During my residency at the V&A Museum I wanted to set up a design studio that included students who maybe experiencing emotional based school avoidance, their support network from Football Beyond Borders and V&A staff. Our design studio is called ’That’s Effort!’.

One member of That’s Effort! Was surprised at how badly designed some seemingly accessible tools are and how disabled people regularly have to adapt designed products for themselves and at that moment said ’That’s Effort’, so we chose this as the name of the design studio, with the idea that we are going to remove some of that effort.

We learnt about inclusive design in the V&A collection and had an ‘ideas door’ in the studio where we wrote all our ideas and voted on our top three in order to choose one inclusive design product to make. We started by creating a few different prototypes of adaptive designs, including fidget toys, jewellery with an accessible magnetic clasp and a locket for medication. The product that we chose to develop further and make was an arm-worn water bottle designed for a member of That’s Effort! They walk with a stick and asked for a bottle that they can use hands-free and that does not impact their balance or mobility.

In the display exhibited at the V&A are the Polaroids we took ( see below), our group diary with plans and thoughts, our wallpaper painted in the style of Nerys Johnson (a disabled artist in the collection who painted with tissue paper and whose work we looked at) our prototypes and the water bottle. I also wrote a poem about our time working together which you can hear below.