Design for the Mediterranean Social Inclusion

For many years the meaning of “human diversity” was often intended in a negative sense: physical appearances, if not included in recognised proportions or capabilities, have been tied to words like “disability”. The meaning of human diversity concerns many aspect of everyday life, from physical to social, cognitive and behavioural ones. In Design, the attention to the issue of human diversity has been recognized since the 50’s and, throughout years, generations of designers have proposed enabling solutions more tolerant of diversified human capacity. One of the most recent European Design Approach, oriented toward a Social Inclusion and based on it, is Design for All (DfA). Accordingly, DfA considers all human diversities as design strength in order to propose complete end enabling products for real end-users. The paper describes the DfA approach and, considering the emerging scenario of Mediterranean countries, it considers the potentialities resulting from the adoption of a human-centered, inclusive-oriented and socially responsible design approach.