Author: Jane Bringolf

Pedestrians on Wheels: A new paradigm?

Personal mobility devices are shown as the Segway, Hovertrax, Ninebot Mini, Solowheel, Onewheel, and Z-board.Pedestrians are becoming more diverse. Consequently, moving through public spaces needs more design consideration by urban designers. It also means accessibility and safety is more than having kerb ramps and level footpaths. Pedestrians on wheels is a new paradigm.

Mobility will become more complex as mobility choices increase especially with battery powered devices. We already have a diversity of pedestrians. They come with baby strollers, wheeled suitcases, wheelchairs, guide dogs, walking frames, and skateboards. Then we add powered devices: mobility scooters, wheelchairs, Segways, hover-boards, and e-scooters. And the line between mobility aids and other wheeled devices is blurring in terms of road and footpath use. 

Manoeuvring around all these different pedestrians is difficult enough. Then we need to add in people who are using umbrellas, carrying large parcels, pushing delivery trolleys, and those looking in shop windows and their smart phones. And let’s not forget bicycles and e-bikes. 

 An interesting study on personal mobility devices is reported in  “Diversity of “Pedestrians on Wheels”, New Challenges for Cities in 21st Century“. The article has a surprisingly long list of different categories of pedestrians and their differing obstacles and needs. For example, pedestrians with wheeled elements and pedestrians requiring more action time. 

Cars take priority in planning

Traffic management authorities collect data on vehicle traffic flows, but not pedestrian movements. Data are, however, collected on pedestrian road accidents and deaths. Pedestrians who feel unsafe on the street will curtail their movement in their neighbourhood. The number of journeys not made because of road and street design are not known. 

In the conclusions, the authors discuss the need for regulations for users and on the use of the devices, and using designs which can be easily detected by other pedestrians by using colour and sound. 

New ideas about “Movement and Place” are at odds with the “Roads and Traffic” paradigm. Something will have to give if we want more walking. People limit where they go based on how safe they feel. Pedestrian crossings aren’t designed with all pedestrians in mind – they’re designed with traffic flows in mind.

Extract from Abstract 

Reality shows us that pedestrian diversity is a reality that is becoming increasingly complex. In the 20th century the car set aside horse carriages and pedestrians. In the same way, 21st century pedestrians are taking centre stage with policies for walkability. But the design of streets for this new paradigm has yet to be solved. 

Citizens on scooters, skates, skateboards, Segways, and unicycles, are added to the already traditional baby strollers, wheelchairs, and suitcases with wheels. “Pedestrians on wheels” poses new challenges of coexistence and design. These are considerations of universal accessibility that we cannot leave out while our society progresses.

This paper identifies some of these new needs and presents a progressive analysis in three phases: 1 classification of the different user of the street, 2 study of the Personal Mobility Devices (PMD) and 3, the new accessibility barriers that arise with the use of PMD. As a result, some action strategies are pointed out to respond to the difficulties of accessibility derived from this new reality and to integrate them into the universal design of the urban public space.

The article is from the proceedings of the UDHEIT 2018 conference held in Dublin, Ireland. It is open access publication.

One of the seven Lime designs. A two seater tricycle.Micromobility is now accessible for people with disability thanks to seven new designs launched by Lime. They are not “disability” specific – just good design useable by more people. The article is on FastCompany website. 

Diversity and Inclusion or Belonging and Dignity?

A crowd of lots of different coloured heads representing diversity, inclusion, belonging and dignity.Are Diversity and Inclusion and recognition of Diversity the right words to use? Have they just become jargon for human resource policies and not much changes?  An article in the World Economic Forum newsletter says Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have failed. Belonging, Dignity and Justice are proposed instead. The reasons are explained.

      • The existing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives only expose discriminatory attitudes and do nothing to change things
      • These programs are still based in white dominant culture
      • Belonging, dignity and justice are alternative values that are about the experiences of marginalised people

Belonging is about feeling welcome, dignity is about be a person, and justice is about restoring and repairing individuals.

Although the article is by a practitioner in this space, the information in the article is useful for any organisation wanting to improve diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In essence, it is about embedding the principles in all policies and practices both inside and outside the organisation. 

We are reminded that the work done today on diversity and inclusion creates a legacy for future generations. The title of the article is, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have failed. How about Belonging, Dignity and Justice instead?

The office: Inclusion, Empowerment and Belonging

Looking down into a large open plan office with desks and partitionsMany people spend a great deal of their week in the workplace. It is a micro community where people share experiences and develop connections. The birthday cake is one way to encourage meaningful social connections. But are all workers feeling like they belong in the office? Inclusion, empowerment and belonging are important factors for a productive workforce.

An article in Sourceable asks us to think about the physical design of offices as well as workplace practices. Linh Pham begins the discussion with her own experience of coming to Australia with her family as a refugee. She reminds us that concepts of diversity and inclusion are relatively new. But they are no longer “nice-to-have” – they are “must-have”.

New parents are discussed in terms of childcare facilities. One in five couple families with small children have both parents working full time. Thoughtful office design makes the workplace more welcoming for people with various disabilities.

Pham suggests that programs to reduce inequality are essential. But the commitment to inclusion can go beyond the office to involvement in activities such as International Women’s Day. Nicely put together drawing on all marginalised groups and statistics.

The title of the article is Building empowerment and inclusiveness. 

 

Accessibility in UX Design

Infographic showing three groups of disability: permanent, temporary and situational.
From the Microsoft Inclusive Toolkit

The Web Accessibility Guidelines aren’t just for web designers and tech people. We all need to have an overall grasp of what they are about. As we do more online it is important we don’t make things inaccessible by mistake. Claire Benidig introduces the concepts of accessibility in UX design using the guide from Microsoft.

Cognition, Vision, Hearing, Mobility and Mental Health are all covered in an easy to read way. So, non-tech people can understand.

If we know about the basics of web accessibility, we can give a decent brief to a web designer. Then we will we can check if the Web Accessibility Guidelines were built in. Many designers still think of accessibility as an add-on feature.

Claire’s article is titled, Accessibility in UX Design.  She says that accessibility is not confined to a group of users “with some different abilities”. Anyone can experience a permanent, temporary or situational disability. An example of situational disability is having just one arm free because you are holding a baby or the shopping. 

Microsoft inclusive design principles state:

“Exclusion happens when we solve problems using our own biases. As Microsoft designers, we seek out those exclusions, and use them as opportunities to create new ideas and inclusive designs.”

UX and Mental Health 

A drawing of a woman with her back turned to her laptop. She has her head in her hands signifying a mental health event.

It’s safe to say that everyone has experienced a website or app that is difficult to use. But little is known on how difficult interactions with apps and websites affect people with mental health conditions. UX design, or user-centric design, is associated with digital and website design. However, UX is not quite the same as co-design with actual users.

Danae Botha says that “a confusing UX could trigger anxiety” and repetitive tasks can make depression worse. Repetitive alerts are not great for someone with an attention disorder either.

Design for mental health reduces or eliminates features that can aggravate symptoms of a disorder. For example, automating menial tasks may decrease the risk of boredom-induced depressive symptoms.

In her article, Botha offers some tips for organisations and companies to minimise communication barriers. She covers many of the different apps available such as Teams, Jira Slack, and Miro and explains their pros and cons.

The title of the article is, Kinder Tools: How to Improve Enterprise UX Design for Mental Health.

Talking to users: an introvert’s guide

A desk has highlighter pens in different colours, working papers and a smart phone.What if you are a designer and you’re not sure how to engage with your user base? According to a UXDesign blog post, many designers are introverted and don’t know where to start with user interviews. A fear of talking to strangers brings up many thoughts: 

I’m no researcher, what if I don’t ask the right questions?
What if I say something to offend the person?
How do I not contaminate the responses with my own views?

So some tips for stepping outside the comfort zone are helpful. The article has some practical advice such as, don’t jump straight into the questions without some light introductory chat. And fix the things you didn’t like about the interview process for the next time. The title of the article is An introvert’s guide to starting user interviews.

However, it might be the case that the personalities that go into ICT are not the people who are good at user interaction. This might be why higher education programs are not producing graduates who are skilled at this side of the design process. Indeed, according to an article from Norway, the institutions are not training people to even meet basic legal design requirements for accessibility.

Case studies of universally designed homes

Max and Tricia stand at their doorway which reflects their love of Japanese design.Lifemark in New Zealand has several good case studies of universally designed homes. Some are modest homes and some are more upmarket.

Their newsletter features a spacious home with great views. The owners, Max and Tricia have an interesting story to tell. Max is a mechanical engineer who taught environmental and spatial home design to architecture students. He knew about accessibility but not heard of universal design. Turns out that one of Max’s students in 1995 became the designer of their new home. The story of Max and Tricia has some nice detail and pictures in the article. 

Not everyone has money to spend on a “grand design”, but it doesn’t have to be grand to be universally designed and suitable for everyone.  Lifemark has a gallery of homes designed with universal design principles on their website. There’s also some examples of retrofits. 

 

Playmobile helps with design translation

Playmobile figure in a bed with a doctor figure standing by.Doctors and architects speak different languages. That’s understandable – they’ve been to entirely different schools. We can get by in a foreign country with gestures. But when it comes to communicating detail we need a phrasebook. Similarly, architects and health professionals a similar tool – Playmobile. It helps with design translation. 

Using Playmobile figures and 3D printed beds and hospital equipment designers and medical staff can shape the spaces together. Not everyone can grasp the concept of spaces on a two-dimensional drawing. Likewise, designers do not have an intimate understanding of how clinics work. But everyone has played with toys. 

This is a great example of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The short article on FastCompany doesn’t mention this specifically, but it follows the basic tenets: multiple means of engagement, representation and expression. 

This is not a new idea – Lego has been used in other situations.

Accessible rail systems: A global study

Global map with different coloured dots depicting different levels of accessibility in different cities.If you are a wheelchair user and want to travel by train, the best places are in Asia and Europe. That’s according to a global study on accessible rail systems. The key points of the study are:

    • The lack of accessibility is not only an issue in developing countries.
    • The systems’ accessibility level varies even among cities of the same country.
    • 62% of all systems with good accessibility are located in Asia and Europe.
    • 19% of the systems do not provide any information about their accessibility status.

The title of the article is, Wheelchair accessibility of urban rail systems: Some preliminary findings of a global overview. It is open access from ScienceDirect. 

The article has a graphic showing the level of accessibility by city (shown above). It shows Sydney as “fully accessible”. However, in 2021 Sydney is still retrofitting lifts into urban rail stations. The historical context of accessibility, or lack thereof, in each country is a key factor in the current accessibility status. 

The authors conclude,

“This study aimed to present a preliminary and general overview that can be valuable as a starting point for other studies on this subject. Thus, we encourage future studies to consider the real accessibility at the stations (and the availability of all the required infrastructure), not just the accessibility that is declared by the systems’ operators on their official website, as that information may not be updated nor even realistic.”

The research was carried out by an international team funded by institutions in Taiwan, Brazil and Chile. 

Online hearing and vision simulators

Picture of a coffee machine in a cafeEver wondered what it is like for someone with hearing loss trying to be part of a conversation in a restaurant? Or wondered what it is like to try and read a transit map if you have glaucoma?  Now you can check this out using online hearing and vision simulators to get the idea of the way things sound and look.

The Inclusive Design Group at the University of Cambridge have come up with a hearing simulator that covers mild, moderate and severe hearing loss in five different settings: restaurant, classical music, rock music, a ringing phone, and a station platform announcement. Similarly, the vision simulator includes the main vision impairments including macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataracts, and diabetic retinopathy. 

You can also use their Exclusion Calculator for vision, hearing, thinking, dexterity, reach and stretch and locomotion, to see how many people might be excluded if not thought about in the early stages of design. You can set the calculator for multiple capacities, such as sight, hearing, thinking and locomotion – all of which are needed to negotiate public transport, for example. A very useful tool for any designer.

 

Age Friendly Communities Handbook

Front cover of the Age Friendly Communities Handbook.From Norway comes an Age Friendly Communities Handbook that presents information in easy to consume formats. Norway has been driving a universal design agenda through national and local government since 1999. Norway’s key document for this is Norway Universally Designed 2025. This Handbook fits nicely within that framework but with an emphasis on an ageing population.

The WHO Age-Friendly Cities guide is useful and detailed, but it’s showing its age. So this handbook comes at a good time.

Infographic from the handbook showing the essential element of age friendly.The Handbook for Age-Friendly Communities is 70 pages with many photos and graphics. It covers the key steps in the planning cycle, aspects to consider in built design, transport, housing and social participation. Pre-requisites for age-friendly development are co-creation and communication.

Elements not considered in the WHO guide are plain language, internet use and how to co-create and gather information from older people.  Checklists and examples are included. Fortunately the Handbook is in English so many more people can benefit from Norway’s 20 year’s experience. A great resource, particularly for local government.

Norway has reviewed its policies over time and began to include more than the built environment. They also developed a method for mapping their level of accessibility in 2017.

Alternative Age-Friendly Handbook

Front cover of the age friendly handbook. Simple layout white with black text
Front cover of Alternative Age Friendly Handbook

Alternative to what? you might ask. An Alternative Age-Friendly Handbook, with acknowledgement to the WHO’s work on age-friendly cities, takes a different approach to creating age-friendly urban places and spaces.

Focusing on small scale age-friendly urban actions the handbook takes the reader through some useful thinking processes. First, it avoids the language of “apocalyptic demography” where an ageing population is described in terms of disaster and catastrophe. Then it moves on to the participatory approaches that have evolved over the last ten years.

A refreshing presentation of a handbook – not the classic “how to” format. Rather a creative “think about…”  While this is from the perspective of older people, much of the thinking and many of the processes apply to all age groups. It looks like a long document, but that is because it is in large print. An easy and engaging read.  Published by the University of Manchester Library. 

Disasters and emergencies: Leave no-one behind

Road Closed signs and a barrier of a road that reaches down to swollen river.‘Leave no-one behind’ is the tag line for the Sustainable Development Goals. In disaster management this idea takes on a very practical meaning. People with disability are two to four times more likely to die or be injured in a disaster than the general population. So why is our disaster planning and risk reduction failing people with disability?

Being able to attend community meetings to find out what to do in an emergency is one factor. Having more than one person in the household with disability is another. Community education and plans assume everyone can get out of the house with a few belongings, get in the car and drive to safety. But some of the problem is that people with disability don’t make a plan or don’t tell anyone their plan. 

There is no nationally consistent standard for including people with disability in disaster risk reduction. An article in The Conversation explains some of the research into this. It includes the comments made by people with disability when asked about disaster planning. One such comment is very telling,

“But I spoke to three different people who had three different disabilities, and you realise that the communication has to be targeted. Because those three people required completely different things. And the information they got was not in a mode which they could use.”

Four men with orange lifejackets are standing in a yellow State Emergency Service boat on a swollen river.The title of the article in The Conversation is, ‘Nobody checked on us’: what people with disability told us about their experiences of disasters and emergencies. 

The academic version was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The title of the paper is, Applying a person-centred capability framework to inform targeted action on Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction, and is available from ScienceDirect.  

Key points from the study are:

    1. Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction requires collaboration with people with disability to remove barriers that increase risk in emergencies.

2. The Person-Centred Emergency Preparedness framework directs attention to the choices that people with disability have in emergency situations and factors that enable or limit them.

3. Findings can be used to support implementation of Australia’s National Strategy for Disaster Resilience by defining person-centred responsibilities of people with disability and service providers in emergencies.

Findings gave deep insight into the diversity and interrelatedness of factors that increase the vulnerability of people with disability. The report offers new perspectives on why Australian’s with disability are disproportionately affected by disaster. 

Universally designed emergency management

With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, the need to have inclusive emergency systems is paramount. Although there is some awareness of people with disability within emergency management, there are few tools that embrace universal design principles.

Research has focused on the general public, but not on stakeholders such as first responders, control room personnel and decision makers. Many of us turn to our mobile phones and downloaded apps to keep us up to date. But how inclusive are they?

A research paper from Norway takes the topic of emergency management beyond the physical environment, such as escape routes, to communications technology. Appropriate technology can improve disaster management for everyone.

The paper is a literature review of universal design methods in emergency management. Among the findings was awareness of people with disability was increasing and systems were being adapted accordingly. However, gaps remain.

Some of these are:

    • Most of the work on ICT tools and platforms for Emergency Management does not take into account Universal Design nor accessibility.
    • There is a lack of communication support between emergency medical responders and people that are deaf.
    • In use of social networks in emergency situations, the age gap was identified as significantly more severe than the disability gap.
    • Accessible tools and platforms exist, but most of them are on the conceptual or at best on the prototype level.
    • Research on the use of assistive technology by older adults during disasters is a neglected issue.
    • Accessibility is often limited to access to Internet, rather than the diversity of stakeholders and their access to digital solutions.

They also found that participatory design methods gave best results but were rarely used. Maps for visualising disasters were unlikely to be accessible, but had high value for users. The article is comprehensive and covers every aspect of emergency and disaster management, particularly from the perspective of emergency personnel. 

The title of the article is, Universal Design of ICT for Emergency Management from Stakeholders’ Perspective. It is open source.

 

Designing and reorganising transport hubs: A framework

Inside Kings Cross Railway Station in UK showing two floors with shops inside a giant atrium.Seamless transitions between walking, cycling and public transport are important for the environment, inclusion and for reducing traffic congestion. That’s not a new idea. How to do it is another matter. The MATCH-UP project in Europe developed a method to assess how policies are measuring up and creating design solutions. The method and background to the project are presented in a new article published in Sustainability.

The aim of the method is to support designers and decision-makers who need to re-organise existing transport hubs and plan new ones. This detailed document is good for anyone in transport planning and transport policy, sustainability, accessibility and universal design in the built environment. Accessibility and universal design are embedded in all aspects and not listed at the bottom as an afterthought. 

The title of the article is, Assessing the Performance of Modal Interchange for Ensuring Seamless and Sustainable Mobility in European Cities.  

Embedding of universal design principles is discussed as a first step. It will “ensure high-quality spaces in every condition and for every ability, being permanent or temporary.” Key factors are listed as, universal design, accessible pedestrian routes, parking facilities, shared mobility and wayfinding.

Dedicated staff and services to assist people moving inside the main transport hubs. That’s because distances and wayfinding are often complex.

 

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