The State of the Science in Universal Design: Emerging Research and Developments

Full text available

This paper reflects on current practices in universal design and how they can be improved to increase adoption of the concept in mainstream design and engineering disciplines. Theory and practice in the diffusion of innovation are used to identify lessons learned in other fields that can be applied to universal design practice. Questions addressed include: How has the concept of universal design been diffused? Are these methods effective? How could they be improved? What can be done to improve adoption? How can the rehabilitation sciences, health sciences, and other disciplines help advance the effectiveness of universal design practice?

Emerging markets for great design are growing with the aging of the Baby Boomer generation. As the population ages, a higher proportion of people in the U.S., other industrial nations, and even in developing nations will become consumers for innovative products that address their daily living needs without emphasizing disability or loss of ability to chronic illnesses, accident, or changes in life stage. To develop products and environments that address this demographic shift, it is necessary to project the size of the potential market and identify the key components of successful products and environments. Moreover, just because a product or environment is easier to use, helps someone, and has a strong recognizable brand, it will not necessarily be purchased unless it meets other important needs of consumers - both rational (e.g. value, reliability, customer support) and emotional (e.g. aesthetics and cultural appropriateness). Beautifully designed products and environments make people feel good, putting them in an open frame of mind to be creative and find solutions to the problems they face, an especial important part of aging well. This article looks at the dynamics of growing markets and uses a national survey about home buying preferences as a case study to understand the levels of appreciation for good design appeals.

Policy-makers, practitioners, researchers, designers, and people with disabilities all need to know when universal design works and when it does not. We need outcomes and evidence of design success for best practice. Unfortunately, we are not well prepared to create and report evidence, so we must master methods and strategies to collect, document, aggregate and report good and bad design features to create an evidentiary database. This chapter surveys the growing field of evidence-based practice and highlights its implications to universal design with a discussion around specific issues around acquiring evidence particular to universal design interventions. For example, by definition, universal design aims to create environments and products that work for everybody regardless of ability or disability. This challenges the collection of evidence since the most reliable traditional methods to elicit evidence are population specific. Chapter content highlights a history of evidence-based practice and related disciplines, presents types of evidence lists resources for more in-depth discovery around evidence-based practice, and explains specific evidence acquisition and reporting methodologies. In addition, the chapter presents a discussion emerging out of evidence-based practice around the potential contributions of single-subject design methodology, aggregate evidence databases and their potential as mechanisms to acquire and use evidence to advance universal design and its implementation.

Evaluating the effectiveness of universally designed environment is typically done through case studies conducted by experts in field settings. The logistics and costs associated with field case studies, however, inevitably constrain not only the individuals who can participate, but also the environments that can be studied - further compromising case studies’ already limited generalizability and frustrating evidence-based universal design practice. This chapter discusses an alternative standard for evaluating the effectiveness of universally designed environments that removes these constraints and enhances case studies’ generalizability by moving them from the field to the internet.

Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) research is a key source of evidence for universal design. However, the level of knowledge translation from HFE to universal design practice is low, even though the Principles of Universal Design actually are based on HFE knowledge. Several areas of HFE research on functional performance have direct relevance to universal design: anthropometry, biomechanics, perception, and cognition. Knowledge from a relatively new area, emotional design, has the potential to be especially valuable. Many theories, tools, and research findings from HFE can be applied in universal design practice. But there are several barriers to increasing knowledge translation from this field, the most significant being the vast amount of knowledge to assimilate. Three strategies are proposed to overcome this barrier and bring the two fields into closer alignment. They include adoption of a system to conceptualize the range of functional performance problems encountered by people in using the built environment, redefining universal design to make it more directly related to HFE, and conducting systematic reviews to collect and evaluate knowledge that addresses key design questions. Adopting these strategies can not only help in knowledge translation from science to practice but also help HFE research develop an agenda that is more relevant to universal design.

The ideal 21st Century Community for aging in place will have affordable and appropriate housing, supportive community features and services, and a range of mobility options, which together facilitate personal independence and enable all individuals to engage in work, civic, and social life as they choose. How do we get from vision to reality? This chapter focuses on housing and reviews current housing problems, research, and the state of the science of universal design in housing. Are current practices compatible with universal design? One thing we know is that over the past few decades housing preferences have changed. This can be attributed to many factors, although changes in population demographics, legislation, and economic conditions have had the most significant impact. These contributing factors drive the housing industry; the success of the housing market is based on how well it responds to consumers’ needs. Often slow to respond to people’s changing needs and preferences, the housing market now appears to be adopting new strategies and policies leading to more innovative practices and designs.

People with disabilities must often rely on workplace accommodations in the form of universal design, or in its absence, assistive technology, in order to be able to participate in the workplace. Regulatory guidelines that specify how spaces or products can be designed to be “accessible” have helped us move toward more universally designed work environments. Unfortunately, these guidelines may still not address all of the access needs of a particular employee. In addition, there is limited research on universal design and assistive technology accommodations that can be used to guide practice to meet the needs of these individual employees. This chapter reviews how research on workplace accommodations is leading to evidence upon which practice might be based. The base of evidence available, however, needs to be expanded to include research subjects with a wider range of disabilities and to include a greater variety of accommodations. In addition, research efforts must begin to focus more on accommodation outcomes.

Studies conducted in countries all over the world have linked winter climate to increased risks of morbidity and mortality. However, researchers have yet to understand the overall effect of the winter climate including consequences of such factors as surface conditions on the human body. The main objectives of this project were to develop a portable ambulatory system for data collection in cold climates and use it to observe physiological and biomechanical effects of cold temperatures and icy surfaces. Furthermore, a laboratory-based experiment was designed in order to obtain datasets on 11 young and healthy subjects. Participants were observed in a cold chamber walking at a comfortable pace in three test conditions: (1) on ice with a safety harness, and on a rough surface while (2) wearing a harness, and (3) without a harness. The ambulatory monitoring system was used to simultaneously record blood pressure, heart rate, skin temperature, muscle activity, gait parameters and foot pressure, and subjective responses were used to derive a comprehensive understanding of the body's responses. Preliminary findings of this study include results which indicate that heart rate is significantly elevated prior to traversal over ice and blood pressure rises significantly within ten minutes of exposure to cold are also presented.

Winter in many parts of Canada and the US is an enormous problem for older people. We know that every winter there are many older people who do not get out of their houses for up to three months because they cannot move around safely in the snow, ice, or slushy conditions. This paper describes our efforts at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute to address the difficulties faced by vulnerable people in winter. The first challenge comes from identifying their perceptions of problems caused by winter. We have subsequently studied the physiologic response to cold and outdoor walking behaviour in wintry conditions in order to understand the problems in greater depth and be able to develop solutions. Emphasis has also been given to investigation of the reported difficulty donning and doffing winter jackets and coats and the effectiveness and safety of winter footwear. Our continuing effort will be focused on the universal design of streetscapes, street furniture, winter clothing, footwear, and improved assistive mobility devices. We are also determining safe exposure levels to cold weather in order to inform the public of the risks associated with mobility in winter and to provide objective criteria for public agency responses to ensure safety and social interventions to reduce isolation in winter.

Informal learning environments, such as aquaria, are attracting an increasingly diverse visitor population as the number of people with disabilities living in the community has grown. These environments are particularly important as they provide unique opportunities for visitors with disabilities to participate with friends and family in shared educational or entertainment activities that feature biological diversity and inspire conservation. While there are general guidelines to assist these settings in designing accessible spaces for visitors with disabilities, they are not specific enough nor do they guarantee that exhibits will be usable by all visitors. As a result of these issues with current guidelines, there is a need to understand the barriers and facilitators to exhibit access that are experienced by visitors with disabilities as a method of providing an evidence base for exhibit design practice. This paper reports on the findings from a post-occupancy evaluation that was conducted at the Georgia Aquarium that: 1) documented the current exhibit display and interpretation design practices; 2) provided visitor feedback on the usability of exhibit displays and interpretation; and 3) discussed the needs of visitors with disabilities. The findings indicate that there are several characteristics of the display, interpretation, and surrounding exhibit environment that act as barriers or facilitators to exhibit access for people with disabilities.

Since, the design of our cities tends to constrain people with impairment from performing their daily activities, removing barriers and making public space accessible for everyone is becoming a human rights-issue. However, efficiently improving accessibility requires knowledge about the location of obstacles in the urban environment and how these affect accessibility. Using GIS-models to map and measure accessibility, this study aims at providing new knowledge about the spatial distribution of accessibility for impaired persons in seven Swedish cities. Based on field surveys, detailed digital models of the pedestrian and public transport networks were created for each city. These models were used to evaluate the possibility for vision and mobility impaired citizens to reach different destinations. The results reveal how different types of flaws in the pedestrian network cause interruptions or force travellers to detours in the travel chain between home and destination, thus restricting accessibility. The results show where it is possible to live and independently perform daily activities as an impaired citizen and how travelling times and distances vary between impaired and other citizens. In conclusion, the study shows how planners, by using GIS-models, can easily enhance their knowledge about how flaws in the design of their cities affect accessibility for impaired citizens.

This chapter uses a person-centred approach to develop an inclusive society and related economic analyses. It develops a new kind of cost-effectiveness analysis that can encompass individual situations. To do so, this chapter uses the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) in a novel way. Traditionally, people with disabilities have been excluded from environments and activities by exclusionary design practices and limited access to recent technological developments. The cost of including people with disabilities has thus been conceptualised in terms of the additional expenses for specialized technologies and modified environments. However, little attention has been given to the costs and outcomes of the existing exclusionary design practices and possible wastage of resources. Building on previous work, this chapter uses the ICF’s concepts of activities and participation to identify effectiveness, and the ICF’s concepts of environmental factors to identify the relevant costs. Such a cost-effectiveness analysis compares a particular person’s current situation, which includes providing the currently available assistive technology (AT) in an exclusionary environment, with a hypothetical optimal situation. This optimal situation is conceptualized within the framework of current technological possibilities and the person’s individual requirements. It includes the following two sub-situations: one in which a person is provided with an optimal AT system in the existing exclusionary environment and another in a universally designed environment with a corresponding AT system. The chapter uses an illustrative case to compare activities and participation achieved in both situations, and calculates the real costs that would result in an Australian town.

This chapter outlines the current experiences of Malaysia, India, and Sri Lanka in moving towards a more accessible built environment. In all three countries there is a growing awareness of disability and ageing. This is important, as the Southeast Asian experience of disability is markedly different to that of developed nations such as Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Responding to local and regional needs, while contributing and developing to larger ‘community of inclusive practice’, stems from a desire to share and a growing recognition that the constant reinventing of the wheel and lack of knowledge synthesis hampers everyone. Nevertheless, countries like India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia struggle to implement western accessibility norms. Further, the widespread adoption of accessibility standards based on standard wheelchair design presents additional challenges, as there is a mismatch with local assistive technologies and a limited understanding of regional disability populations in terms of their functional and anthropometric profiles. The sharing of successes, insights, and knowledge in relation to Asia–Pacific reconstruction and accessibility innovation, particularly in regard to local materials, standards, and construction practices is both timely and important.

The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Universal Design and the Built Environment (RERC-UD) State of the Science Conference explored the contributions of universal design to the independence and participation of individuals throughout their lifespan. It reviewed the latest research and practice of universal design in housing, work environment, and public spaces from cold regions like Toronto, Canada to developing countries like Sri Lanka and Malaysia. After a number of presentations on the latest research in universal design, a series of questions were posed to an assembled group of leading experts and interested stakeholders. Utilizing prepared questions, facilitated discussions identified and prioritized strategies, resources, and opportunities for applying evidencebased practice within and across these various domains. The following reflects a summary of these discussions. Understanding these issues and solving these questions remain critical to advancing the field and ensuring the creation of a 21st century community that supports the needs and preferences of an ageing and increasingly diversifying population.

Full text available