Who does the designing and what do they design? If the design works, users don’t think about the designer. But when the design works poorly, or not at all, the designer becomes the focus. “What were they thinking?” is the catch-cry. In spite of much research and literature on designing thoughtfully and inclusively, we still have a long way to go. So who do designers design for?A short paper takesa critical look at five design approaches from last century that remain current. The author discusses “Accessible” in terms of partial inclusion and design afterthoughts. “Inclusive/Universal Design” is discussed from the perspective of eliminating disability rather than embracing diversity. Six degrees of “User-Centred Design” is the focus of this design approach where users get a say in the design. An extension of user-centred design is “Participatory Design” which is also a learning experience for designers. Lastly, “Emancipatory Design” is praised for being empowering for people with disability.The title of the short paper is, Design Methodologies and Ethos in Disability: Research Snapshot.Editor’s Note: The Universal Design movement is sometimes accused of wanting to design out disability. Perhaps this view can be traced back to the mistaken interpretation of universal as “one-size-fits-all”. The concept of universal design in the context of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is very much one of inclusion, equity and acceptance of diversity.
From the Introduction
The subject of design is one that dominates the disability literature. Throughout the past number of years, there has been a push among researchers and advocates to think critically about the ways in which design is executed and by whom. Design has taken on a central role in the ‘normalization’ of disability. Each of these design methodologies and ethos has had an essential impact on built and design environments; however, there is still a considerable need for progress. Importantly, these design methodologies and ethos bring to light the significance of understanding that in today’s society, it is normative that environments and technologies are designed for people with disabilities, not by people with disabilities.
Staying home has taken on a new meaning, and for some, a priority, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But what if the design of the home environment isn’t helping, especially if you have dementia? Alzheimer’s WA has a great website with really practical information on housesand apartments. But we need to create all environments for dementia.
Of course, staying home also means staying in the community. So the neighbourhood and facilities need to be dementia-friendly too. The website also has this covered. There are sections on, Publicbuildings, Gardens, Hospitals, and Careenvironments.
Each section takes you to a floor plan with interactive buttons. Each button takes you to an illustration of a room or space, again with buttons for more information. For example, a click on a floor plan kitchen takes you to an illustration of a kitchen. Within this illustration are buttons checking off each of the design principles, such as lighting and cooking. There are PDF lists for download as well.
This website is a comprehensive virtual information centre for living with dementia. It’s useful for family members and designers alike. Some elements might be something as simple as rearranging things so they can be seen. Others might need more design know-how. A great resource.
Dementia-friendly neighbourhoods is a growing area of transdisciplinary research. But there are challenges and gaps that limit the depth of knowledge which need further research. An article from the University of Michigan outlines the issues for the built and social environments.
Neighbourhoods are multi-sensory – sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Technological advances support things like wayfinding and memory in navigating environments.
The authors discuss the need for participatory methods to identify areas of need and to prioritise neighbourhood issue.
Tactile markers and kerb cuts are commonplace on our footpaths and in other outdoor places. But what suits a person with a mobility restriction can pose problems for someone with low vision and vice versa. This issue of access features as a minimum standard is nicely presented in, Is your inclusive my exclusive?
The article is one of several conference papers in Open Space : People Space 3.It begins with a really good way of explaining the terminology each of which has inclusion as the underlying goal. Accessible design is about accommodating specific individuals and is usually applied at the end of the design process or a retrofit. But accessible design does not suit all.
Universal design is explained as a strategy to make designs usable for any many people as possible. This is less stigmatising for all users. If an outdoor space is designed inclusively, the need for tactile markers is reduced. Architectural features provide guidance instead.
The article includes a case study of tactile paving. Observations of pedestrians and lab tests on different designs are discussed briefly. The way that tactile pavers and kerb cuts are maintained is an ongoing issue for users and should not be ignored. The article ends with a reminder that good design, inclusive design, benefits everyone. Through a process of continuous improvement we can do better than minimum standards.
Design challenges as part of conferences are great for innovative outcomes. The Design for All Europe Summer School in Portugal was no exception. Working as interdisciplinary teams, participants were challenged with addressing the city planning issues in Viana do Castelo.
In her paper, Jenna Mikus from Queensland takes us through the four inclusive design steps for the city planning challenge. Stage 1 is to Explore, Stage 2 is to Focus, and Stage 3 is to Develop by building scenarios. Stage 4 is Delivering the conceptual design concepts to stakeholders. In this context pilgrims and tourism workers were the priority user groups in Viana.
Mikus concludes that following an inclusive design process helps frame design research. User insights help drive innovative ideas and ensures design teams ask the right questions of participants. That leads to design solutions based on feedback – the basis of people-centred design.
There’s more to this paper which details processes and outcomes. The terminology is a bit contorted with “Design-for-All” and “Inclusive Design” but should be read as meaning the same thing – a quest for inclusive societies.
Abstract: The 2019 EIDD Design for All Europe Summer School in Viana do Castelo, Portugal brought together 20 international doctoral students and design professionals to explore and apply Design for All knowledge. The program culminated in a capstone design challenge, during which participants were divided into teams and asked to apply Inclusive Design (ID) principles to address Viana’s urban planning issues. This paper presents the results of one of the four teams—outlining the design process, considerations, objectives, and outcomes. During this challenge, the team followed a prescribed ID process (based on the EIDD Design for All Europe-supported Inclusive Design framework [1] created by Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA) in collaboration with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) at the Royal College of Art (RCA)), testing its applicability. By engaging directly with lead user group members and relevant stakeholders, the team identified creative, pragmatic design solutions to meet design goals and innovate across people, planet, and profit. Thus, by applying ID as a people-centered strategy, participants created a conceptual urban design likely to result in sustainable innovation and resonate across demographics.
A caring city is one that understands the dynamic relationship between individuals and their surroundings. But are our cities caring or careless in their design? Carelessness makes cities uncomfortable, ugly and dull, with traffic movement taking priority over pedestrians. This extends to a multitude of steps and stairways making access difficult or impossible for some. Charlotte Bates argues that we need more caring in our cities. Her book chapter is a discussion based on three case studies that illustrate ways to configure care in the design of urban environments. The examples are of an open space, a hospital complex, and a housing estate.In each example, people are have the opportunity to come together or to retreat into private space. Intimacy and spontaneity are encouraged so that “caring spaces enable connections to be made”. As Bates says, the notion of caring design challenges the designs based on property-led narratives.The title of the chapter by Bates, Imrie and Kullman available on ResearchGate is, “Configuring the Caring City: Ownership, Healing, Openness”. Or you can directly download a PDF of the document.A second chapter titled Designing with Care and Caring with Design looks at designers as carers. The authors examine the intersection of design and care and how it is expressed in design practice. Understanding care from this broader perspective is another way of understanding universal design. It shows how universal deign is an attitudinal concept rather than resolving inclusion issues in the design process. The book is published by Wiley.
Book contents
Designing with care and caring with design. Rob Imrie and Kim Kullman
Age-inclusive design: a challenge for kitchen living. Sheila Peace
Curating space, choreographing care: the efficacy of the everyday. Daryl Martin
‘I don’t care about places’: the whereabouts of design in mental health care. Ola Söderström
The sensory city: autism, design and care. Joyce Davidson and Victoria L. Henderson
Configuring the caring city: ownership, healing, openness. Charlotte Bates, Rob Imrie, and Kim Kullman
‘Looking after things’: caring for sites of trauma in post-earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand. Jacky Bowring
Empathy, design and care – intention, knowledge and intuition: the example of Alvar Aalto. Juhani Pallasmaa
Architecture, place and the ‘care-full’ design of everyday life. Jos Boys
Ageing, Care and the Practice of Urban Curating. Sophie Handler
Caring through design: En torno a la silla and the ‘joint problem-making’ of technical aids. Tomás Sánchez Criado and Israel Rodriguez-Giralt
Design and the art of care: engaging the more than human and less than inhuman. Michael Schillmeier
Afterword: Caring urban futures. Charlotte Bates and Kim Kullman
Inclusive environments and universal design
Rob Imrie and Rachael Luck provide a philosophical essay on inclusive environments, rehabilitating the body and universal design. In this essay they bring the discipline of occupational therapy to the discussion. The essay published in 2014 still has relevance today as changes in housing design are still slow to come. The title is, Designing inclusive environments: rehabilitating the body and the relevance of universal design. The essay is an introduction to the chapters that follow in this special issue of Disability and Rehabilitation.
How do you draw together the right to an urban life with practical policies? It’s a case of weighing up democratic values and architectural design. Urban life is more than just a place outside of home to visit. It’s also about being visible in public places – a concept much valued by people with disability. The underpinning value is social justice. Universal design is both a concept about inclusion as well as design initiatives. Finding the balance between them is the key.
A study carried out in Oslo, Norway sought the views of urban experts. They included local government representatives, disability rights organisations and property owners. To sum up, public places can protect equality and dignity if all stakeholders share the same knowledge and understanding. Once again, we see that inclusion requires knowledge sharing across disciplines.
Excerpt from abstract:How can urban planning processes include perspectives from people with disabilities? This paper discusses the implementation of universal design and accessibility in a local urban context. Universal design consists of both core values, such as inclusion and equal status, and specific design initiatives, such as design of pavement surfaces and benches. The aim of implementing universal designing strategies is to achieve equal access for all citizens. Based on an empirical study of an urban redesign project, I argue that equal access must imply both access to public places and to political processes.
Sometimes it isn’t possible to do research in the field so that’s where research labs come in.In Toronto, Canada, they have a giant lab with several simulators where researchers can test their theories, products and ideas.
One of the simulators at the KITE lab.
The Kite Research Institute has simulator labs for the design of hospitals, driving ability, and assessing falls, homes, stairs, and streets. Their website features each one of these with descriptions of what they are researching. For example, the WinterLab recreates typical Canadian winter conditions with ice and winds up to 30km per hour. It’s all done with safety in mind under controlled conditions. That includes tilting the simulator to create sloping ground. It is used to test clothing and footwear and improvements to mobility aids.
HomeLabis a home within a lab where products are tested with volunteer participants. Researchers can observe the volunteer undertaking home activities from an overhead catwalk. The focus of the research now is on intelligent home systems.
Research labs like these are essential for the development of environmental design and the design of products. Something as basic as stairway design can always be improved. Have a look at their current researchand the simulators.
The video below provides an overview of the labs when they were owned by iDAPT.
Editor’s comment: While attending a conference in Toronto I was fortunate to visit this lab. It’s an amazing set-up.
Can universal design be regarded as a science? As more guidelines are produced with technical specifications, there’s a danger that the spirit of the concept is getting lost. When we drill down to the skills required to design inclusively we find it goes beyond well-meaning guidelines. This is what makes designing universally a science. Reporting on case study of a design proposal for a floating sea terminal in the Grand Harbour in Malta, Lino Bianco explains why. The case study also includes a heritage centre, a maintenance workshop and offices. The article details technical aspects supported by drawings and design considerations.Bianco begins with the background to universal design and how it relates to EU and the Maltese context. As a member state of the EU, Malta is obliged to follow the legal requirements for accessibility and inclusion. Bianco argues that the universal design philosophy has evolved into the systematic development of design guidelines. Consequently, the guidelines have become mandatory for built infrastructure projects. This has lead to a compliance approach which is contrary to the original aims of universal design. This is why the holistic application of universal design principles is a science not a format.His concluding comments propose that universal design should be descriptive and not prescriptive. “Adopting a performance-based approach is what UD as an applied science involves. It leads to designs with inclusive environs beyond the prescriptive requirement at law”.The title of the article is, Universal Design: From design philosophy to applied science.Abstract: Universal Design (UD) philosophy is inspired by the social responsibility that no discrimination is present in the use of the built environment. During recent decades UD philosophy led to a systematic development of design guidelines for architectural and urban projects aimed at rendering the built environment accessible to all. In Malta, such guidelines are endorsed by central and local government entities and nongovernmental organizations and they are covered by legislation which i s actively enforced. Moreover, the law stipulates that the planning regulator makes it mandatory that a given development permission complies with these guidelines. This ensures that no barriers can hinder the usage of a given development. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that UD is not only a legal requisite emerging from a socially sensitive design philosophy and grounded in official design standards that ensure legal compliance, but an applied science aimed at ensuring mobility for all. Using a case study from this European Union Member State, this paper argues that setting the focus on technical specifications relating to access for all falls short of addressing the inherent interdependencies; consequently, it does not tackle UD issues. UD goes beyond the prescriptive requirement established by law and underpins a performance-based design, thereby intrinsically enhancing the quality of any given element, whether a space or a product. UD is an applied scientific discipline; it is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary branch of learning. It involves the application of current formal scientific knowledge to pragmatic scenarios in order to attain contextual specific solutions. UD is not just an applied design philosophy; it is an applied science integrating anthropometrics, medicine and design; it is universal design science.Bianco, L. (2020). Universal design: from design philosophy to applied science. Journal of Accessibility and Design for All, 10 (1), 70-97
When it comes to active travel and bike riding, fewer women take up these options than men. The City of Sydney wanted to find out why this inequity exists and commissioned a study. It’s part of their overall strategy to apply a gender lens to planning. With an historical bias towards designing cities for men, it’s time to design women into urban environments.
Using participatory methods and a gender lens they found the drivers, enabling factors and barriers affecting women’s transport choices. The report resulting from the study is comprehensive. The key recommendations for supporting women to walk and cycle are:
perceptions about women bike riders
there’s a gender bias in transport planning
Safety beyond street lighting and cycle-ways
the need to work hand in hand with public transport
the need for end-of-trip facilities
Women’s travel habits are more complex than those of men. That’s because of home and work responsibilities. It’s not just a case of getting from A to B. Women often have more than one stop such as school drop-offs, running errands and doing the shopping.
The report recognises that infrastructure needs to be friendly to all ages, abilities and backgrounds, not just women. The title of the report is, On the Go: How Women Travel Around Our City: A case study on active transport across Sydney through a gender lens.
There are other research reports on active travel on the City of Sydney website. Bike riding is one of the City’s strategies for mitigating climate change.
Architecturally, glass stairways have an aesthetic of their own, but intuitively they seem more dangerous than regular stairways. So are they, and if so, by how much? An observational study of two public stairways, one glass and one concrete, showed that the glass stairway had significantly more incidents. This was in spite of more caution being used on the glass stairway. Indeed, they were eight times more likely to have an incident. Encouraging people to take the stairs is one of the proposed strategies of healthy built environment movement.But if the design excludes users because of the design, or is less safe, this is discriminatory. And yes, there might be an elevator, but this is not equitable access. Regardless, everyone should have the opportunity to use the stairs if they wish.The title of the study is, “The effects of glass stairways on stair users: An observational study of stairway safety”. It is open access on Academia, or you can download the 2MB PDF file. There is an earlier stairway study on ResearchGate, “The effects of interactive stairways on user behavior and safety” by the same authors.Abstract: The purpose of this study was to assess the safety of a winding glass stairway by observing the behavior of stair users and to identify issues that should be studied in a laboratory setting. A checklist for coding stair use behaviors was developed. Video observations were conducted in a retail store with a glass stairway (GS) and a shopping mall with a conventional stairway (CS). Key behaviors related to safety (tread gaze, diverted gaze,handrail use) and stair incidents on the two stairways (GS and CS) were identified from the recordings and compared. On the glass stairway, more users glanced down at the treads (GS: 87% vs. CS: 59%); fewer users diverted their gaze away from the stairs (GS: 54% vs. CS: 67%); and handrail use was higher (GS: 32% vs. CS:24%). Incident rates were much higher on the glass stairway (6.2%) compared to the conventional stairway(0.7%). Walking on winding treads made of glass may be more dangerous than walking on conventional materials due to reduced visibility of the tread edge or reduced friction between shoes and treads. Recent laboratory research suggests that stairway users may behave more cautiously using stairways with glass treads but the results from this study demonstrate that the benefit of increased caution can be negated in real world conditions.
Who does the designing and what do they design? If the design works, users don’t think about the designer. But when the design works poorly, or not at all, the designer becomes the focus. “What were they thinking?” is the catch-cry. In spite of much research and literature on designing thoughtfully and inclusively, we still have a long way to go. So who do designers design for?
A short paper takes a critical look at five design approaches from last century that remain current. The author discusses “Accessible” in terms of partial inclusion and design afterthoughts. “Inclusive/Universal Design” is discussed from the perspective of eliminating disability rather than embracing diversity. Six degrees of “User-Centred Design” is the focus of this design approach where users get a say in the design. An extension of user-centred design is “Participatory Design” which is also a learning experience for designers. Lastly, “Emancipatory Design” is praised for being empowering for people with disability.
The title of the short paper is, Design Methodologies and Ethos in Disability: Research Snapshot.
Editor’s Note: The Universal Design movement is sometimes accused of wanting to design out disability. Perhaps this view can be traced back to the mistaken interpretation of universal as “one-size-fits-all”. The concept of universal design in the context of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is very much one of inclusion, equity and acceptance of diversity.
Staying home has taken on a new meaning, and for some, a priority, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But what if the design of the home environment isn’t helping, especially if you have dementia? Alzheimer’s WA has a great website with really practical information on 
Tactile markers and kerb cuts are commonplace on our footpaths and in other outdoor places. But what suits a person with a mobility restriction can pose problems for someone with low vision and vice versa. This issue of access features as a minimum standard is nicely presented in, 
Design challenges as part of conferences are great for innovative outcomes. The 
A caring city is one that understands the dynamic relationship between individuals and their surroundings. But are our cities caring or careless in their design? Carelessness makes cities uncomfortable, ugly and dull, with traffic movement taking priority over pedestrians. This extends to a multitude of steps and stairways making access difficult or impossible for some. 
The title of the chapter by Bates, Imrie and Kullman available on ResearchGate is, “
Can universal design be regarded as a science? As more guidelines are produced with technical specifications, there’s a danger that the spirit of the concept is getting lost. When we drill down to the skills required to design inclusively we find it goes beyond well-meaning guidelines. This is what makes designing universally a science. 
When it comes to active travel and bike riding, fewer women take up these options than men. The City of Sydney wanted to find out why this inequity exists and commissioned a study. It’s part of their overall strategy to apply a gender lens to planning. With an historical bias towards designing cities for men, it’s time to design women into urban environments.
Architecturally, glass stairways have an aesthetic of their own, but intuitively they seem more dangerous than regular stairways. So are they, and if so, by how much?