Have you ever thought about what life is like for a person who has to navigate access discrimination?
When the standards of our living conditions are lowered, we are affected. More than 70% of our lives are spent indoors, therefore the space we occupy plays a major role in our behaviours. Our mental and physical well being is dependent on the environment we inhabit. We are active participants and contributors to environmental change. We can completely reshape our surroundings.
If we do not consider everybody’s access needs, we are creating access problems, we are creating division and exclusion. We are dividing people into those who have access problem and those who don’t. That is discrimination by design.
At the moment accessibility is regulated by legislation. Code based design with minimal requirements guarantees compliance but that does not equal good experience. We need to move beyond a code-based understanding of accessibility and focus instead on providing equity of experience.
World Health Organisation defines disability as a contextual phenomenon:
“Disability occurs at the intersection of the person and their environment.”
Architecture, in all its forms, also occurs at the intersection of the person and their environment.
It is vital to design inclusion in.
If we don’t consider human beings with varied spectrum of abilities then we are designing and creating discrimination.
Photo Credit: Zachary Kyra-Derksen @ Unsplash 
Photo Credit: Nathan McDine @ Unsplash
If I design a beautiful building with a grand monumental staircase procession into a glass-ceilinged atrium and I then give people using wheelchairs an elevator down the hall next to the broom cupboard or maintenance plant room, my building will still be compliant building but it’s certainly not an equitable building. This tells wheelchair users, parents with strollers, elderly and others in need of a lift that their experience is less important.
Industrial revolution changed how we perceived human beings. People were being seen as resources, we became human capital, our value measured and determined by our productivity. As soon as our productivity is exhausted, our worth ends.
Today we claim to be well into “human centric”, “people power era” and yet, in majority of cases, our buildings are designed to suit only “normal” human beings and unfortunately sometimes don’t fulfil even our “basic” human needs.
Whether it is our environment or our economies, the message we sent out is that these people cannot be productive. They are often experiencing uselessness, or feel like burden which can lead to helplessness, frustration, sadness, even anger. Assuming that people who do not have an ability to see or ability to walk, cannot add value or be productive part of our society is foolish.
No one wants to be a burden or an afterthought, and these men and women deserve to be considered in the experiences we design. They desire to live a life in just like everybody else sense, with no special treatment whatsoever, despite significant physical constraints and/or mental wounds. The goal is to strike the right balance; to offer a house that appears ordinary, nothing more than plain wonderful normal house but where the obvious needs for specific accommodation that dramatically improves quality of their life has been considered. It’s not about sympathy and feeling sorry for them, it’s about empathy and wanting to enable a positive difference. If a designers can respect and appreciate whom they are designing for, there will be an intentional level of dignity and integrity that is delivered in a designed experience. This human-centred approach that’s grounded in empathy, inherently has the opportunity to benefit all of us.
Accessibility needs to be part of our well being story, it ought to become part of our lifestyle, it needs to be natural and beautiful.
It is well known that beauty can reduce stress and make us feel better, and that well designed places and objects can actually improve healing.
“True creativity is intelligence having fun.”
If you feel affected by the place you live in or work in and wish to improve it…