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A little room to wonder

Inclusive Sport Design

Inclusive design looks for barriers in a task and its setting, then considers changes with the people affected. A change should preserve a meaningful choice rather than assume one way of participating fits everyone.

Which rule or feature creates the barrier, and what would a proposed change actually alter?

An empty outdoor basketball court, with painted lines and a hoop beneath a wide sky.
An empty court shows one possible activity environment. Its existing lines and equipment do not determine every possible rule or way to participate.Alyssiui, 2023, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0. · Source · CC0 1.0

Examine the design before judging the person

A movement activity is shaped by its rules, equipment, space, timing and instructions. A barrier may sit in any of these features. “The person cannot do our standard task” is a different description from “our task permits only one kind of action”. The second description makes a design choice visible without assuming which alternative a person would prefer.

The CHANGE IT approach, used in Australian sport education, invites adjustments across features such as coaching, scoring, area, numbers, rules, equipment, inclusion and time. It is a set of design prompts, not a guarantee that a change suits everybody. A proposed adaptation still needs a clear purpose, participant choice and an honest account of what has been checked.

Worked example: a larger target changes more than a label

Consider an invented paper target with radius 10 centimetres. A redesign uses radius 20 centimetres. For a circular target, area is pi times radius squared. The ratio is 20 squared divided by 10 squared: 400/100 = 4. The target has four times the area, not twice the area.

That does not prove a player becomes four times as successful. Attempts need not land uniformly across the surface, and distance, scoring and equipment also matter. The calculation describes the target, not a person’s capacity or a tested result. It helps a designer state precisely what a proposed change does and what still needs investigation.

Offer a choice that keeps the task meaningful

Suppose a fictional activity aims to explore choosing a route, but its rule requires every choice to be expressed by running to a marker. A paper route choice, a spoken choice or another agreed communication method might preserve the decision task while changing its expression. Whether those options are useful must be asked, not inferred from somebody’s appearance or a diagnostic label.

Some changes alter the challenge; others remove an unrelated barrier. Record which goal matters before calling two versions equivalent. Fairness may involve access, an appropriate challenge, a transparent scoring rule or several aims at once. State the aim rather than claiming every participant needs the same adjustment.

A paper proposal is still valuable

You can produce an annotated rule card with two optional participation methods and a question for future review. Label it a design proposal. It does not authorise delivery of a sport session or show that an activity is safe for a particular person. Listening to a person’s preference belongs before treating a proposed adaptation as their solution.

Only if you feel like trying

Redesign one rule on paper

  1. Choose the fictional route-choice activity. State its learning aim and identify the barrier created by the running-only rule.
  2. Draft two optional ways to express a route choice. Explain what each preserves and what it changes.
  3. Calculate the target-area comparison in the worked example, then write one result the calculation cannot establish.

Optional design work only. No exercise, medical advice, ability test, disclosure of health information or real-world trial is required.