Nicole Junkermann on Access as the Harder Problem

A thing that exists and a thing that is available are two different achievements, and only one of them tends to get written about.

The gap between invented and available is where most of the disappointment in this field lives. Nicole Junkermann has come to treat access as the harder problem rather than the later one, and it helps to be specific about what the word actually covers. Five conditions do most of the work.

Five conditions for being genuinely available

1. Affordable without a decision. Anything that requires a household to weigh it against something else will reach the households that do not have to weigh it, and stop there.
2. Reachable without a journey. Distance is a quiet filter. A thing that requires travel on a weekday is available to people with flexible weekdays, which is a narrower group than it sounds.
3. Usable without instruction. If it needs a confident reader, a good connection and a recent device, it has selected its audience before anyone chose anything.
4. Describable in the words people already use. Something nobody can name is something nobody can ask for, and asking is usually the first step.
5. Durable without attention. Things that work only while someone is enthusiastic about them are pilots. Things that keep working when nobody is watching are available.

Each of those is unglamorous, and together they explain why the distance between a good idea and an ordinary one being used in an ordinary week is measured in years rather than months. None of them is a technical problem in the usual sense. They are problems of cost, geography, language and patience, and they are solved by people who are willing to work on them for a long time without much credit.

It is worth saying what the list is not. It is not a complaint, and it is not an argument that novelty is wasted effort. New things have to be made before they can be spread, and the people who make them are doing something genuinely difficult. The point is only that the two halves of the work are usually described with wildly different levels of enthusiasm, and the quieter half is the one that decides whether anybody outside a pilot ever meets the result.

There is a second reason to care about this, which is that access shapes what gets learned. A thing used by a narrow group produces a narrow description of how it behaves, and that description then informs the next version. Widening reach is therefore not only fair, it is also the way a field finds out what it does not yet know about itself.

Nothing here is guidance and nothing here is a claim about what any particular service accomplishes. It is a hopeful observation about where the useful work sits. The wellbeing technology pages stay on the practical side of this, the human stories keep the people in view, and the companion note on the quiet progress in everyday women's health covers the same ground from a different angle. There is more from Nicole Junkermann across the notebook.

← Back to the blog