Designing for the Disabled


Book Description

Designing for the Disabled is concerned with architecturally disabled people, those who when using or attempting to use buildings can find themselves confronted by impediments.




Designing for the Disabled: The New Paradigm


Book Description

Selwyn Goldsmith's Designing for the Disabled has, since it was first published in 1963, been a bible for practising architects around the world. Now, as a new book with a radical new vision, comes his Designing for the Disabled: The New Paradigm. Goldsmith's new paradigm is based on the concept of architectural disability. As a version of the social model of disability, it is not exclusively the property of physically disabled people. Others who are afflicted by it include women, since men customarily get proportionately four times as many amenities in public toilets as women - and women have to queue where men do not - and those with infants in pushchairs, because normal WC facilities are invariably too small to get a pushchair and infant into. To counter architectural disability, Goldsmith's line is that the axiom for legislation action has to be 'access for everyone' - it should not just be 'access for the disabled', as it presently is with the Part M building regulation and relevant provisions of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. In a 40-page annex to his book he sets out the terms that a new-style Part M regulation and its Approved Document might take, one that would cover alterations to existing buildings as well as new buildings. But architects and building control officers need not, he says, wait for new a legislation to apply new practical procedures to meet the requirements of the current Part M regulation; they can, as he advises, act positively now. This is a book which will oblige architects to rethink the methodology of designing for the disabled. It is a book that no practising architect, building control officer, local planning officer or access officer can afford to be without.




Designing for the Disabled


Book Description







What Can a Body Do?


Book Description

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.




Are you an inclusive designer?


Book Description

Despite improvements in the last 20 years we still have a long way to go before all of our buildings, places and spaces are easy and comfortable for all of us to use. This book puts forward a powerful case for a totally new attitude towards inclusivity and accessibility. Exploring both the social and the business cases for striving for better, this book will empower architects to have more enlightened discussions with their clients about why we should be striving for better than the bare minimum, and challenging the notion that inclusive design should be thought of reductively as simply a list of “special features” to be added to a final design, or that inclusivity is only about wheelchair access. This book will be to help make inclusive design business as usual rather than something that is added on to address legislation at the end of the development process. Accessible and engaging, this book will be an invaluable resource for students as well as practicing architects, richly illustrated with case studies showing both good and bad examples of inclusive design and celebrating inclusion.




Designing Around People


Book Description

This book presents the proceedings of the 8th Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT '16), incorporating the 11th Cambridge Workshop on Rehabilitation Robotics, held in Cambridge, England in March 2016. It presents novel and state-of-the-art research from an international group of leaders in the fields of universal access and assistive technology. It explores various issues including the reconciliation of usability, accessibility and inclusive design, the design of inclusive assistive and rehabilitation systems, measuring product demand and human capabilities, data mining and visualizing inclusion, legislation in inclusive design, and situational inclusive interfaces (automotive and aerospace). This book provides an invaluable resource to researchers, postgraduates, design practitioners, therapists and clinical practitioners, as well as design teachers.




Housing and Social Policy


Book Description

This topical book transforms the analysis of housing problems into a lively, interesting and contentious subject of social scientific study, addressing themes of residential experience, inclusion/empowerment, sustainability and professionalism/managerialism, which lie at the heart of the housing and social policy debate. Each chapter considers a specific social category - such as class, gender, or disability - and evaluates the experience and understanding of housing and social policy under this category. With innovative approaches to conceptualising housing and a clear, defined structure, Housing and Social Policy encourages students and practitioners in both arenas to think reflexively about housing as a central instrument of social policy and social experience.




Doing Disability Differently


Book Description

This ground-breaking book aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly on compliance, it sees disability – and ability – as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde? To do this, Doing Disability Differently: explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable asks how designing for everyday life – in all its diversity – can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space. Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.




Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader


Book Description

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader takes a groundbreaking approach to exploring the interconnections between disability, architecture and cities. The contributions come from architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English language and literature, rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and disability arts and cover personal, theoretical and innovative ideas and work. Richer approaches to disability – beyond regulation and design guidance – remain fragmented and difficult to find for architectural and built environment students, educators and professionals. By bringing together in one place some seminal texts and projects, as well as newly commissioned writings, readers can engage with disability in unexpected and exciting ways that can vibrantly inform their understandings of architecture and urban design. Most crucially, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader opens up not just disability but also ability – dis/ability – as a means of refusing the normalisation of only particular kinds of bodies in the design of built space. It reveals how our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability, and it suggests how thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative and new kinds of critical and creative architectural and urban design education and practice.