Column by Anders Bjarklev, President at DTU. Published in the media Frederiksborg Amts Avis 29 March 2022.
Last winter I was made aware of a problem that, by virtue of my own mobility, I had no idea existed.
The problem concerned a wheelchair ramp at one of the buildings on DTU’s Lyngby Campus, which had been built to ensure wheelchair users easier access. At least that was the intention. But a close colleague told me that in icy conditions, his disabled daughter struggled to get up the super slippery ramp. Several times, she had given up and gone home. Simply because the ramp was too steep and slippery for the wheelchair to handle the challenge.
I wonder if that problem would have arisen if a wheelchair user had helped develop and test the solution? I feel confident it wouldn’t. If we want to create a world with equal opportunities and access for all, it’s crucial that the people who create it have insight and knowledge of the challenges they want to solve. Talking about promoting diversity in innovation among students, researchers, and product developers is not just the decent thing to do. It’s a necessity if we want a sustainable society with value-creating solutions that include everyone.
Seen in this context, it is paradoxical that the tradition of embracing and promoting diversities within academia has historically been non-existent. This is still evident in numbers; among other things in relation to gender distribution within the STEM subjects, which is a collective term for the educational areas of science, technology, engineering, and math. Here, only 1 in 3 students are women.
However, it’s vital that we take the issue seriously and work constructively and proactively to create more diversity. We do so at DTU. Among other things, we have worked to recruit more female teaching assistants and students in the IT field, which is particularly challenged in terms of gender balance. We also train our managers and HR professionals to avoid unconscious bias towards, e.g., age, ethnicity, and sexual orientation when hiring new employees. And future students with physical or mental disabilities will be able to get a flexible and valuable teaching option and everyday life at DTU. Here we offer special support in the form of mentor schemes and a flexible student life with the possibility of video teaching from home.
Vibrating bed sheet
We also work on individual and long-term initiatives to promote diversity outside DTU. A good example is the 3-year project Technology Leaving No One Behind. The project has been created in collaboration with the Danish Association of the Physically Disabled and Bevica Fonden. It aims to make inclusion and accessibility a natural part of product development and entrepreneurship. Before the turn of the year, this gave rise to an inspiring innovation boot camp for young entrepreneurs with disabilities, who teamed up with DTU students and developed ideas on universal solutions that can benefit all people. Not just people with disabilities or wheelchair users like my colleague’s daughter. Not just people like me with full mobility. But all people.
One of the solutions was a vibrating bed sheet for people with impaired hearing, who do not wake up from the sound of an alarm clock and could have problems getting up for a job or and/or studying. That solution was also relevant for all those who half in their sleep turn off their alarm clock in the morning and oversleep.
If we want to make technology that can make the world a better, more sustainable, fair, and inclusive place to be, it requires one important thing. That one thing is not your gender or nationality. Neither is it whether you run or ride a wheelchair to your studies in the morning. Nor your religion. Basically, the only crucial question I want to ask all future students is: Are you a human being? Because we need people, all kinds of people, who can and will contribute. Each with their unique perspective, knowledge, and insight into the world that surrounds us.
That’s where we can make technology for all people—and make the world we share a better place to be for all of us.
