The report nobody asked me to write
INCLUSIVE DESIGN
A semester where the goal stopped being to discover something new, and started being to finish something old. With Roman Sellner Novotný as my mentor again, I'm taking the digital nomad work into a bachelor thesis, even though the final shape isn't decided yet.
Speculative
Futurism
Design challenge
IKEA
I work at Pluxee in Prague Anděl. One day I started looking at the office the way someone with a physical disability would have to navigate it. Not as a thought experiment, more as a habit I'd picked up from coursework. Once you start seeing it, you can't stop.
The list grew quickly. Entrance routes that assumed you could climb a step. Toilets that technically existed but realistically didn't work for a wheelchair. Signage with low contrast and small type. Meeting rooms with no consideration for hearing assistance. Corridors that worked fine if you had two functioning legs and didn't need to think about it. Most of these gaps weren't malicious. They were invisible to the people who designed them, because the people who designed them never had to use the building any other way.
I wrote a report.
Why mentoring mattered here
Robert Osman became my mentor for this project, and his framing changed the way I approached it. As a geographer working on inclusive access to space, he treats accessibility not as an aesthetic problem or a checklist to satisfy, but as a structural question about who gets to use a place fully and who doesn't.
That framing kept me from writing the report I would have written on instinct, which was a list of things to fix. Under his influence the report became something closer to a map. Not "here are problems," but "here is who is being silently excluded, and where."
The report
The report wasn't a thesis. It was a clean document covering what I had observed, organised by category, with photos and short descriptions for each item. Mobility. Sensory. Wayfinding. General building access. For each gap I noted what the issue was, who it would affect, and what an entry-level fix could look like.
I didn't propose a redesign. I didn't argue for a budget. I made the gaps visible in one document so that management could see them all in one place, instead of hearing about them one by one through complaints that never make it past the inbox.
What changed
I handed the report to leadership. They started fixing things.
That's the part of the story I keep returning to, because it's the part students don't usually expect. You don't always have to design the solution. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is name the problem clearly enough that the people with the power to fix it can no longer pretend not to see it.
Some of the items got immediate attention. Some are queued for renovation phases. A few are still being argued over. None of that matters as much as the fact that the gaps are now on a list that exists, instead of being a thousand small daily frictions that nobody connected.
What I'm taking with me
Inclusive design doesn't always start with a redesign. Sometimes it starts with a paragraph. The skill the seminar trained wasn't designing for accessibility. It was learning to see the gaps in places everyone else had stopped looking, and making the case in writing strong enough that someone has to act on it.
The seminar also reframed something I had been getting wrong. I used to think the deliverable of design work had to be a thing you make. This project taught me that sometimes the deliverable is a thing you say.
