Embracing Co-Design at Meta: Building a More Inclusive Future Together

Building products that serve everyone is at the heart of our mission, and the best products are built by working alongside the communities we serve. We embody this commitment through our co-design efforts, which often involve experts and members of historically underserved communities as equal partners in the early stages of product development.

What Is Equity-Centered Co-Design?

Equity-centered co-design is a participatory approach that prioritizes the involvement of people from diverse communities, experts, and academics early in our product development process. This method helps ensure that the unique needs and concerns of the groups most often overlooked are addressed. Inspired by the concept of curb-cutting—where a solution designed for a specific group actually benefits a wide range of people—equity-centered co-design creates inclusive experiences that serve everyone.

This process is rooted in the belief that building with communities, rather than for them, leads to much better product experiences for everyone. By integrating people’s unique perspectives, experiences, and insights into our design decisions, we’re able to create technologies that are truly reflective of the diverse needs of our nearly 4 billion global users. As such, co-design is not just a methodology—it’s a core part of our commitment at the intersection of inclusion and innovation.

Accessibility in Mixed Reality Product Development

In our most recent co-design session, we partnered with people with disabilities and disability advocates, including Paul Amadeus Lane and Michael Luckett, to ensure accessibility is integrated into the development of our mixed reality technology. This collaboration is tremendously important to the future of MR, and it helps us deliver universal value for our users through:

• Real-World Insights, Based on Real-Life Experiences: Co-designing products with diverse communities allows us to better understand user experiences, enables us to test assumptions, and helps us prioritize solving for user needs. People with disabilities and experts in accessibility bring to the table invaluable insights based on their lived experiences. Their contributions help us understand how our products are experienced by people with different disabilities, what gaps and pain points currently exist, and how the community would like to see specific challenges addressed.
• Inclusive Innovation: Inclusion is a cornerstone of responsible innovation. By involving people with diverse needs—such as disabilities—at the very start of the design process, we can ensure that our MR technology is more accessible and inclusive for everyone. As Lane says, “It’s important to build with people who have disabilities. And if you do it early in the process like we were able to do in this co-design, then you can eliminate some of the pain points that may come a year or two down the line.”
• Building community: Co-design requires building deep relationships based on trust and mutual respect. When we co-design products with diverse communities, we not only create products that more people can use, we also drive trust with users that are often left behind by technology. As Luckett notes, “I feel like we’re being heard as the community of disability. I feel like I’m a part of something that’s not just about me, but about everyone that goes through at least my experience and also on the whole spectrum of disability.”

We know that equity-centered co-design not only drives real-world impact—it also unlocks new possibilities, creating richer, more meaningful product experiences for everyone. We recognize that the industry still has a long way to go to make MR more inclusive, including through iterating on or establishing industry standards applicable to emerging technologies. Lane highlights the broader impact of these efforts: “Meta’s influence is huge. I think Meta evangelizing this push when it comes to accessibility is really going to help other companies out there to think deeply about accessibility and design.”

Co-designing solutions earlier in the development process will enable everyone to thrive in the metaverse, and we are dedicated to collaborating with communities that have historically been overlooked by technology—because together, we can achieve greater things.