Building a world fit for people: "Nothing about us without us"
By Maria Morskieft
This book by Elaine Ostroff, Mark Limont and Daniel Hunter was published in 2002 and can be ordered for $15 or read online from: www.adaptiveenvironments.org/accessdesign
"Building a world fit for people" is a new book written by and about designers with a disability and gives an excellent insight in the 'universal design' approach these designers have used.
Only when you use the 'universal design' approach while designing landscapes, buildings or devices - and therefore catering for all people in every sort or measure - you will allow and promote the full participation of all people in society. 'Design should attend to the needs of all people throughout all phases of the human life cycle'.
Designers with a disability add a valuable quality to this work: their knowledge of having a disability. Apart from their professional skills, their own experiences and knowledge about the way designs interact with disabled people makes their designs much more valuable. Working from this perspective they are able to create a universal accessible world with beautiful functional design solutions.
'Building a world fit for people' is a collection of interviews with 21 designers from 6 different countries. It is especially created to inform students with a disability studying design about their education, coaching, teachers etc. It informs them how to incorporate their experiential knowledge with their professional knowledge, to create a network of other designers with a disability, to present themselves to future employers etc. In other words, this book is a source of information for students, designers and decision makers in order to create accessible public areas, schools, houses, cutlery, clothes, furniture or anything else requiring functional design.
Reading these interviews, it is odd to see that the designers were much more handicapped by the obstructions they experienced from the public attitude than from their own disability. But it also describes how their specific concepts of design have influenced their own surroundings. Marcelo Pinto Guimaraes for instance, a Brazilian architect, tells about his young children and their ways of including their father's way of moving around in their daily activities. One of his children wants to be a designer himself, designing buildings and transportation devices. And he surprises his father every birthday with new wheelchair designs. His last 'design' was a mini hovercraft chair for those people that are bothered with all the bumps in the road a person in a wheelchair is experiencing.
Letting go of "the standard human being"
The book is one big explanation about how nowadays mainstreaming is excluding so many people. As long as the heads of designers are filled with ideas about the "standard human being", they keep on designing only for a few of us. The sooner they let go of this ridiculous idea of using this standard as their framework for designing, the sooner the world will really be our world.
The book celebrates the inspiration these designers have given to their colleagues, to their surroundings and to the designing world in general. They have changed their profession from the inside by offering new ways to define people and to create universal design. And they show the importance of seeing people with a disability not only as consumers of design but also as a source of information or as a designer themselves.
The next step is having designers and policymakers with a disability in executive positions so they can take affirmative action. Why not having a state architect using a wheelchair or a blind state secretary in charge of environmental issues or a deaf CEO of a telecom company? But as long as children with a disability are not stimulated to take up technical courses the chances of having this dream becoming real stays very small. This book might be able to give just that last push.
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