Jutta Treviranus is Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University. She co-leads IDEA’s Hub 5, Disruptive Technologies and the Future of Work.

Treviranus established IDRC in 1993. IDRC is a growing global community of open-source developers, designers, researchers, educators and co-designers who work together to proactively ensure that emerging technology and practices are designed inclusively. IDRC helped establish the Web Accessibility Initiative at the W3C, writing early web accessibility guidelines, and working to make the first HTML editor accessible. Over the years, IDRC’s focus has included e-learning tools, virtual and extended reality, mobile systems, cooperative platforms, social media, smart cities, internet-of-things technologies, coding practices, artificial intelligence, virtual health, financial systems and many other systems.

Treviranus is credited with developing an inclusive design methodology that has been adopted by large enterprises such as Microsoft, as well as public-sector organizations internationally. She also founded an innovate graduate program in inclusive design at OCAD University.

Treviranus has a PhD in philosophy from University College Dublin and an MA in special education from the University of Toronto.

“Our employment systems, including recruitment, screening, hiring, training, performance metrics, promotion and firing, are biased against human differences. They are thereby fundamentally designed to discriminate against disability. Broadly deployed AI tools mechanize, amplify, accelerate and automate this discrimination. This harms organizations and employers by creating monocultures that lack the adaptability needed in the current economic climate. I wish to proactively intervene in emerging systems to prevent inequity and identify approaches that benefit people currently.”