Why Inclusive Design means equal provision for everyone
All too often, inclusivity is considered as an afterthought to a project’s design, brought in to tick regulatory boxes. David Dropkin, senior access consultant for international multi disciplinary engineering consultancy Buro Happold explains what the practice’s inclusive design team really does and how it not only ensures accessibility, but also positively effects and encourages opportunities for all.
So what is inclusive design?
The term inclusive design is often misunderstood. Its detractors often mistake it as a euphemism for designing for the disabled, that is: designing environments, products or systems for a small minority.
Another misinterpretation is that inclusive design seeks to find a utopian solution, a kind of ‘one size fits all’ to suit all types of users. Literary examinations of utopian societies, such as Thomas More’s Utopia, portray societies organised to overcome the flaws of human nature; where individual appetites are controlled and balanced against the needs of the community as a whole. Compare this to the inclusive approach to design, which positively recognises diversity and turns away from homogeneity. This process, when successfully applied, delivers environments where all members of society can access and benefit from a full range of opportunities.
By removing barriers that create undue effort, separation or special treatment, we enable everyone – regardless of disability, age or gender – to participate equally, confidently and independently in mainstream activities with choice and dignity. The adoption of inclusive design principles therefore ensures that the project, whether the built environment, a product or organisational policy, will be designed to be:
■ Inclusive – so everyone can use it safely, easily and with dignity.
■ Responsive – taking account of what people say they need and want.
■ Flexible – so different people can use it in different ways.
■ Convenient – so everyone can use it without too much effort or separation.
■ Accommodates all people, regardless of their age, gender, mobility, ethnicity or circumstances.
■ Welcoming – with no disabling barriers that might exclude some people.
■ Realistic – offering more than one solution to help balance everyone’s needs and recognising that one solution may not work for all.
Inclusive design: making it work
Simply put, people need to be at the heart of the design process. Developing exciting concepts for public realm projects and building striking and innovative structures does not preclude this. Too often, our role as access consultants is seen as ensuring compliance against checklists extracted from building regulations or British standards.
However, our actual role is to have a watching brief - encouraging dialogue and discussion within project teams to ensure there is an understanding of how the issues that form access and inclusion are addressed across all disciplines. At the same time, our guidance has to be balanced against the very real physical constraints of the site or financial restrictions.
One of the greatest threats to the delivery of inclusion is value engineering, which reduces access to physical features and their relative value within the project. This process really is about minimum compliances but accessibility does not lend itself to this approach. For example meeting the requirements of Part M of the Building Regulations does not ensure that duties under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) will be met. The DDA describes barriers that can be removed, but as it does not describe exactly how they should be removed there is, therefore, nothing to comply to.
The role of Buro Happold’s Inclusive Design team is to allow designers and architects to create their vision in a way that is accessible and inclusive - a continuous education process for the design teams that we work with, indeed at times it feels as if we are providing environmental ‘marriage’ counselling; an opportunity for all parties involved to share their requirements with the aim of achieving the best possible solutions.
The scope and breadth of our work is changing: access consultancy and inclusive design are very much part and parcel of a long, continuing process that has moved disability from the realms of a medical model (where the barrier was the medical condition) to a social model of disability (we create the barriers e.g. employment, physical access or interpretation).
Increasingly, in order to deliver the broader requirements of diversity and equality strategies that public authorities are aiming to deliver, Buro Happold’s Inclusive Design team is looking at how to provide appropriate and inclusive environments for all communities. These may include provision of family rooms and spaces for ablution and prayer, with particular attention paid to their orientation within the building, aspects not covered by building regulations. Not everyone will immediately perceive these as accessibility issues, but they are aspects of inclusion and part of the expertise that Buro Happold’s Inclusive Design team is developing in order to meet increasingly wider client briefs.
With the increasing demand for sustainable developments come environmental and societal obligations which require inclusive design strategies, particularly addressing the issues of changing need, flexibility and adaptation.
Rules and regulations
Although the content of the May 2004 Part M is similar to BS 8300: 2001 Design of buildings and their approaches to meet the needs of disabled people — Code of practice, it signifies a major shift. No longer is it ‘access to and facilities for disabled people’, but rather ‘access to and use of buildings’.
With Part M of the Building Regulations and the associated Approved Document , a statutory inclusive approach has been established in England and Wales with the key requirement that “reasonable provision shall be made for people to gain access and use a building and its facilities.”
Its author, the chief architect David Petherwick, clearly intended that it was to be an educative document, set out with objectives and design considerations as well as specific provisions. These sections in particular encourage a process of lateral thinking when problem solving, especially as it is not feasible to describe every building type and element or anticipated all possible required solutions.
This great achievement, however, is still a long way from being universally understood as both design team and clients continue to ask our inclusive design team to comment on ‘compliance and the disability regs’. Whilst physical provision forms a large part of the work that we advise on, almost all of the work that the team is involved with has to be measured in terms of consequence relating to the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005. This is as a consequence of our role in bringing an expertise and understanding to the duties owed under the Acts to the design teams we work with.
Planning and building control process
Design and access statements came into force as a statutory requirement of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act in England in 2006 and in Wales in 2007.
In order to prepare the access strategy, a design review is conducted which is then incorporated into the design and access statement, representing the architect and client’s approach to creating and maintaining an inclusive environment. The access strategy forms the core of the access portion of the design and access statement. It explains design principles and concepts and how the issues of access and inclusion have been addressed in the design development. It is essential that the approach to inclusive design is not just limited to the access section of the statement but is woven throughout the approach to the entire project. The access strategy will inform an access statement (if required by the local authority) which follows at building control submission. The access statement is intended to be ‘living document’ and is revised as the project develops.
At project completion, the client should be presented with the two documents that chart the processes and decisions that make their facilities accessible. These, in turn, should provide the basis for the client’s formulation of policies, procedures and practices required for managing their facilities in an inclusive manner, to meet their duties under the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005.
Consultation and involvement
In his crusade to make the web more accessible, internet usability consultant Jakob Nielsen describes ‘the accessibility fallacy’, a concept based on the assumption that accessibility exists in a vacuum and can be scored without considering users and their tasks. But even if you meet every checkpoint (and this is, unfortunately, still how many designers and architects view access and disability), disabled users may still be completely incapable of using what is designed.
Fortunately depending on the size, nature and scale of the project, public consultation is now increasingly required at various RIBA stages, particularly by public authorities, which have a duty to consult and involve disabled people under the Disability Equality Duty. The Inclusive Design team facilitates these consultations, assisting clients and project teams to understand, incorporate and implement what can often be perceived as quite negative input, and to distil it into constructive and positive information that benefits all.
Shared experience
Ultimately, our aim is to ensure that everyone has the same equality of experience – the essence of what is enshrined in the Human Rights Act. But that does not necessarily imply that the mean and mode of the experience are absolutely identical.
If we are successful in our approach to inclusion, we create seamless experiences for all users to adapt to their specific requirements without drawing attention to themselves.
Too often, though, when we are asked what constitutes accessibility, the reply is a long list of physical features such as ramps, lifts and automated doors. There is no argument that these features, as individual elements, are essential. But how they fit into an overall package of service provision and employment, however, is very rarely mentioned.
The role of Buro Happold’s Inclusive Design team is not only to ensure that minimum physical provision is addressed but to broaden the understanding of both the project team and client as to what constitutes well thought out, inclusive solutions that go well beyond a tick-box approach.
Our successes can be measured when all people can transact their day- to-day business without any special effort or thought.
David Dropkin is a senior access consultant in Buro Happold’s Inclusive Design group, part of Specialist Consulting.
Ends
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Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976. It offers civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, health and safety management, infrastructure and traffic engineering, ground engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, inclusive design consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.
