Illustration by Suzuanne Burwash
The Equity and Inclusion in Housing Design Team, based at the University of Alberta’s Affordable Housing Solutions Lab, has been exploring approaches for involving people with disabilities in the design of accessible housing for more than two years now. The overarching goal of this project is to explore how people with disabilities experience traditional design activities and develop practical resources that can be used in access design to better include people living with disabilities in design decisions.
This research is grounded in the inclusive design paradigm. Inclusive design puts future users at the heart of the design process. Why? Design work is more responsive to diversity and difference and the need for flexibility and choice in environments when future users are directly involved in design decisions. By centering users in design decisions, designers can create buildings and environments that are convenient and enjoyable for everyone regardless of abilities.
Inclusive design is not without its challenges. Design processes must be sensitive to power differentials and include a safe and inclusive space for collaboration. This involves careful consideration of the intersectionality of participants: the fact that everyone brings unique ethnic, racial, gender and socio-economic backgrounds to these processes which can position them differently with respect to the problem at hand.
People’s physical, sensory and intellectual abilities can also position them differently in design processes, even exclude them if these processes include barriers. It is such barriers that too often exclude people with disabilities from participating in design processes.
Yet, people living with disabilities can be meaningfully involved in the design of accessible housing when designers and engagement specialists modify design activities and provide accommodations to participants.
In this regard, centering equity in inclusive design is essential. Equity concerns ensuring that everyone has access to the resources they need to participate meaningfully and effectively in the design process. Without considering equity, inclusive design processes can exclude many groups that are historically oppressed and marginalized, including people living with disabilities. Equity is absolutely fundamental to achieving the first principle of inclusive design: placing people at the heart of the design process.
With this understanding in mind, the team developed a toolkit for adapting and modifying design research activities so that people with disabilities can be meaningfully involved in design processes.
This toolkit:
- provides design teams with a set of “equity lens” that can be used to modify design research activities and accommodate people with disabilities so that they can be meaningfully involved;
- was created for design teams who use design research to learn from people with disabilities about their experiences and needs;
- can be used when planning design research activities during the early phase of the design process and beyond; and
- will increase the likelihood that people with disabilities will be able to meaningfully participate in planning and design activities related to housing.
Click here to access and download the online version of the toolkit.
Click here to access and download the print version of the toolkit.
This research was funded by a grant provided by the Alberta Real Estate Foundation.