It is with great joy that I want to let you know that last night, we announced that Be. Accessible is transforming into the Be. Lab!
July 2019
To our dearest Be. Community!
It is with great joy that I want to let you know that last night, we announced that Be. Accessible is transforming into the Be. Lab! We hosted a small gathering, a soft launch if you like, at our offices in Auckland in order to celebrate this evolution of our work and our vision for New Zealand.
I am sure this will raise some very key questions for you and over the next few weeks and months it will become clear why we have decided to make this important shift.
What is the Be. Lab?
Well the Be. Lab is the New Zealand-based, globally-networked centre for access innovation for the 21st century.
Our aim is for New Zealand to become the centre of access innovation, of accessible design and of accessible products and services in the world.
We believe by harnessing the social frameworks of equity and fairness that underpin our society, as well as our unique entrepreneurial spirit, Aotearoa is uniquely poised to play this role globally!
All the Be. Accessible services that you know and love are still a part of the new Be. Lab, but you will notice them evolving and iterating over the next few months as we incubate them to come into line with the new Be. Lab ethos.
And yes, we have a very full pipeline of incredible and exciting Be. Lab news and activity that we will share with you over the coming months. Alongside this, we'll be launching a brand-new website in a few weeks.
As the CEO and founder of Be. Accessible, and now the Be. Lab, I believe passionately in this shift in our focus. The world around us is changing at an unprecedented rate and it is my feeling that we are now at a critical point in terms of accessibility both locally and globally!
With the rise of new technologies such as AI, block chain and digital currencies, with climate change, bio security and changing population trends that see the rise of millennials and an ageing population all impacting the world around us… we need to have the means to be able to respond to these uniquely 21st century disruptions and opportunities in a 21st century way.
That is what the Be. Lab will enable us to do, explore possibilities using our new future-focused systems-changing, design philosophy. It's called the Possibility Lens and we'll be sharing more about that in the near future!
We have spent the last 3 years developing and co-designing this new approach with our local and international community, identifying how and where we believe we can be of most value as a 21st century access innovation lab. And, in the true spirit of a lab we will be trying out a range of new approaches… some of which will work, some of which may not but all of which will help us to learn and take some risks in what is increasingly becoming a rather risk-averse world.
So, we openly invite each and every one of you to join us on this exciting new stage of the Be. story! Come with us and know that we will be learning together. We will not get things perfectly right. We will need to try, to test and to learn. And we will need to iterate constantly as is the way with any true design and innovation process!
However, just imagine what we might be able to create together if we start to look at the world through a future focused lens of Possibility.
It is time to let go of deficit thinking, of tick boxes, and of low expectations for the 1 in 4 of us with access needs…and start to harness the incredible creative energy and true diversity that lies within our amazing community instead.
A truly heart felt thank you to every single person who has played a part in making this vision a reality, you are all remarkable!
We can't wait for you to join the Be. Lab!!