phrase the disability rights movement gave the world, and I wish every founder had it framed above their desk: nothing about us, without us. It sounds like a slogan. It is actually a design principle — and a warning.

The warning is this. The moment you design for a group of people instead of with them, you begin solving an imagined problem. You picture what a woman returning to work needs, what a wheelchair user finds hard, what a first-generation learner is missing — and you build for the picture. The picture is always tidier than the person. It leaves things out. And the things it leaves out are exactly the ones that decide whether your solution works at all.

I have watched well-funded, well-meaning programmes fail on precisely this. Not because the team didn't care, but because they cared from a distance. They ran the workshop they assumed was needed, not the one anyone had asked for. They installed the ramp at the wrong gradient, printed the form in the wrong language, scheduled the training at the wrong hour of a woman's day. Every one of those mistakes was avoidable — by asking first.

So we made a rule at the Foundation: the people we serve are not the recipients of the design, they are part of the design team. Before we build, we sit with them. Not a survey, not a focus group performed at them — a conversation where they hold the pen. The expertise we lacked was never technical. It was lived. And lived expertise cannot be researched from a conference room; it can only be invited in.

This changes who gets to be called an expert. The woman who has run a household on almost nothing knows more about resilience than a budgeting curriculum. The para-athlete knows more about what dignity looks like on a field than any brand consultant. When you treat them as sources rather than subjects, the design gets sharper and the ownership gets deeper — because people protect what they helped build.

It is also, quietly, the most efficient thing you can do. Designing with people front-loads the hard questions, when they are still cheap to answer. Designing for people back-loads them, until they surface as failure, at the most expensive possible moment.

So before the next plan is finalised, the question worth stopping for is the oldest one in this work:

Are the people this is meant to serve in the room where it's being designed — or are we, once again, deciding on their behalf?