Photo by Ted Morrison
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The Revolution in Design
By John Hockenberry, November 2008
Grab bars, lever door handles, and curbless showers—products and tools originally developed for people with disabilities—are now going mainstream
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While lecturing to a packed auditorium during a technology conference at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I joked that my beautiful emerald-green 1938 Remington portable typewriter was actually a laptop that printed while you typed. The joke got a big laugh, but then when I explained that one of the reasons the typewriter was originally developed was to allow the blind to write, the audience audibly gasped. Like most people, they had no idea that some of the first beneficiaries of the keyboard revolution were the blind.
The point I was making is that historically all kinds of extraordinary technology was developed first to address impairments of one kind or another. The revolution in optics that produced astronomy and microbiology began with lenses to address the needs of nearsighted Italian merchants in the 13th century. The telephone was invented as a way of helping the deaf; its broader implications were apparent only once the device was actually used on a large scale.
Look around you and you see this design trickle-down continuing today. Advanced prosthetics developed for amputees promise applications for human augmentation and robotics. The design for a wheelchair that can climb stairs inspired the two-wheeled Segway. Type an e-mail on any smart phone and the device guesses at the word you are trying to spell and allows you to enter the word with a single command—using software originally developed for people with cerebral palsy to speed their communication on hard-to-use point-and-speak voice generators. Sports bars rely on closed captioning designed for the deaf to present play-by-play on their TVs without interrupting their patrons’ conversations and drinking.
This brings me to universal design (UD), a concept that’s driving a historic change in how we think about our living spaces—and maybe even our lives. The term, which refers to environments and products that are accessible and usable by everyone to the greatest extent possible, regardless of age and ability (hence universal, get it?), was coined back in the 1980s by a visionary architect named Ronald L. Mace, who established the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University. Mace claimed the world would embrace UD as the population aged, and he predicted a radical transformation in design and consumer culture that would benefit everyone, not just those with disabilities.
Today Mace’s prediction is coming true on a scale even he never envisioned. Simple numbers tell the story. As the population ages, increasing millions are demanding living arrangements and products that work with people’s declining physical function. A recent AARP study established that 89 percent of 50-plus Americans intend to remain in their own homes as long as they possibly can, a phenomenon called aging in place. As a result, those with disabilities have become an engine of innovation. They are the so-called lead adopters of sophisticated design that meets specific physical needs.
These days, builders, contractors, and designers are scrambling to accommodate a huge new market—one growing exponentially as more and more boomers and older retirees who want to age in place realize that making sometimes costly modifications to their homes now makes economic sense. All they have to do is tally the annual cost of assisted living against that of remodeling. The installation of stepless entries, home elevators, wide passageways, adjustable cabinets, curbless showers, and other UD features is now the fastest-growing segment of the residential remodeling industry.
Interior designer and consultant Rebecca Stahr of Atlanta confirms that the whole building industry today is rushing to catch up with a trend it ignored for decades. Stahr got into the business of UD more than 20 years ago, after the American Society of Interior Designers, of which she was a member, suggested that making custom living spaces for the aging population was going to be the Next Big Thing. It sure seemed Big, but in 1988 it sure wasn’t Next. For years she combated the prevailing perception that her designs subtracted value from homes.
“It was a struggle to convince people that this was a good idea,” says Stahr. I know this from firsthand experience. For most of my adult life, looking for a place to live has been a matter of being shown apartments I can barely get into, and estimating how much demolition and construction I would need to do to widen doors, remove steps, lower counters, and make spaces accessible to the wheelchair I have been in since I was paralyzed in an automobile accident in 1976. So, when a decade ago my fully ambulatory and younger-by-a-decade wife and I came across a home for sale that contained UD features, the legacy of the prior owners, I was thrilled.
The house was fully ramped and wheelchair accessible. I rolled effortlessly into the living room with a big smile on my face. The lowered kitchen counters were like a dream. The large, open hallways were welcoming, and the bathrooms required no wheelchair gymnastics to enter and use comfortably. Ultimately, we passed on that property only because we found a lovely three-story home with a built-in elevator.
How times have changed. These days Stahr, who in 1997 founded LifeSpring Environs, Inc., a consulting group to housing professionals, spends much of her time training developers, builders, remodelers, and Realtors to become Certified Aging-in-Place Specialists, or CAPS. (The CAPS program is a collaboration between the National Association of Home Builders’ NAHB Remodelers, AARP, the NAHB Research Center, and the 50+ Housing Council.) Each year Stahr turns out hundreds of graduates for CAPS (and other similar programs) who go on to spread the word about universal design in communities all over the United States. “Last year I must have trained more than 600 people,” she says. “That’s 600 ‘aha moments,’ when people say they get it. They always say the same thing: ‘This is just what any good design ought to be.’”
Architectural legend and globally renowned product designer Michael Graves discovered in a very personal way the power of universal design. Six years ago he contracted a mysterious virus that resulted in paralysis from the chest down. He doesn’t call his sudden, permanent disability an aha moment, but he does describe his rehab as a kind of sobering journey into a world of bad design for people with disabilities. An architect whose buildings are iconic around the world, Graves once considered the Americans with Disabilities Act—which mandates ramps and wheelchair access—just another burdensome government regulation for buildings. Today Graves, through his subsidiary Michael Graves Design Group, has embarked on a mission to bring high-quality design to everything from wheelchairs to bath chairs and canes, and he believes the universal-design movement represents a deeper shift in architecture and aesthetics. “Just as the Renaissance was an explosion of design and technology that reflected an infusion of new public participation in European life at the end of the Middle Ages, architecture and design are being asked to create tools and spaces for a new, diverse 21st-century public,” he says. Far from shunning redesigns to achieve mobility and access for the widest possible number of users, Graves loves going back to the drawing board. “When I am asked to reconsider a design to allow increased access, I say, ‘Thank you,’ because now I get to design it all over again. Who knows what wonderful new solutions I might find?”
It is this unexpected shift from thinking of universal design as some kind of clumsy but necessary accommodation for old people to seeing it as a central organizing principle for all of life’s changes that will transform our culture the most. This will involve embracing the potential of design to solve problems rather than simply convey style. And it will require shedding fears about physical changes that produce shame over being no longer young or physically perfect.
We are taught as adults to believe that any condition that renders our physical bodies useless, renders us unable to communicate, and forces us to rely on everyone around us to survive is a ticket for the Dr. Kevorkian Express. Yet, if you think about it, these difficulties are a perfect description of early childhood, where products are routinely designed to deal with physical challenges of all kinds. From advanced ergonomic sippy cups to brightly colored high-tech strollers that look as if they just returned from the international space station, design enhances the experience of childhood despite all its physical changes and setbacks. Why not for everyone? Far from being remote or frightening, universal design is a place we have really never left…we just think we have. It’s time to think again.
John Hockenberry is a distinguished fellow at the MIT Media Lab.
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