One of BT's most longstanding collaborations – with the University’s Engineering Design Centre (EDC) and Professor John Clarkson – was started in the early 2000s by Jeff Patmore, then head of BT’s strategic university relationships.
According to government figures, just under a quarter of people in the UK have some kind of disability, increasing to almost half of those of pensionable age.
With funding from BT, Clarkson and his team, working with Roger Coleman, Professor of Inclusive Design at the Royal College of Art, developed an inclusive design training course which they delivered to designers and product managers across BT. The outcomes were impressive and included the 2008 launch of two bestselling BT products which incorporated all the principles of inclusive design: the Freestyle 750 series phone and a more user-friendly Home Hub 2.0.
Since then, the University's toolkit for inclusive design has been adopted internationally as the 'gold standard' and its principles have been incorporated in the UK's national curriculum for Design and Technology. For Clarkson, "The thinking and all the early development of the toolkit was funded by BT. Its support was instrumental in making all of that happen. We simply couldn't have done it any other way."
But that's not the end of the story. The approach, first developed in the early 2000s, has stood the test of time. BT is currently funding a PhD student, supervised by Clarkson, who is helping to design internal software packages to make them user-friendly and fully inclusive.
Another type of academic engagement pioneered by Patmore and Clarkson was rapid research into how new communications technologies were affecting human behaviour.
This was prompted, explains Patmore, "by increasing concern in the media about the impact of the internet, particularly on children. These were big questions BT decided it needed to answer. We needed to think about the consequences of making the internet accessible to everyone."
"We needed to think about the consequences of making the internet accessible to everyone."
Jeff Patmore, former Head of Strategic University Research & Collaboration at BT
The result was an ambitious study of internet usage and its impact on families and their wellbeing in the UK, US, China and Australia, Culture Change in Communication.
