UD2014

>>: Don’t close the hatch.
(Laughter).
Hello. Sorry.
(Laughter).
>> G. ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: My name is Anthony. Is that good enough?
(Comment off mic).
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: No. I will burn through it. Everybody is ready to coffee anyways .
(Comment off mic).
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: Perfect.
(Comment off mic).
I timed it at like 11. I think we will be all right.
All right. I see we only have the hard core technology people here, which is fine by me. You are my audience. My name is Anthony. I worked at Nova, the Norwegian research Institute in Oslo. I work on a view different DREAM grants. One is the acronym DREAM, disability rights expanding accessible markets.
Another one is called DISCIT and it is active citizenship for people with disabilities and the last one is CLOUD4ALL. And it is using cloud technologies for enhancing solutions for people with disability is.
Really good fun and I hope if you Google any of those acronyms, hours will be the first link to come up and I hope you follow us on Facebook and Twitter and all of our blogs and websites.
But my article is about the universal design of the web, which is fun.
The first question I asked myself when I approach this topic in writing an article on the universal design conference, is this goal really worthwhile? And we can agree that the lack of a universally designed web really contribute to social exclusion, but for people with disabilities as well as older persons.
But that really gets into the idea of accessibility, and we have a lot of legislation around that, attempt to ensure accessibility over the web with people with visual or cognitive or sensory disabilities.
So my article is really more of a story.
Part about universal design, but also about copyright and privacy.
And what universal design means to me is that fundamentally the web must be usable or should be usable at least.
And one of the barriers to usability and even accessibility is an operability.
And what an operability refers to is flex ability of use.
Flexibility along with ease of use are really principles inherent in a universal design approach.
For example, I can have a book, but if I cannot search a book in the same way as if it was digitized or I had an e book and I cannot use it across different devices, then this really impacts how and when I can use the book.
And ease of use is similar. Some websites are profoundly difficult to use and it is usually because they are poorly laid out or hard to navigate or for a variety of other reasons.
And one of the drawbacks to an accessible the approach is I is that you can have a website for someone who is blind or partially sighted and still not have a website that is easy to use. And that is a very important differentiation of the idea of accessibility and the idea of universal design.
Am going to try to build a model slowly die proposed in the article so let’s just first assume that content publishers and when I say content publisher, what I’m referring to is any person or organization that creates something for the web.
Let’s assume content publishers actually make a choice whether or not to have universal design content. I recognize this is an artificial choice. It is not meant to be a choice in reality. It is meant to be a choice in the hypothetical level.
Publishers really base multiple and conflicting incentives regarding universal design in any approach to developing content.
But let’s just say that of content publishers both aware of principles and the resources to producing universal design content, there only faced with the choice to prioritize universal design or some other feature of the content.
As we know a very small amount of web content can be considered with universal design. So it seems that content publishers have chosen whether deliberately or not to promote other features of the content and, of course, we can see this.
Content publishers really emphasized the value of the innovation or the appeal of content that is not universally designed.
So now consumers or faced with a choice. To consume the content as a was published or to somehow minute delay the content to meet our needs and the 10 logical solution stimulating content and changing it are becoming easier to use a more readily available.
And, of course, what we find is that consumers have rejected consuming content as it is published.
They had done this in a variety of ways, but one of the most important ways is through copyright infringement.
Yes.
Copyright infringement.
I lost my train of thought.
A lost world was in the lineup.
Yes.
So the illegal use and distributional of copyright. That is the copyright infringement idea.
Most web content falls under content regime and basically this means you cannot reproduce orders to be content without the owner’s consent.
A copyright law really intends to promote new works, writing new code or creating music or creating art and this, of course, is a very simple find way of putting it and doesn’t it in to a lot of the technology is not being my friend today it is not get into a lot of the caveat of copyright law, but brings across an important point consumers infringe copyright whether knowingly or not as a response to a lack of universal design.
The irony is that some content publishers condone infringement by using it as a measure of success.
So a television program will say we have broadcast this program on television. It has been viewed by X number of people on TV and online and this many people downloaded it illegally.
So in many ways it is condoning infringement.
We have ways of dealing with copyright infringement. Most typically, it is through coercion. If a company makes an accusation of copyright infringement, I can file or threatened to file a lawsuit or through other means seek arbitration and penalties for cases found to be infringing.
However, that really only gets a so far. If the consumer wants to infringe copyright material, they have the ability to avoid course of enforcement of copyright laws.
And one of the ways consumers can avoid enforcement is through the use of anonymity technology and the technological skill for docking and effectively using anonymity technologies is diminishing. It is making anonymity technologies available to a broader audience. The paper goes into a lot more detail about the development has the potential to reduce the risk of copyright infringement to almost zero.
It appears to be a growing trend due to a variety of factors, most notably privacy concerns, but in this article it is at least in part due to lack of universal design content.
So that is the basic idea of the model. That a lack of universally designed content relates to copyright infringement and relates to anonymity.
This is not in the paper.
That is the interaction between, that is the interaction between universal design and innovation.
Innovation really has its focus from a commercial sense. The development of an lecture property and then the commercialization of those copyrights and patents.
So I think we have a limited view of what innovators do. I believe that many people would say that innovators innovate for the satisfaction of bringing a product to market or helping to improve society, to move us forward, but innovators are also embedded in a structure that is also about claiming rights, monopolizing those rights force long as possible and then commercializing that property. And the commercialization of that property typically involves target marketing and developing the use case of a product for as profitable of a market as possible.
And these processes are in many ways incompatible with the universal design approach.
Not going back to the model and the paper and the choices that are related to universal design, of course, relating to copyright infringement and adoption of online anonymity technologies, wise is a problem? Basically, the article poses a few questions. First again I think we can agree that a universal design approach to the web is a worthwhile goal; however, it doesn’t seem that the market has responded to the need for universal design so that leaves us with government intervention.
How can we regulate this process and more specifically how can we realign commercial incentives to produce a better outcome? Currently incentives favor the commercialization for product niches and one of the problems with the current incentive structure is that it is very difficult to change behavior patterns. It seems the behavior of publishers and consumers appears to be self-reinforcing.
So the question is to what extent have the two behaviors provide further incentives for copyright infringement and the adoption of anonymity technologies? If we really find that behaviors are self-reinforcing, that it seems like we need an immediate solution.
So I’m going to and with the beginning, the title of the paper is The web as a site of intractable governance and I think this article poses a useful example of how the web can be an intractable governance problem.
The problem these articles proposer, not going to diminish to diminish or go way.
As I said we really have to find new ways of organizing democracy and handling trust. I believe that only then we can find novel ways of using commercial incentives to really support a universal design to the web.
And that is all.
(Applause).
>> HOST: Was it 11 minutes?
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: I don’t know. I did not check. I talk faster. It may have been less.
I am sorry if it was really complex. I tried it I tried my best to make it as simple as possible.
(Laughter).
>> HOST: Anyone picking up on this?
>> GUEST: Hi! I’m still adjusting to what you said because it is complex, but I am not sure I follow the argument about why innovation hinges universal design, if that is a very crude summary of your little aside that was not in the paper. If you think of things like the good groups, maybe that is a special example but surely that is highly (Indiscernible) and yet universally designed.
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: I’m happy to respond to that. The fact that it is a special example is more the point that I was trying to make. It is the commercial incentives that are structuring innovation that I view as the problem, not innovative approaches in general because certainly we can point to Good Grips and even the work that Apple has done in the society area. At the same time, the fact that they are an anomaly is to be evidence of commercial incentives that really push us away from universal design.
>> GUEST: I missed that it was the commercial incentives rather than the innovation.
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: Okay.
>> GUEST: But it additional problem is that the commercial incentives might be counterproductive because they are more eager to say that the more projects are universally designed than making them actually universal design I have a good many of examples that I see the profile and you sell it and then you are unable to sell it because the law demands that you should have a universally designed website or at least that there must be a regulation saying that there should be universal design. So I think you are back to most producers and developers of websites, and then the ICT solutions. And then there is a big a big challenge of (Indiscernible) systems, both from governance level, but also from a company. So another little problem varies after you have national legislation in Norway saying that both private and public websites should be following the WCAG that you discuss rigorously. But this is limited to public websites. But just a few commence early comments.
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: I appreciate the comments. I think there is a problem with symbolic compliance especially in terms of accessibility. In the US we have problems with it because the law is so broad and so it is easy for some companies to say we are compliant without actually being compliant and getting the public relations benefit of saying that they are compliant. Thank you for that comment.
>> HOST: Anything else?
(No response).
>> HOST: Interesting. We will digest this and speak to you tomorrow about this at lunch.
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: That would be brilliant.
>> HOST: Okay.
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: Please connect with me online. I am on social media. I’m happy to connect with you in your format.
>> HOST: Did you have a page with your contact details?
>> ANTHONY GIANNOUMIS: I can give you my email, but it is not on the page. It should be in the conference materials. But it is gagian@hioa.no.
I will say it again. Gagian@hioa.no and it is on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere. Coolness?
>> HOST: Thank you.
(Applause).
(Thank you very much for joining us. The presentations are now over.)

>>: Test, one, two, three.
>> HOST: Welcome, next presenter.
>> TILL HALBACH: Thank you for the kind introduction. My name is Till Halbach. I’ve worked on this together with my colleagues from the Norwegian computing center in Oslo.
I hold a position as a research scientist. I’m educated educated as an engineer, electrical engineer. So this is to give a slightly a slightly different view on universal design. We heard a lot of talk, at least I have heard a lot of talk, which work related to architecture and buildings, and this is to put this in the context of ICT. Canal during lunch I learned that ICT is not that known as a term that I had hoped actually. So just to spell it out, it is short for information and communication technology.
So as a third person, Kristina Hoydal who is from Norway and also worked at the topic, which is called Universal Design Awareness of Survey Software Manufacturers. So actually, this is on a very, very narrow scope in the world of ICT. And in order to give you the scope of this work, it is about online questioning. As I would almost expect that almost all of you would have experienced to be called up or have had the chance or the opportunity to answer or to fill out an online questionnaire if it was like about your last vacation or a stay at a hotel or whatever.
So this is about those electronic forms that you would fill out. So what we have done here is not really new in the respect that there has not be any research on this before, but the research has been limited to technical accessibility studies and also, it has been limited to user studies. So the first technical accessibility would focus on the narrow part of accessibility within universal design, which is called accessibility.
Our questionnaire is usable, for this by screen readers? How does it work when you zoom out the text and all of that?
And the user center studies have integrated the users. Like what is your experience? Did you like it? What did not work out for you? So we thought, what actually was missing was the provider point of view and to shed some light on how the provider of such survey software make us actually, I think.
So just to start with, I would like to give a very rough overview of the survey. So basically, those who carry out the person air or surveys, these I have chosen to call product and service providers, which I am in the middle of. And they, of course, need to get some experiences, they need to get answers. They want answers from the users. And usually they don’t have the means to do this themselves and this is why we are ask here, from the software manufacturers in order to provide the proper software for generating and also carrying out those questionnaires.
The approach that we did was we thought well, what was the most natural thing in this respect would be to let makers of survey software and so ace answer a survey themselves. So we gave them a questionnaire. So this is a very qualitative approach, not quantitative and we have a very low number of participants, informants as this market, at least in Norway is very small.
So unfortunately, we were not able to get any higher.
But it still can give us value to answers as this is a qualitative not quantitative approach.
Which directly brings us to my results.
I should probably start with saying that this was a national study in Norway regarding ICT. We have and antidiscrimination law and within the antidiscrimination law, there is something, which is known as the regulation of universal design of ICT.
And our first question was if those software providers or software makers knew the regulation and 60% answered positively to that answer.
So to compare that number with a very recent study conducted by what I call the agency for public management, the e goverment of Norway. And they talk to 1500 persons, and they came up with a completely different answer, which is like only 1% know the regulation that I am talking about now.
Why the huge difference? And I read the details of their report and I believe it is due to who you asked. We actually asked the developers themselves, like the ones that write the code, which make up the service whereas here they ask the management, they asked some high level the prisoners of the company to most likely don’t know the regulation as they are supposed to, because they are in management, as compared to developers.
But the real answer probably lies in between those 2 numbers as our research here, we had to set the context for the study and we had to give them information about there is something, which is called this regulation.
So it might be the situation that too many people have positively answer that question even though they don’t really know the regulation, just to keep that in mind.
Regarding responsibilities of the universal design in the company, we got a very good picture I would say. Like for instance, 20% said our developers are equally responsible, which is obviously very good because then all the developers, whoever is working on the software could make it universally, well, develop it in a universal way whereas up to 20% said that no one is truly responsible.
So in between there, there is 62%. We have answers like well, only one person is responsible, and we have outsourced the entire process.
So here, we have to see well, is this really good or bad? So in the case of outsourcing, this would be rather bad as then the competence for the company is not inside the company. It is gone. It is outside. Whereas one single developer or one single representative is responsible, then this would be a good thing but probably not as good as like all developers are equally responsible.
We also ask them if they knew the standards which are related to this regulation in the world of ICT and especially web. It is called the WCAG. And around 50% recall that they knew the standard. This was as an open question. So they did not know the answer in advance. This can be compared to only 2% knew that the standard is called VCAG. WCAG.
I believe the difference is that we had a different target groups than the one they ask.
Regarding skills and knowledge, I have actually very positive numbers.
So 62% reported well, in our company we have very good skills regarding universal design and 30% said well, we have good skills, but this can be compared to the numbers reported here where less than 30% where they found out that less than 30% really know the details in the respective standard.
When they conducted a little test to see if the people would recall details from the standard and obviously, less than 30% came up with some details and this is something that we did. So here, we are simply relying on the numbers that the people gave us and I believe they might be over reporting a little bit.
So we have to treat those numbers with care.
Now regarding to testing, we found that only 20% of the companies actually have carried out accessibility, which I believe is a very low number. As it basically means, 80% haven’t done any accessibility evaluations, which are part of usability.
Now of those 20%, only 40% no, 60% have made use of any form of assistive technology whereas 40% have not.
So just to explain their point a little bit, when you do accessibility evaluation, especially when it comes to accessibility for the visually impaired for instance, then you would use some sort of assistive technology like screen reader or a braille device or whatever.
So this is vital in the process of testing and it is a little bit well, in our eyes it is a little bit disappointing that so few only used well, carried out accessibility relations in the first place and use the proper tools in the second place.
Speaking of tools, what we had another question in our questionnaire and found that not a single company actually uses a tool to check the conformance with the WCAG. So how this relates to the former, well, the answer to the question how good is your confidence and how high are your skills in dealing with those standards, that was the question.
So now when it comes to the customer, we have asked if customers really have required a universal design solution of those companies and 20%, only 20% said yes this is really the case.
Now this relates to this pyramid I have been showing you on an earlier slide where we have the makers of service questionnaires on the top and the end user on the bottom.
In between here we have service providers.
So just to illustrate the software industry here is not really in touch with the end user and also the service providers don’t really ask for universal design solutions, which would be the first requirement actually, the first element, the first incentive for the software industry to make such software.
This is mirrored actually in the priorities of the software makers, where the highest priority is that the service providers can generate and roll out with the services independently. This is of the highest concern and first, after that, actually a little bit longer down on the list, things that are relevant for universal design such as completion rate or degree of completion.
So when I arrived at the conclusions, actually I find it interesting to observe that we arrive at exactly the same conclusions that Camilla was talking about.
First of all, this is having a proper strategy and having the proper implementation of the process in the industry.
Second, it is about educating or maybe training the developers; give them the proper knowledge and the proper skills.
In the case of outsourcing, then it is highly recommended to regain this knowledge, in source it and put it inside the company again and include the degree of competency with the developers.
So in summary this up, when we put this together, I would really like to ask two important questions.
And the first one being how representative are the questionnaires for the entire society, for all citizens, like how easiest it actually for all of those citizens, target groups to participate in the digital life and how easiest it to raise their voice in terms of opinion surveys, for instance,.
So here it might be, in fact, it could be a democratic problem.
So just to summarize this, what we need is the proper information about the legislation, about the process and training and point two is probably the most important is that universal design is very often viewed as an attribute for the final product or service, but it should rather be viewed as a process.
Because when it is viewed as a process, then it is not guaranteed that also the final solution is universal design, but it is at least well, it is a very important requirement.
And third, even though like the process and all of that, all of the plan is in place, is important to give if the proper priority, which would translate into value.
So this is basically it. I give you some contact information on the last slide. And if you cannot read this, then you can contact me after.
>> HOST: Thank you, Till
(Applause).
>> HOST: Really interesting. Food you see as the main consumers of your report or your information? Is it the companies producing the service or the authority
>> TILL HALBACH: In the first place we thought that this was the service of the industry; however, we can see that what we get are some nice pointers to the rest of the industry. So, yes, for instance, they would be a thing for this.
>> HOST: Have you had any contact with them?
>> TILL HALBACH: No. Because the report came out just a few weeks ago, two or so, so I haven’t been in contact with them.
>> HOST: Any other questions?
(No response).
>> HOST: Okay. Thank you very much.
(Applause).

>> So welcome, Kristin to this seminar around University sign and assistive technology. I’ll have to inform you that the last presentation about the forms will not be so you can look for other presentations and then we’ll finish out at 11:20. Welcome!
>> Okay, thank you! I am okay, there we are. Yes, I am Kirstin and I’m going to present the paper with my colleague Jean which is working at computing center which is fun. I’m working in a company called vision truth and this is called challenges with assistive technology, compatibility and universal design. And we are computing something. Our work is research based institute. We are co located with the University of Austria and we’re a non profit research. We’re working outs the theory of statistics and I’m the head of the small group working. This one.
So first of all, I want to draw attention to the definition. There’s so many definitions of universal design but the UN definition or the definition from the conventional rights with persons of disabilities, in this definition, there’s two parts and the second part which I have highlighted here puts emphasis on the universal signs and assistive devices for particular groups of persons with disabilities.
This is an important but also negligent part of the University side. The ultimate goal of universal design is to meet the need for assistive devices. It’s recognized that at least currently, this may not be possible and then we have to accommodate assistive devices.
Assistive devices or assistive technology can be defined product devices, created for personal use, used to maintain, increase, or improve sensory, physical, or cognitive disabilities or persons with disabilities.
So assistive devices is directed towards particular groups with particular types of disabilities or impairment in contrast with universal design which is directed towards everybody. And there are, of course, multiple assistive technologies. I have some here. Screen readers, screen magnifiers, peddles, on screen key boards, on tracking devices, mouse control, recognition, et cetera. And here’s a picture of the screen reader with the magnification, speech to text functionality.
So I also want to draw attention to universal design and this thing here. This is consisting of two main parts, technical accessibility that you actually that is technically possible to use as a solution and it must be useful for everybody. Of course, technical accessibility is a precondition for universal design but not necessarily the patient and in this project, it’s the same thing here, we’re focusing on technical accessibility which we’re aware, this is not enough for just the universal design. And so the background for this project is this. We usually do user investigations in all of our projects. In some, quite well, in a couple of the projects we had many many participants with disabilities. There has been two solutions for it and we had 24 and 30 participants visiting them in the field and we just go with it, even though the solution is supposed to be quite accessible, quite technically accessible, it was not.
So while it worked with one participant with one type of screen reader, we have another type of screen reader. And the third one with, yet another type of screen reader. So I had encountered this problem previously but the problems were not as extensive. So I started to discuss this with users with their own screen reader users and quite particularly, I discussed this with a screen reader user working with an English company access in order to find out how big is this problem. Is it a real problem or was it kind of an accident that we came upon this and he sort of confirmed, it happens quite a bit. So we agreed that this needs to be investigated more. And the main project proposal, we got funding from this program which was administered by the center, the national resource center for participation and accessibility and that’s part of the region. And this year we have done something for the project and we’ve got funding from the administration as well. So we are we have the screen reader compatibility, it’s a challenge, particularly when it comes to reach solutions and I just wanted to explain the name of the project. It’s VHL and that’s translated to virtually assistive technology. And the focus is to develop tools and methods to have the compatibility between the solutions and assistive technology but we are focusing on screen readers because that’s where we have seen the problem mostly.
I think in principle, it’s the same problem with all types of assistive technology but screen readers are rather complex technology with software and hardware and quite complex software as well.

And compatibility is required by the WCAG guidelines which is the guidelines used by most countries regarding that accessibility and the guidelines for one is to maximize compatibility with current and future user agents including assistive technology. So it’s there but it’s just that it doesn’t work properly and we have found that the only way to really be sure that it’s working is different types of assistive technology or different types of screen readers is to test and see if it works.
There’s so many companies and so many possible configurations so we have to be testing. So the activities in this project, we have come with focus groups with stakeholders such as assistive technology. Represent it from the system and other assistive technologies and we have written an online guide on accessibility. This is in our vision. We are looking at an online service to use for testing the different types of screen readers and with this currently a part of the network of screen readers, the one called
The results so far from the investigations is that the typical has access to different types of assistive technology. Some of them are large teams may have long screen reader to but they lack information about work types of assistive technology. And in a way as we have translation in this era now coming into force, but they are graded on what are the requirements at this point. And they like information about the version of assistive technology that must be supported and they have observed and know who the technology users are. There is reason for that. And then compatibility problems are cured if they are noticed about this with a participant. It’s difficult to identify where the problem is. If the screen reader, it may be problems with the screen reader or maybe service, yeah. There is possibilities here. And the screen reader is often the black box. We don’t know what is happening inside of it, at least for this side which is open source. So in a way, the readers are here, and topic for Android and it’s, you know, a person needing the screen reader doesn’t necessarily decide what screen reader to use because that may be about the system. So it’s not a free choice.
So the challenge is there’s a number of versions and possible combinations of screen readers and web browsers and the question is, do we have to test all of the combinations? There’s quite a lot of work but if not, what combinations do we have to test. And that’s something we want to find out and give support to with this.
So the conclusion is that there’s a huge need for information and tools in this area. It’s a need for up to date definition of assistive technology for each. Of course, this very strong company with that name, they have a screen reader each year, well, I think for 4 or 5 years now and it’s like a different product. There’s different screen readers that are popular in the US and some of the bigger ones of course. There’s some development in this area as well. You know, this is offered for free for Office users so there’s a better possibility and of course, so on.
But anyhow, the users, we need to accommodate them. So what we have discussed is how you can best assist them and we have a lab facility where we try and test those versions and we have started to build up an online service where the people can log on to the service. They can start whatever their browser, they want to start. They can put in their they can log in and then start screen reading and trying to find it. And the reason is, they might start any combination that is relevant.
But in order to really understand how this is working, it would be if developers could really use it hands on instead of ap on sign service because the online service is not connected to a service. There is a delay because it’s through the internet.
Some of the developers in the focus groups have mentioned they would like to see a service where the one expert in assistive devices could do the testing. And of course, it’s not just go ahead and test it because you need to understand how the screen readers are working and if you you need to know the combinations and the difference that varies between the screen readers so you need some skills to be able to do this kind of testing or you need to at least read to understand.
On the higher societal level, there’s need to work on this because the system should not allow delays and updates and so forth. It should assist users to get updated. It should be changed, I think. Users may have a few hours but not enough. And they should require from the suppliers that they assist the users to a higher degree. And the question, why doesn’t this work, there’s many reasons for it. Delays and updates, of course. It may be there is some ways to implement certain aspects but often there is parts that are not done. So this is actually a part that we have and I would be happy to receive your comments and suggestions. Thank you.
>> Thank you. I was thinking, I’m working with a deaf/blind person in Sweden and we had a long discussion a few years ago about involving more users in testing but it’s a threshold and you have to have a system where there’s more but you have to find ways to involve them and some of them will really be expert users and some are not. There’s no single user that it’s important to involve them. I imagine you have been thinking about this. Do you have can you evolve and explain more what you think about that?
>> Well, as I said, it’s not just to use a screen reader, it’s also the training. So of course, screen reader users are proficient, some of them are at least proficient in the tools and I think the reason why we didn’t pick up on this problem earlier has been we have been aware that we have a screen reader users are not experts on their choice. So sometimes you have kind of attributed difficulties to the lack of proficiency in using the tools but then we kind of got aware that actually, sometimes it doesn’t work even if you are very proficient and that was kind of the confirmation we got from all the partner agents in the project which is very he’s used several of these screen readers. But of course, a service that was asked for among them. It’s a special service that would be really beneficial if it was employed by people, by screen readers.
>> One more question.
>> Okay, it’s really interesting. When I hear about compatibility problems, I always think about standards and I think in my mind, it’s some kind of standards. It’s also about responsibility and such matters but isn’t there a lack of standards here that could lead to a long term solution on this problem? I mean, it will always be necessary to test but it’s basic.
>> Yeah, I discussed this problem with the developers and our partner and of course, with the simple straightforward solutions, this shouldn’t be a problem because then, they use the most standardized element. So after that, the solutions become more complex to use. Java scripts, it’s more of a problem because those elements have standards or the standards are updated all of the time and maybe the web browser is not updated equally so you have, it’s a real world problem, actually, because if it was an ideal world, it’s good, maybe.
>> Do you have a recommendation for which version of the technology that you would recommend?
>> Well, that’s one of the things we’re working with. Last year we got a list from the narration benefit system to know, actually, what versions are almost there. This, of course, we can discuss this with developers in focus groups as well and first of all, it’s used in the welfare system was not readable for developers because, well, the statistics were not usable. It was too detailed. It had specific names and it was difficult to figure out what and they just showed what was delivered but they didn’t show updates so we had no way to know what versions were in use right now in Norway. So really, because the welfare system is a project this year, we’re working with them to try to make this more useful for developers and then we have talked to, well, how do you say it in English?
>> Monitor.
>> Yeah, they’re monitoring systems, the developers are changing the legislation and we asked them, you need to know how many versions that you need to comply to and so forth but we haven’t investigated this issue. So they could give advice.
>> It’s a very interesting question because when you develop new web sites, you often test it with several web browsers but you don’t test it with old versions and you don’t test all web browsers. You make a choice which browsers you should test on. And when you work with assistive technology, essentially with screen readers, there’s often problems with the screen reader itself. For example, you had mentioned this in Norway, it appear ins documents even though other screen readers have been able to. So you know, you could say that Norway couldn’t be about to use PDFs because one of the largest screen readers can’t handle that technology but no one will go through that comparison.
>> That’s why we have, this welfare system is participating in the project group. There’s different departments in the welfare system that can talk together for more than a year and they just discovered, okay, this issue needs to be sorted out. So I don’t have an answer.
>> I understand it. It’s just an interesting question.
>> Yeah, and I think they’re supposed to do, in the organizing of this issue because as I said, this is kind of the requirements to the welfare well, the welfare system needs to make some requirements to the screen readers so it should say before they can read this, for example.
>> Okay, thank you!
>> Thank you, Kristen, can I ask one more question? You were talking about the welfare system, helping users use more modern screen readers. I don’t know if you have that knowledge or that research but do you think there’s a problem that users don’t want to upgrade because they don’t want to relearn or rethink or do you think it’s mostly a welfare system resource problem that we don’t give them the education to upgrade?
>> Well, it’s both, of course. Because a screen reader user needs to know a lot more than a user that doesn’t use it who took it under a combination. If there’s new screen reader or a combination of screen readers and web browser and so forth. So it’s a lot to learn each time and then there is the limited number of hours that they get from the welfare system. So I fully understand they are reluctant to update because you never touched something that works and I’m sure all of the screen reader users have experienced a number of break downs nearly everyday. It’s both.
If they could at least be sure they can call somebody and get help the same day and not in a month if something doesn’t work, that would be one step better. I’ve talked to screen reader users who have been offline until half a year because they didn’t get help from the welfare system. You know, there’s inconveniences just before the holiday happened and then, yeah, all of these things have been off for half a year. It’s, I think there again.
>> Sad. Thank you very much!
>> In Norway, you know, which is
>> Thank you, Kristen. We’re going to have a five minute break before the next presentation which can start at 11. You can go to other places or just stay here.
>> Thank you!

>> Good morning, everyone.
This is a session with short talks on guiding and accessibility in transport environments.
You probably saw me yesterday morning in the plenary.
I won’t do much of the talking in this session. I was told to hand over the word to Kjersti Øksenholt, who will be talking about searching for ways of improving usability accessibility and safety for sight impaired people in complex transport environments.

>> Thank you. Can you all hear me fine?

Perfect.
I am Kjersti Øksenholt. I come from Norway.
And this lecture and presentation I will be giving today is based on project we did for the Norwegian Public Road Administration and the Norwegian Building Authorities.
And they wanted to have an outside view of how their standards actually were working.

The structure of my presentation is I will start with Universal Design and a little bit about the situation in Norway. I will say something about my research questions and the methods we used. I will say something in general about usable environments and about the standards. I will shortly present our findings, the knowledge — regarding the knowledge, the standards and the practice, and of course I will answer the research questions.

It’s defined by far of process of finding your way to a nation in a familiar or unfamiliar setting by using cues from the environment.
And this is a common and easy process for sighted people. But for the visually impaired, the visually impaired to a much greater degree rely on sounds and sound and changes in surfaces to orient themselves. Universal Design does not have one definition. But according to the Norwegian anti-discrimination and accessibility act and Universal Design is designing or accommodating the main solution, so it can be used by as many people as possible.
Hence you should preferably not design environments with the special facilitation as needed.
The Norwegian Public Roads Administration in one of their hand books says that it should be clearly defined, physical and easy to follow.
Sidewalks or walkways with well-defined borders are the easiest roads for those to follow. Most visually impaired search for a border free of obstacles and dangers.
In Norway we distinguish within natural and artificial lead lines. The natural lead line is considered the ideal facilitation and it consists of elements naturally belonging in the environment. So you will use different materials, different color and contrasts and stuff like that to mark the pathway.
The specialized tactile paving, it’s used for warning surfaces, when you need to warn of danger. In Norway that consists of knots or stubs in the ground.
You have guiding surfaces where you need to guide along a route where there is no natural guidance or where you need to guide around obstacles.
In Norway, the guiding surfaces consist of parallel sinusoidal waves which goes in the travel direction. And then you have information surfaces. And you use them when you need to inform about information about venues or stuff like that. In Norway these consist of also this sinusoidal waves, but in the direction of perpendicular to the travel direction.

And I had some more comments here.
In one of the hand books of the National Public Roads Administration, they also put on a condition where specialized tactile paving is appropriate and that is where the street environment is so complex that you need to clear and coherent leading elements. Of course, to warn of danger. When you need to express that the individual has arrived at certain or kind of or type of place and, of course, to compensate or correct for flows or errors in the natural guidance.
I have some pictures here. I will try to explain them, but it’s a little bit hard, but I will try. On the top left it’s a picture from inside the Norwegian Technical University. You have sinusoidal waves who leads the way for visually impaired, but you have a large pillar located really close to them specialized paving. And if you’re blind and you follow these lines, you are in clear danger of walking directly into the pillar. On the top right, it’s a picture from a street corner. It’s pretty hard to see on this picture, but from the street corner, you have two warning surfaces who goes out in 90-degree angle to each side of the curb from the wall. When you come to the crossing, you have a warning surface. But when you go across the crossing and out the other side, you have cobblestone and not a warning surface as it should be.

The picture on the bottom left is from a crossing in Oslo. Here we have a street corner with lowered curbs and they are lowered all the way around the corner crossing.
So here it can be really hard for blind people to take direction over the crossing and it could also be hard to know when you’re actually in the street, because you don’t have any gap between the curb and the street.
And on the bottom right you have Oslo’s main pedestrian street and it’s a little hard to see this, but you don’t have a name or warning signs when you cross the streets here. You don’t have any artificial lead lines, which could be okay, but you also have a lot of official signs and a commercial posters and billboards, and they are scattered around the streets, and often they are put in what is perceived as a natural pathway for blind and visually impaired. So our question then is, why do we end up with all these different solutions?
Our research question is based on the fact that the tactile paving seems to be chosen as a solution in the situation where the natural guidance could be possible. And there is a lack of consistency and homogeneity where tactile paving is laid out. Our question is how and why are some design process producing such results and how can the situation be improved?

We did a lot of different methods for this project. We had literature review and document studies where we read a lot of research literature. We read the Norwegian standards in different handbooks and guidelines and also some Scandinavian and foreign standard handbooks and guidelines.
We did some in-depth interviews with the authorities responsible for developing the standards, with organizations who represent the visually impaired and also with practitioners in the planning, designing, building and maintaining of the built environments.
And we had some seminars, two seminars with relevant stakeholders who are involved in or working with facilitation. The first seminar we got input and contribution for our preliminary findings and on the second seminar it served as kind of a quality control of our findings and conclusions.
So which makes usable environment? You should have simple and logical organization of the physical environment. You should have short distances between A and B, if it’s possible, of course. Obstacle free walkways, warning of danger, smooth, even paving, crosswalks, perpendicular to the curb, strong tonal contrast or strong as possible to get. And a coherent system tonal lead lines complemented with paving where necessary. They should contribute to the sign streetscapes. They should ensure usability for visually impaired is given priority and especially in competition with other considerations that also needs to be made.

The standard should be based on practical and scientific knowledge on how the visually impaired orient themselves in the environment, how they find their way and how they use the different elements in the built environment to do this.
And this knowledge must be translated into relevant and usable requirements and recommendations for those who actually use the standards.
What we find was, then, the research literature and mainly tactile paving and how the visually impaired use this, for instance, which kind of depth you should have on the waves or knobs for it to be detectable.

With research related to how the built environment should be organized and the sign to facilitate orientation wave finding for visually impaired, Atkin did empirical studies how visually impaired with different grades and sight loss and different assistive devices made use of natural and artificial elements and found that natural guiding elements are superior to artificial when it comes to orientation and wave finding. But our main finding is that there’s lack of systemic empirical research and that leaves the standards and hand books and guidelines not being able to carry the knowledge into the standards and practitioners on how the street scape should be usable and safe for visually impaired. When it comes to the standards, the natural lead lines are the first choice and solution. The tactile paving should preferably only be used where natural elements alone are not adequate or where warning is required. There is a general lack of descriptions and illustrations of natural lead lines and how these should be designed to ensure usability, accessibility and safety. And tactile paving is described in detail but when the tactile paving should and should not be used are diffuse and the description mainly represent ideal situation, not the complex situation that many face.
And the recommended solutions are seldom just further explained, so you don’t know exactly why this is the right thing to do, just that you should do it this way.
And the main finding is that the current standards, hand books and guidelines are not sufficient guidelines for encouraging practitioners to use natural lead lines as the solution and consider this in tactile paving systems. When it comes to practice, our interviews, they had good knowledge of basic principles in Universal Design but they also told us that most people in the field do not have the same level of expertise and understanding as they do. They try to facilitate the built environment with natural leading elements but the standards are not helpful in the complex situation they often face. So they often end up using tactile paving in these difficult situations.
Universal Design are often considered too late in the planning and design process.
There’s a struggle regarding the prioritization between various groups, various fellows and different objectives. And we wonder maybe the user consultation in Norway is in need of a professionalism. Often in smaller cities in Norway you have, for instance, one visually impaired, one blind person, and if the authorities are doing something, they might go directly to that person and ask, okay, but how should we do this? What works for you? Of course I don’t care you might end up with a solution that works for that person but this would lead for a lot of different solutions throughout the country.
But most often the user consultation is necessary and useful input. So how and why tactile paving use, where natural lead lines would be a better solution. Well, the practitioners face complex situation where several considerations must be taken into account. They face a situation where they introduce changes of elements in already existing streetscapes and where structures are already in place or where a zoning plan has already been decided upon. So it’s not easy to make a natural pathway if there are a lot of light posts in the middle of the way.
And the standards, they find big descriptions of natural guiding elements but elaborate descriptions of the tactile paving.
The lack of document and knowledge they can draw upon describe how the visually impaired orient — they lack the document knowledge that describe how the visually impaired actually orient themselves and find their way. They do not possess the relevant knowledge regarding these issues. So the practitioner face complex situations. There’s many considerations that need to be made, so the standards, they mainly give recommendation from simple situation and in the complex situation the practitioner, the standards might not help. So the practitioner, he might turn to research literature to find information about how the visually impaired orient and often the research literature is not helpful, at least not in the natural way or natural guidance.
So the need to figure out how to solve the situation on their own. And this leads to deviating the signs and inconsistencies and that is both in the same situation and different places, but also in different places, you will have different solutions. And this will also probably deviate from what the visually impaired would think would be the optimal solution because it’s a decision based on… okay, thank you.

>> Thank you. It was very interesting.

[Applause]

>> And I guess some of you have questions.
Yes, of course.

>> Very interesting. Thank you. That you came up with the need to look at this more, do you have any plans for that and what you see in standard, that is not described correctly or enough, are you doing any work on that side?
>> Not currently. But, of course, we hope that we can do more research later on, but we’re not doing anything on it currently. But we hope.

>> Hi, thanks for a nice talk. I sort of — this was because I was in the workshop Sunday and we looked at the station and after that it sort of — I kind of wondered if you could make the tactile guiding into a universal guiding, or if that is a stupid thought. Because you could — potentially everyone would like to be — know where is the center, where should I go, so you could have some sort of universal guiding. But then that would probably impact on, you know, these recommendations versus natural things, whatever. So I don’t know what your thoughts on that would be.
>> Well, it’s a good question. Well, the tactile paving, if it’s used correctly, it’s used in situations where you don’t have a good natural guidance. I talked to friends of mine, when I talked to them about the nubs, the crossings in the street, what I told them to do, to warn visually impaired, they were like, oh, but I’ve been walking in the street and stopped by the feel of it under my feet. So I think that if it’s implemented correctly, it can also help regular people, older people, stuff like that. And I think it’s really important to say that the tactile guiding is a really good solution in some situations, but, yeah, I don’t know. To talk about universal guiding, I think that that is more of a natural guidance, if I understand you correctly. So it’s more like what the environment actually looks like and how you can design this environment in a way that — for instance, visually impaired doesn’t feel that they are taken into special consideration. The environment in itself is so good design that… yeah, everyone can use it.

I hope that answered your question.

>> The original scheduled presentation is canceled. Apparently he was unable to make it but Charlotte is filling in with the time machine, inclusive nature and museum trails. And this will be our last presentation in this session today.
>> Okay, sorry, it’s on. I invite you to try the system because it’s upstairs there. It’s a screen so we brought it with us and you can look at a film and hear different sound channels and audio description on your smart phone. Just getting that. It’s where we had the lunch and dinner area.
>> Can you hear me? It’s good? So you see some of the logos here because this is actually finished project but it came from that EU project and it was a lot of interactive design but we have moved on with this after the project. And I’m showing this because we had a keynote saying you need to learn to talk to different people about different things and also, with mobile devices, I think we have this excellent motivation for inclusion in the mobile use.
So depending, now, I’m at a conference for design so I really don’t need this but at other conferences, you know, you can talk about all of these different situations where you might want to use it and it also pushes inclusion as well. So this is an app. But the underlying idea is that we wanted to make an app for quotation mark, everyone.
Of course, there’s people who won’t be able to use this but we wanted to make sure that you could, even if you couldn’t see the screen, it would be good. You would have a good experience and if you can see the screen but you can’t hear the sounds, you can still read the stuff so there should be a nice experience for a lot of people in this. And we have actually, we have presented early work in 2012 so I’m going on to stuff we did after that. Which was looking at more how you can explore because the early work was just the trail. You followed the trail sort of and there was no choice. But still, since I have that video, I’m not going to show the whole but I’m hoping that I can give you an idea of how it works.
So anybody who has information is simply quite similar. When you point it in the right direction, the direction it’s supposed to go, it vibrates and it’s a little when you get further along you will hear
(Music) you can see how it acts like a guide and for exploring, we wanted to look at how you could, maybe not just follow the trail but to find all of the different things that is around you. So we implemented, you can scan and then you can scan for different things around and then you can select one of them. Of course, if you have the historical medieval city, you have lots and lots of things so the problem is, how do you filter it? You filter it on the screen so you look for things far away and if you have your thumb closer to the body, you would have things closer to you and you would select a distance. For example, we have mean, medium, and we didn’t have a continuous filtering. We tested it in 2012 with visually impaired persons. Previously we had tested it with elderly users and some of them had visual problems. This was just on severe or all of these people became users so some were blind or close to. We don’t use a cane if you have good vision.
And a range of ages and it also included two persons because we other participants where someone was in a wheelchair. And for the wheelchair, you know, the pointing, you know, you need your hands for running the wheelchair. We had a special design so you could point with your head instead. These are more of the observations, the quotes of the results.
So the guiding because once you had selected a part, you were guided to it. That was easy. It was like, first time use for many people so it took a little bit of exercise or getting note, getting to know it. But you know generally, it was quite easily. The problem is this is a hand held thing. You may have a lot of stuff. You might have a dog, a cane and a phone and you might have a challenge juggling all of these things.
It’s also one thing that several users actually, visually impaired people were afraid of theft and one person had it stole from their hand which is you thinking, well, how low can you go but, yep. And the scanning design which we had tried before as well worked nicely but you have to keep the finger in touch with the screen and that turned out to be a problem.
And also, some of the scanning in the wheelchair was difficult and the scanning generally is kind of intuitive but it is new to the users. You have to introduce it. One of the problems is also, if you had places that were close to each other and you have, sort of varying GPS positions and just around the compass because compasses are not very stable, you have the problem of jumping between so it was hard to actually get the one you wanted.
We also tried to go through guidance and just going through the goal and there seemed to be some preference that was routed. And of course, crossing the square is not okay if you’re a if you see very little. As a visually impaired person, you would go along the edges instead so this kind of a novelty, just being able to cross. We had a lot of problems with the S. A lot of problems but there is a problem and because of that, also, it’s built into the design of the app that within ten meters from a point, you are considered to having arrived.
So you will never get this very very precise location. On the other hand, you really can’t because you can never trust the position to be the position in a sense. Generally, it was appreciated and you know, you might want to turn it off. There was one person who also had hearing problems and wanted to get results. And you want info because actually, this is just the sound and previously we have trails and you would sort of get the information that related to this sound in the guidance points but now you can select any and you might pass a sound and you really wouldn’t know why it was there. For example, in the central park, we had good picks because in the old days there was this was enclosed and you can see in the old documents, they had a problem with it getting in there. But this was, of course, really strange. Why would you have picks there? And also, if you were impaired, the real life sounds are very very important. You have to be careful how the audio relates so you don’t sort of occlude the real sounds. And actually, this is sort of surprising. Also, if you have very nice sounds, it can make you forget to actually attend to thing. In this case, guidance, we had one thinking, she’s walking in one direction and it’s like, yeah, why are you walking or are you really and she’s like, no, I follow the music because, oh, yes. The music was so beautiful so I forget to think about where I was going. So these were some suggestions from improvements. You do want information about the sound windows. You also want information about the present time. In this case, the information in the system was historical and we had, like, there was a place called the small square where they used to have a cattle market and there’s no small square these days so if you have a current LUND person would not know at all. It’s actually, if you were facing the University building and had the fountain in front of you, the small square is kind of to the left of the University there. You want distance to target. You also maybe want more navigation and information in speech, it turns, ahead.
And if you are guiding towards one point, you might want to get back to the starting point so for that test, we brought with us, yes, the scanning is still great. It would work to have this around your thing but we were not really happy with filtering and how we did that. So after this test, we have been working with the local museums and they very much like these trails. We have been trying to move it to Google. As a researcher, you move it into a prototype app and move it into something that you feel comfortable releasing to the public is quite a lot of work. So it was quite a lot of work making it more immediate. Because before, when you had a test, you could explain to people, how it worked and now all of the sudden it has to be self explanatory and parts of it were new interactions where you scan so there is an app that is available. And I think you can search for time machine. And I’m sorry to say, we have respected the access for this app. So in Sweden, and Norway, so far, but originally it was only Sweden because we only have it in Swedish, so forth.
It’s a goal to start making it in other languages because there’s nothing inherently, you know, that needs to change. It’s just you need to create all of the material in the other language and the app itself has English and Swedish.
So if you’re Swedish speaking, you can down load some demo trails in Lund. You could try it out because there’s some stuff we don’t know. And this is the logo, just so that you search because it’s always a Google thing. You might have more than one app having the same name.
And the changes from before, we tried. Since we with respect really happy with the scanning, we didn’t include explicit scanning.
What we did is we made it a lot easier to select a point, to have the trail there with all of the different points in the trail. And we made it very easy for you to just select one of the points so you can select one point, go to it and then you can select another point and go to it so you don’t have to follow the trail. You can follow the points. Since this an act that can work in nature environments and all sorts of environments, even though routing was appreciated, we can’t really trust there’s something to route on. So what we have done is having via points so when you create the trail, you can put little points that people shall pass by. So for example, if you go by nature, you can put a point by the bridge to make sure they pass the bridge before they go to wherever the goal is.
When you go to a point, you see an image and hear someone talk and if you want to read what is said, you press the text button and then you would, instead, see the text so you can read the text instead of listening and of course, you can play it again and again if you want. So I think that was it, already.
>> Do we have any questions or comments or were things crystal clear?
>> You had the same user group, you were facing, getting along with the Android.
>> Actually, since this is an app that started development quite a few years ago, this was a big problem because by then, Android was not accessible at all. Well, it was a little but it had a really crappy screen reader. We actually implemented one that works slightly different but now when you do things, after Android four, I think the access is not a big problem. It’s sort of the same. We could get rid of a lot of the stuff we had done before.
>> Anything else? Thank you for coming. If you came in the midsection, there was a change from the original printed program. So Charlotte came instead for that.
This is the end of the presentations of this session today, thank you very much!

>> Yes, I can hear you.
>> Can you see the streaming? Okay, the common ground. Inclusive okay. Mapping the common ground.
>> Can you hear me? Great!
>> Good afternoon. And welcome to this parallel session on art, entertainment and play. My name is Ilene and I’m the moderator of this session. I’m the time keeper. Right now we have three presentations scheduled. The second presenter has not arrived as far as I can tell. Mathias, are you here? No? But we will begin any ways with Tali and she will introduce herself and then afterward, we’ll have about ten minutes for questions from the audience.
>> Thank you! Hi, everybody. I’m Tali Cohen coming all of the way from Israel. I’m very excited to be here and nervous but there’s only a few people so I’ll over come the nervousness.
I’m an architect. Any profession is an architect and I’m assistant professor in interior design and accessibility and connection between them. I’m also the head of the accessibility department in the city of Jerusalem so my practice in everyday life is trying to make this complex city very not accessible, trying to make it accessible.
I will present an ongoing part of, whatever you see today, it’s a result of the last two years walking with the students, my four year students with this project and it’s a project of an academic research that I’m doing with them trying to put together my professional experience and my academic experience into a real life project.
We call the project three M project and my presentation will divide into three parts. I’ll talk about the mapping, the meaning and the making. That would be easier for you to follow what I’m trying to say. The name of the project is mapping the common ground and the common ground was those place keeps and spaces in Jerusalem where people are trying to play in a global problem, into a local solution.
The project was trying to answer the question, is it possible to create an inclusive place that integrates the needs of children, various children within its design. The tool for it is mapping, mapping and serving playscapes with the purpose of understanding the playscapes.
The first goal of this project is to come up with a typical profile, first to understand the profile of the gardens and the playgrounds and then to try to integrate it into the design and make it more inclusive for children with and without disability.
I think it presents a new perception and special concept based on that profile which relates to the playgrounds as a universal space and it’s funny because I’m coming from the interior design and what’s important or what was very different about it, we are all interior designs, designers and architects trying to design out door spaces with people with disabilities.
Before I start, I’ll just give you some data that I think is important to understand for you to understand the project. The national survey, the year of 2007 showed that in Israel there’s 314 thousand children that suffers from different kinds of disabilities which is presented in 22 percent of the children are disabled which is a very big number.
Such children on wheelchairs, children with visual impairments, mental cognitive disabilities and so on. For many children, the playground is a place of joy and laughter, self expression. For others with physical disables, it’s a place of frustration and disappointment with the inability to reach the facilities in their own environment in order to use them.
Another important information is that in Jerusalem, I think in 2009, there was 450 playgrounds among the city which is a huge number. I think today we are 530. None of them, in all parts of the city, in the orthodox neighborhood and the western and eastern part of the city, none of them, not a single one of them is accessible.
That is a completely wrong and unacceptable. What we’re doing, we’re trying to understand the elements that make it inaccessible for everybody, not only for disabled people, for a mom with her kids, for wheelchairs and for little children. I think the work that we are doing as designers, we think about the spaces and we consider the spaces through the eyes of the users so we were very interested in understanding who are the users with all of these spaces, what do they do there and that makes a lot of what do they do and how we can make this place accessible to everybody.
How to create inclusive spaces that will have integration of the needs of the various children and the various people on the playscape that is designed for. To give you an idea of this, this is our almost all of the playscapes, this is what it looks like. It doesn’t matter if you’re from Jerusalem. These all look the same. This is the standard playground and so you can see all over and I think that the quality play, that the quality play of learning environment is more than just a collection of play equipment.
The entire sides with all of its elements from storage and so on can become a play and learning resource with the children with our without disabilities so we wonder why this is the situation in Israel and why each and every one of the playscapes is a collection of facilities that you pick from the catalog, usually the people that are not professional, and put them in the spaces without really thinking what the purpose of putting them there.
On the other hand, we have this available parks which are equipped and designed for special needs to begin with. So these spaces are fenced and often during special time during the day, they don’t allow other children or without disability to get in so you can get some kind of a spaces that are totally doing different things and available facilities, it looks like that. If we’re talking about disability, colors, materials, and so on this is what we see. And students and designers, we have asked ourself, if this is this the visibility we want to live with or is it okay and do we want to live like that, not speaking about the price.
Each one of the facilities cost like three times the regular playscape object, especially this one. This is like a lot of money. None of the disabled children themselves, they don’t use it. They don’t use it, they don’t like it. It looks like a hospital machine or something that is not designed. You don’t want to stand on this stage and say, here, I am. I am a disabled person.
So this is a very good park for well, the intentions very good but there’s many problems in it. We analyze all of the spaces. We analyze all of the object and we try to understand why it’s not working. And it’s not working for many reasons like the way they designed the object themselves, the way they think about all of the users, where the wheelchair is going to sit. Do I have the opportunity toic be up and make a decision myself and enjoy the space like everybody else.
We call this phenomenon optimism versus inclusion and we are trying to see what we can do with it design wise. Other places that we looked at, it looks like that all over the world, inclusive playgrounds. The children with and without disabilities play together at the same time, at the same moment in the garden, in the parks and they make interactions, social interactions, dialogue, they play together, they learn together and we didn’t see that in our spaces.
So we were trying to figure out what is the common playscape. Of course, the tool and the background for our research was inclusive design. These were the parameters we looked through and tried to understand whether it happens, it’s there or not.
But before I start with a criteria of everything, he’ll help me and I’ll start with a short movie showing you a short trip with a wheelchair in comparison to one of the gardens so you can get an idea of how those spaces look like and then we’ll continue from there.
>> Movie: (Music).
>> This kind of photography but they’re all dealing with the same kind of issues and the same obstacles and the same but they are not all with the same capacity like David. David is a very he’s in very good shape and can do anything but still, it looks like that. I just forget to say something very important. This project, we call it, real life projects. It was a collaboration between our discipline which is interior and architecture and the therapy and occupational therapist in the University of Jerusalem so it was a coed designed project and we had co teamed with the department of occupational therapy to understand, to get the knowledge from their area and our discipline and try to figure out together how can we change the build environment towards their understanding of the behavior of the people in the environment.
First we decided on the criteria to pick up the gardens. Those were the criterias. We didn’t want to be too small or too big, various populations of groups, meaning eastern, western, city, religious, non religious, so forth so we can get a grasp of the whole thing.
We made a pilot before we started to walk in another garden. We picked 15 gardens out of 25. There was a committee from the two departments that went through the 25 parks and picked up those five that were totally different with really, totally different mainly different problems. The survey started here with this pilot and we still tried to use all of the technology, use all of the wheelchairs and measure and so forth.
The second, the next set was those tools that I made. We don’t have any tools we have the regulation in the country which is pretty new, I think. Only the last year did the regulation go through and now we have to make those spaces accessible but the children got those four tools that I made which are regarding the behavioral observation, the regulation, the interviews with the children and the parents and together with all of this data, they started a project.
Strategic to co found this program was mapping. We did a lot of mapping research about all of these spaces. Each one of the parks was designed by a group of designers and occupational therapists using the mapping as a tool and they went into those parks and did the measurements and the data that was collected and the sample, they map all of the problems and tried to visualize the problems, basically.
They try to understand who is moving through the space, who is using the space, how often to use the space, what activity they’re doing. Whether it’s in a way or in a planned way and then they get to a conclusion, there’s in different spots in the garden where the movie was taken. This is one spot, all of the green dots are the spots and actually only two of them are active which means that if you come from the bottom part of the garden, and you get to this part, as you come up to this part, you only get to this point and then out and then the main core of the garden is not used at all by nobody.
And that was very sad and the other thing that she discovered is that in this spot, the children just played with the facilities they have. In this part, they have nothing and they created their own play and that was amazing conclusion because she took this conclusion and now she decided to put this part together in a continuous way.
And I think I’m showing this project because it’s a very typical problem that we found all over the gardens. All of them got this problem off of this part. They’re all disconnected. They’re not connected to this city, not to the activity that they’re supposed to promote.
Other spaces, they were just vacant. None of the children were there. Only few and not enough facilities and if there were any facilities or any objects to play with, they looked like that and that’s terrible. That means that somebody didn’t think about the users somehow.
So we tried to understand why. On the other end of the world, parts were entirely new and the regulations were there already and it looks like that. It looks like in a way that each one of stages for the children to come and play on were blocked. You see? They were blocked and do you see those? So there is only a path going through all of them but then, when you get to the spot, you have to go back and you can’t really participate and use it.
So other students, decided to search the users, how long, the duration of the activity in the space and so forth, and this is another student that realized that this is the activity, again, and they all have the project which is this spot here is useless. This is the spot of the whole park because from this point, you can see the point of the 360 degree neighborhood and it’s a very important focal point and nothing happens there which is an empty space which means that it’s not working and this how we presented the problem and the solution and we tried to take all of this inside the part of the garden and make it active and make it connected to the other part of the park.
Other problems where the views, what do we see? Are we connected to what is going on around us or not? A very important thing to say is that the locality and sense of place of all of these spaces were very important to the students. They didn’t just came and check the park. They really wanted to interact with everything that is going on around the park, where are the main public buildings like in this one. Those are the public buildings for elderly people that cannot use the old park. It’s all blocked to them and it’s ashamed because they could be the first potential people to stay there and be there so it looks like a big wall disconnected the city from the garden.
So locality and sense of place was very important and then we find out that we have two scenarios. One of them is playscape scenario and the other is urban playscape scenario. The urban space is something that should have connections to the city like this one. It didn’t have any connection to the University. The park is here, the University is over there. There is a disconnection between the two of them and she tried to make it up and again, okay. I’ll go through the mapping and then we put all of the data together in different charts, collected it and tried to make sense out of it.
And to make sense out of it is only in a comparative, some kind of diagram of each one of the gardens and in the comparative ways, one to each other. We dealt with the size. We have the playing facility, the number of activity spaces, we put all of the information together and you see the numbers. It’s very low.
This is the only garden that was somehow over the expectation. The same with, let’s say one of them that deals with urban space and the urban scapes and the connections to the city. Okay, the findings were not easy even though we kind of knew them. We felt there was a lack of sense of belong, a sense of space in each one of the spaces. We actually didn’t see the children. The children were not present there. They were transparent, invisible. There was a lack of freedom of choice, where to go, how to play, what to do. They were all the time dependent on either their parents or somebody else or some kind of adult that has to be with them and of course, the lack of accessible, protectiveness and safe spaces.
Okay, shortly some of the old processes. I’ll show you some designs, solutions.
>> (Music) okay. So based on the knowledge, the third one is make the spaces and trying to find out what is the common playscape for this location. They all tried to create a meaningful encounter between the various children and create spaces that are successful for promoting meetings and activity and mutual enrichment between the kids and so that the regular disabled and without disability children can play together the same time, the same place and of some kind of social interaction.
In each one of the parks they took at the constructions of the park and made it something that can be physical for them. Like this connection between the two parts of the city, they made five routes, different routes for different people to use them. Blind people and wheelchairs and they’re all coming to the same place and play together. Using water and different types of activities for different types of children. Using different spaces either for adult, elderly people, children, and so forth and try to connect them with the city which is up here. In places where they do need to make some borders or fences, how do you do it in a colorful playful way so people can use it too and be active.
The continuity in the garden is very important and at the same time, the sense of place, they didn’t take out any of the trees, any of the anything that was existing. It was good for shading. It was good for flowers like smells and so forth. Shading was a real problem. Like in this park, they had the forest here and the park was disconnected to the forest and she designed it in a way there is an observation point and everybody can get to that point and enjoy the landscape all around.
Okay. A few other things that we did is we tried to reach out with fliers and ID cards of each one of the gardens to the community and participate them in how to make the connection and what is the best way.
We made fliers, folding fliers and told them about the process. Suggested some solutions. We have even a website and we do present it there at the museum. It was amazing! A lot of people came, we have many different reactions. Those are the people that some of the people I walked with and we do have a site that you can look at and see everything. Thank you very much!
>> And thank you for that presentation! Do we have any questions here?
>> I thought this was very interesting. One thing I wanted to hear a little bit more about is that, in a sense, when you do things, you know, the level of ease of access versus the challenge because you want, you sort of want both.
>> Yeah, I agree. We didn’t want to design this place, in a way they looked like they were designed for disabled people. The idea is to make a good design for everybody to use. We do want we challenged it. We didn’t want to make their life easier or to make the idea is to make spaces that are common for everybody to get together to the same spot. That was one main difficulty that we try to over come because they’re not there. They’re observers, they are outside of the activity. They’re looking at children. They’re not making any interaction and we just first try to push them and put them in the same spot. That’s all we tried to do and then I think the next part is to design the spot in a way that everybody can do something there according to their ability. That’s all we do. We try to do.
>> Other questions?
>> I have a question. Will these things be implemented?
>> Yeah, I hope so. I’m working on it in the city of Jerusalem. That’s why we did it in Jerusalem because I know with people or the politics that are responsible for all of this stuff and then I can at least raise the awareness of, let’s think about it differently. Let’s put it in a place that would be effective for lots of people and make the change. That’s all we try to do but it’s not easy.
>> More questions here?
>> Thank you, again.

Okay. Then I will welcome Mieke Nijs, and you will talk about inclusive housing and present, introduce the session by your presentation.
Very welcome.
>> Thank you. Hello, everyone, my name is Mieke Nijs, I’m project manager of the UD living lab and with my colleagues, a professor in Universal Design and Hubert Froyen will give a lecture tomorrow. We wrote a paper inclusive lab, a home for research, demonstration and information on Universal Design. It’s a project at the University of Hasselt in the accessibility office and a project located in Belgium.

Today I will tell you something about the design process and building process over inclusive living lab. A process, the actual results and future ambition.
So first of all, how we came to the idea of building an inclusive living lab. So at the start of the new millennium, there’s a growing awareness of social expects in the build environment. First the growing insights and social design and second the demographic changes have had impact on the exponentially growing social awareness of designing the build environments. Statistics show that young generation are too few to fulfill the supportive needs and care for elderly and lack of caregivers for the younger generation. So that’s why we support people to live more independently at home in an inclusive environment. Universal Design aims outcome, usability elegance and comfort for as many people as possible by means of attractive and elegant design solutions.

This inclusive approach supports the vision that good design enables and bad design disables, for as many people as possible. Social participation requires stigma and respect for everyone.
However, in practice, it’s often remarked the desired clients and users lack practical knowledge. There’s a lot of information available, but the information available is often too theoretical. Actual solutions are often stigmatizing and not elegant. So for these reasons and to raise awareness, local organization decided in 2008 to build an inclusive living lab. We had a bottom up approach to link design with research education and we wanted to reach diversity of people in society and create new innovative solutions. We speak about Universal Designing because it puts the emphasis on getting there rather than going there. It’s a nonstop process.
So the ideas for our project started in 2008 when students of the faculty of architect and arts of the University of Hasselt were challenged to design an exhibition that would address the needs of people with disabilities taking into account UD values.
Out of 70 team projects, the best project serves as a successful source of inspiration and already shows the most difficult challenges. So we wanted to build a permanent exhibition because there were a lot of ideas that came from the student projects that were good enough to show people the exhibition the students made while a permanent exhibition — it was not a permanent exhibition, so we wanted to make it in a real house, demonstrating what inclusive design can do for people living as long as possible in their own house. So we found a house in Hasselt in Belgium and there were three main ambitions for this house. We wanted to demonstrate what Universal Design can do. We wanted to conduct research and we wanted to offer information on the added values of Universal Design.
So the first thing to do is finding the funding. We find fundings, of course, from the university college and at the moment it’s the university college in Hasselt university. We get fundings from the accessibility office from the European union program from the government, in the city of Hasselt. And then the next step was finding the right architect. So we asked five architectural gurus to make an offer and most importantly to write down their ambition regarding our project.
Out of these five architects, one was chosen, Victor, a famous Belgium architect. He was chosen because of his inclusive ambition and vision. He was no expert, but he engaged himself to broaden his spectrum, especially for this project he worked together with an interior architect who found herself as a wheelchair user. So we had a first user experts. Then to go on with our design process, we wrote an interdisciplinary team — we worked together with experts, students, designers and users to think with us how we could make a living lab a house that is suitable for everyone. So we asked people in a wheelchair, we asked people with visual impairments, people who are deaf, people who are elderly, elderly people, young people. We asked a lot of people what they thought they needed to be in our house. And, of course, we also explained our ideas. In order to do so, we made visual presentations. We used the actual architectural plans, but sometimes it’s hard to tell people what you want to do just having pictures and having a plan. So for some products we made a scaling model one by one, so that people can actually feel the product and in this case, the handrail is most useful for most people. So this was one example. And then when our design process was finished, when we actually had a plan and an interior plan, we could start a building process. But unfortunately, in 2010, our listing for our building was listed as a monument and not only the exterior was listed, also the interior was listed, so it made it very hard. We needed to redesign our plans, taking into account the original concepts that were already made. The building materials from earlier, and the construction techniques. So taking into count all those things, we needed to have a lot of different focus groups again to redesign our plans. And then we could finally start with our building process. We had a very old building, a building from 1913. We needed to take into account the measurements of the rooms that were in the house, so we couldn’t break out walls or something. Because in the beginning we wanted to work with flexible walls, so we could have a lot of different settings, but that wasn’t possible. But we could strive the whole building, so we could integrate the modernizations.

During our building process, we still worked with different expert teams, working around several topics. It was very nice we could do this also in the building process because now we could go with users and experts to the actual building and show them what we wanted. We could actually show them products that we already showed them and ask them to try them and find out if they’re suitable for you.
So we had different teams working on topics like exterior. Someone was working on the interior, working on IT, the finance and communication.

The manager of the UD lab, experts in Universal Design, accessibility consultants and the architect attended all the meetings. So they made it clear that we stick true to our original concept. And then calling the different topics, researchers and students from the different departments, students, company and user experts were shown the different teams. Because we worked with such a diversity of people, we could increase productivity and creativity. It was very nice when we put a lot of users together, different users, users in wheelchairs, users with visual impairments, so they could hear from each other what they wanted in a product and what was important for them, so they could understand from each other why people want something special in the project — in the product. Sorry.
So we tried to reach a conclusion that fits most people, and it didn’t happen. Sometimes it didn’t happen. The management team had the final vote.
So to give an example and make it more visual, for the kitchen, we worked together with the kitchen company, of course, and in our work group we had a designer and a technical advisor from the company, from the kitchen company. We had user experts. We had a UD expert, management, someone from the accessibility office. We had an architect and interior architect. We had teachers from the Department of Architectural and Interior Architect and they all worked around a specific kitchen, thinking about what kitchen is useful for most people. We worked again with models, scaling one by one, and we organized a lot of focus groups, always redesigning our plans. And also when our kitchen was finally installed in our house, we still asked people to come over to our kitchen and test the product for real, so with their feedback we can redesign our kitchen at every stage during our process.
Nevertheless, it happened, the decisions and designs were made on site and a UD vision was forgotten. Mistakes were remarked, constructors were asked to solve them. For example, the control panel in the shower, it was placed on the center of the wall, symmetrical, as often conducted. But in this case we wanted the control panel placed asymmetrically, more to the open space, that someone who gives assistance, like a caregiver can use the control panel without getting wet.
So the contractors knew to take out all the equipment and reinstall the control panel. And another example, we have a lot of different settings, for example, for toilet use, and in this case the toilets were switched. But, unfortunately, when they were switched, you couldn’t make a transfer from a wheelchair to the toilet, because we made it’s especially for that room. So, of course, the contractors needed to reflect with all this again.
So it was a hard work and they needed to replace a lot of things, but we learned a lot about this project.
And, of course, the building was listed. It didn’t make it any easier. So behind the wooden wall we found a fireplace that wasn’t on the plan. But it’s a nice fireplace. So, of course, it was listed again. So we needed to redesign our plans over and over again, taking into account the different people who were involved in our project.
The UD living lab serves permanent experimental environment, researchers, professionals, users, experts and visitors are all emerged in a real social/spatial environment to test, design and construct realtime solutions. This way research and innovation is integrated in a permanent co-creation. The actual experience of users were taken into account during the whole process of our living lab, and that was, I think, the most important thing about the project and where we learned the most of it was from the experts, the user experts.

Then, of course, the keywords in our complex building process: Communication.
The success of the final design results can be measured in relation to the degree of communication that has been taking place, a lot of communication.

And it was very hard sometimes to work with so many people. They have all great ideas, but you have to put them together. But finally we 22 of March 2013, and everyone was glad to show their contribution to our project and was very glad to explain to everyone what they did.
Facts about our project. Our project was located in a city center of Hasselt in Belgium. It’s protected by the monuments office and it’s listed as a typical row-house dated from 1913. It used to be an old maternity hospital.

On our seats we have a research center that is located in the old chapel of the maternity hospital. It’s a flexible room where we can test different settings, different products with a lot of users. We have a visitor center, an information center, where people can actually come and gather information about Universal Design. They can actually come with their plans and we make accessible plan for their house. And, of course, we have our demonstration house.
In our demonstration house we have two units. We have a ground floor apartment and a second and third floor. It looks like a real house, real setting. So a ground floor apartment we have living room, a working place. We have a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. And the second floor we have kitchen and living room. The third floor is a bedroom and bathroom.

Total surface of the demonstration house is 264 square meters. The visitor center is 156 square meters.
And we show to people how Universal Design can be an elegant design solution to overcome obstacles. Like, for example, in a normal warehouse in Belgium, you have two stairs to enter a building. From an inclusive point of view, that’s not suitable for everyone, so we removed the stairs. We lowered the door and we integrated a platform in the corridor. So normally it stands in the middle, so it can be used as a stair. But for people that wheelchair, they can lower the platform using an electronic key, a Smart Phone or a tablet, and they can increase the level of 34-centimeters to go to the ground floor apartment. Because the building was listed, we also needed to use the old styles or redesign styles.
Another design solution we used different doors, and here in the bathroom and the toilets, we used double sliding doors, so we can use the toilet as a private guest toilet, but when we slide the doors open, you can connect the toilet with the bathroom, so you have more space and you can easily make a transfer from wheelchair to the toilet.
We also have a support bar next to the bath and/or shower. Normally you see support bar, like your rail, in your shower, but it looks stigmatizing, so we asked the interior architect, you make something else for a grip in the shower? She was inspired by a climbing wall and she made a design with gaps in a wall where you could hold yourself sitting or standing for small people, large people, children, everyone can hold themselves on the place they want. You can also hang your towels there or hang some shower products.

Then another example, we have an adjustable kitchen dresser and cabinets. So for people who are tired or could use stamina, who want to do it sitting, this together with the dishwasher can be adjusted to the preferred height. And the cabinets can lower to increase usability.
Another non-visual support tool, in the bedroom on the ground floor we have a wellness bath. It looks like an electronic box spring but has the same function as a hospital bed, so you can higher and lower the bed. You can adjust the angle or the back or the legs, the leg support. But it looks nice.
We have a door that slides in the middle, so it takes not that much space and it’s easier to use, because you don’t need to go to the front to take the handle and go back to close the door. You can almost stand next to the door, grab the handle and close the door.
Then we have a smart television in the living room that provides, apart from entertainment, a series of services for people. And besides the fact that these techniques are very useful for all of us, people with reduced mobility or limitations can delegate several actions without needing to move.
And then the last example, we have a washing machine and toilet on the second floor and it has two grips. You can hang your towel there, but for people who need the supports to get up from the toilets, they can use the gaps in the design of the product to get up from the toilet.
So my conclusion, the UD lab offers users information about Universal Design and how they can integrate some products in their own house. We create a place for research by design. We demonstrate it, we do research and we give people information. We organize brainstorm sessions, workshops, courses, professional training programs, and, of course, we still do research.
Our research can be very theoretical or very practical. And in this case, the example that you see here, we organize cooking workshops. We organize cooking workshops together with students from the University College and use experts who actually test our kitchen in a real setting and we learn how they can cook independently at home, but we gather a lot of feedback from them while we’re actually — while they are actually cooking. So in this case we did it with people in wheelchair and with people with visual impairment.
What is the conclusion in our project? What did we learn?
The need for personal assistance can be reduced to a minimum and adaptable living and comfort can be supported when Universal Design attitudes is achieved throughout the design and building process.
A project from the University College Hasselt and the accessibility office, we get fundings from Europe, province of Lindberg and the city of Hasselt, a big thanks goes to the firms who worked with us to make all UD living lab true. If you want more information about a project, you can ask me now, visit our website, visit or project for real or when you want more information about the research we do, you can contact.
Also I have flyers about the project if you want.

>> Thank you very much. There are still some minutes if you want to say something else.
>> No, you can ask questions.
>> Okay, because now we all have a chance to talk and ask questions. We’ll use the microphone.

>> Thank you. I was wondering if there’s any future plans for franchising this concept.
>> At the moment, there are no plans for doing that. But maybe it’s — good question.
>> Thank you.
>> Hello. Thank you for a very nice presentation, very inspiring. I like to see the way you work with existing buildings. I have a question about the economy in the project and your clients. I guess they ask about that. How much more will this cost and so on. How do you work with that?
>> We had a lot of those questions, certainly, and the start of a project we wanted to do a lot more, and everyone said it’s nice, looks great, but I cannot afford it, so I don’t have anything about this.
So we’ve taken that into account and we used actually products that are — some products are very cheap, some products are very expensive, but we made a nice balance between expensive and lower cost products. And we can actually tell people that with the use of similar product that we show, that it’s not more expensive to make your house inclusive. We actually take this into account when designing our project.

>> Anybody else?

Do you have reflections or questions?

>> Thank you. Very impressive, the presentation, and project. I’m interested in how you choose people who — with special needs, let’s say, how you ask them how they participated. Could you tell more? How did you find them?

>> The project is from the University College, and they have a department called healthcare, so we worked together with a lot of healthcare organizations who have a lot of participants, who wanted to work in our project, so we actually get the users from the organizations we work with.
>> So they were like volunteers and they —
>> Yes
>> — they didn’t know where they were going? And children, they participated?
>> Yes, children.
>> The whole group, everyone. That’s nice.
Thank you.

>> I was wondering about — when she asked about the users, how do you do the categorization of users? Like who are involved? Like, I mean, when it comes to physical disabilities and cognitive disabilities, is there any categorization that you have made for that so you know which groups are involved?
>> First we made a categorization and we asked them separately what they thought about the project, what they thought was good and not good, but later on in the project we merged them together so we had a lot of users getting together feedback, and actually in that case we had the most feedback because we heard — they heard from each other the needs for every people is. Every people has different needs. When hearing from each other what they wanted in a project, we came to a conclusion that was suitable for most people.

>> We have still ten minutes for questions. There are some long presentations and shorter ones in the end.

>> Thank you very much. It was very interesting. I wonder, did you have any home control or smart home products in the apartments?
>> Yes. We worked with Stomatics. We have chosen an open system so we can include different technologies on the project. Also because we have an apartment that works on IT and technology, so they can integrate their research in our project, but at the moment it’s very low tech, so we can open the front door. You can lower the platform. The lights go on and off. You can turn on heat, those things. But not more.

>> good presentation. Do you have any long-term status, people living there for a bit longer time, or is it only for the moment where you have a special issue to address or such?
>> At this moment, just studies for the moment. So we have cooking workshops and those things, but we plan on next year, that people can actually live in our living lab and test it, sleep there, cook their meals, they can actually do the whole process. And our living lab will be closed two years from now. So we intend to redesign our living lab. They can take into account feedback.
>> Hi, very nice presentation. Good idea about having the living lab. I would like to ask a technical question. You have shown a door which essentially revolves around, but what about the distance, which is, I’ll say, the width of the door is — the opening is going to reduce down, so are you getting the question?
>> So you want to know when the door is —
>> Then what is the width in comparison to regular door where the width needs to be increased?

>> The door that you —
>> You have shown in your presentation.
>> You see, that wasn’t a part of the building. That was not listed, so we didn’t need to take into account the measurements that were already there, so we could make a large opening, and in this case, the opening, when the door is open, it’s 90-centimeters.
>> But the whole door is —
>> I think about 110-centimeters.
>> So more than the regular door width?
>> Yeah, it’s more.
>> So you need more space in implementing the door?
>> They make this door…
Yeah, they can adapt the door to the space you have, so they can make a wide opening, small opening. It doesn’t matter in this case.
>> Okay. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. I have a question about legislation in Belgium. What are demands on the existing buildings when they are doing this exchange?
>> You mean from the monuments office or disability office?
>> What do you have to do? I mean, what is said in the rules or legislation in Belgium, if you have an existing building and you are doing some changes, do you have to think accessibility or you don’t have to do that? I mean, was it extra?
>> Yeah, they want to do this from the monuments office, they want to include accessibility, but at the moment, the legislation is just taking into account the things monuments office tell you to do. So we don’t have to take into account accessibility. Of course, in this project we wanted to do this, so it’s an extra.

>> Hello. I just want to ask a simple question. Does your project consider the green aspect, sustainable, easy to maintain on your project?

>> Do you mean that we take into account sustainability?
>> sustainability for your project. Do you do that?

>> It’s a listed monument, so we couldn’t take into account —
>> I see — because I see your — to make it Universal Design, so you are using technology and using the electricity, so have you considered a green —
>> I know what you mean. Because the monument is listed, we couldn’t integrate extra — finding the right words when you’re standing here is so hard sometimes.

Isolation. We couldn’t integrate isolation because the monument was listed, we couldn’t do anything about it. We wanted to place solar panels on the roof. The building is listed, so we couldn’t even do that. we take it into account, we ask the monuments office, but it’s all listed.

>> Okay. Thank you very much. It was really interesting.

[Applause]

>> HOST: So we are moving a bit north. We are going to Japan. And I would like to welcome Satoshi Kose.
>> SATOSHI KOSE: Thank you very much. Well, I’m talking about universal design education of the primary school level. That is the topic, the material that was used to teach children in universal design.
So I will talk about the background and the hypothesis.
In then we will talk about the conclusion.
At the University, we have done several contest. And the entries were more on tactile blocks (Indiscernible) rather than universal design. It was intended to be the universal design competition.
So in the background, the barrier free design became a major issue in the 1990s in Japan. And that was because of the rapid aging of the Japanese society.
And the accessible law was enacted in 1994 and there we had the accessible transportation law in 2000.
All they said was that the universal design was assumed to be the natural extension of barrier free design.
So the education that we designed was how this should be done.
So how to avoid this misinterpretation so I happen to contribute to the article in the textbook for sixth graders. We asked them as a starting point for children to continue their own surveys and experiences, to truly understand the concept of universal design.
Instead of just learning on universal design from the text, they were to go into the field, to learn by themselves.
So the hypothesis we had was that children thought with this Japanese language textbook by Mitsumura, a deeper understanding of universal design of children who learned from other language textbooks.
So in examining the difference of the universities and understanding, it will lead to identify problems of the universities and educations.
So (Indiscernible) better university education plan.
So we had some questions.
Whether they know the word universal design and how they knew about that and some keywords related to barrier free design.
And the same procedure is repeated as to the word universal design.
And to identify whether they use the textbook, we asked where they learned, where they were in the sixth grade, at the sixth grade level. Because the local children choose the textbook. And so we can identify whether they learned or they did not learn from the textbook.
And then we also use the student, we use the newly enrolled University student because they are the first your children to learn from that textbook.
So we chose samples at the University, at the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture, and also at the University of Technology and at the national College of technology.
Unfortunately, from the previous research, no noticeable difference was detected.
So the reason might be because when six years have passed, after they learned from the Japanese linguistics books, maybe other knowledges have just mixed together.
So the new survey was conducted to high school students.
And this was done in Shizuoka, Saga, and Tokushima.
So again, there was a six.
Not student in University there was a six year gap
And both Shizuoka and Saga had used this as a policy, but Tokushima had not adopted the.
So the next figure gives us the students who were surveyed.
So let’s you at the University students, about half and half, whether they learned from the textbook or not.
But unfortunately, and contrary to our expectation, the students from high school, from the same high school or from the different high schools, about half and half, yes or no.
Unfortunately, the choice was met, those that we ask had the discretion to choose from which high school. But it turned out that only Tokushima students learn from the textbook while Shizuoka and Saga students did not.
So meant that does at the University, the students from a high school did not learn (Indiscernible).
This is the knowledge of the barrier free design and universal design on the right side.
And the blue color, the majority do know the word barrier free design and universal design, the word barrier free design is better known compared to universal design.
This is all from the University through high school.
And this is for the two upper ones for the high school and the bottom one is the University.
So because the Shizuoka and Saga culture has serviced universities, the students know better because I think they would like to be involved in the University. So they try to know what the University is about.
And this is for Tokushima, and they know very well about the universal design.
And this is for the knowledge about the barrier free design and the word barrier free design and the word universal design.
And so there is a fairly big difference between the difference different high schools.
And this is a more of the information on the high school, so they are much worse in their knowledge.
And those are the major keywords that we identify to be related to barrier free design or universal design and we will come out to the next slide.
So the words that are chosen to be related to barrier free design or universal design, with some difference in a pattern of the citation.
But there was some mix between barrier free design and universal design. So there is some mixture of the concepts with the students.
And so this is the results of the answer in talking with the Tokushima students.
So this is a little bit different from the other two pictures. My conclusion was that high school students remembered what they learned from their textbook and what was taught to them previously.
Many programs at the high school will work effective to some extent, not extensively and students with the University agenda are more knowledgeable unfortunately.
And the University implantation by the local government is not directly communicated to high school students.
The student should actually know more about this. But even if they did not learn with Mitsumura textbooks.
So some strategies of learning by experience needs to be implemented to develop a deeper understanding of universal design.
And after I submitted the paper, I had some additional information, but this is additional now to my paper.
Part of what I mentioned is materials and Japanese textbooks, the secondary schools, not the primary schools revealed that the barrier free design topics, wheelchair use and visual impairment were included in textbooks edited by other companies.
So they definitely (Indiscernible) for the conceptions, that these specific barrier free design problems are important in negating the idea that design issues, particularly in Japan, we are going into very highly aged society.
So this is my conclusion for the moment.
And we are conducting another survey this year and this year we try to ask so that the high school, we will have a little bit of a mix of those who did and did not learn. So it should be better. So we expect that we will have better results next year, to be reported next year.
So this is the population that is aging, the dark blue is for Japan. So we’re expecting more than 35, or nearly nearly 45% of the publisher will be 65 and older.
Thank you.
(Applause).
>> HOST: Thank you very much. Do we have some questions?
>> GUEST: I am just wondering. You talk about some rigorous strategy on how to engage the students. Have you any thoughts on what that maybe?
>> SATOSHI KOSE: Yes. Actually, I submitted to the textbook company, that is a starting point. So they actually went in to the field and they made their own surveys. And as a standard way of teaching, they learned themselves and have their own report as a group and they are suggested to come back to the classroom to prevent to talk to the other children. And that will take up more, say two or three weeks, say five or six hours of learning and experiencing.
And so I have checked whether the other whether the primary school group was arranged.
Already I think they had taken from the originally written book and that is more of a kind of learning, but I am not sure whether they go to the field.
And even if they went into the field, those who learned about the wheelchair would have more emphasis on that topic and those who learned about the visual impairment would definitely focus on the visual impairment problems.
So that is a little bit away from the general, more general issue of universal design and the barrier free design.
>> HOST: Any more questions?
>> GUEST: Was the textbook totally about universal design and barrier free design or was it part of the larger textbook about somebody else?
>> SATOSHI KOSE: Well, it is part of the textbook. So it is only one chapter and so maybe it would take about two or three weeks to learn.
>> GUEST: What is the overall topic?
>> SATOSHI KOSE: Well, almost everything. So some, I mean some literature I mean, the stories some are poetry some are nonfiction and so mine was kind of original, more to be well planned, to tweak the students activities. And so that is what it was originally wanted to boost during the several years but now they have learned, they are changing the direction back so that they must teach and teach more than to give the children, a chance, to give the children a chance to learn by themselves.
>> HOST: Okay. Thank you very much.
>> SATOSHI KOSE: Thank you.
>> HOST: This is the last presentation for today.
>> SATOSHI KOSE: Thank you.
>> HOST: And thank you everyone
(Applause).
>> HOST: And thank you everyone for keeping the time. So now in 15 minutes there is a welcome reception at the design center, the IKDC, maybe 700 meters or something in that direction.
(Laughter).
And it could take between one minute and 40 minutes in a truly universal design perspective.
(Laughter).
Thank you.
(Thank you for joining us. This portion of the presentation is now over.)

>> HOST: Thank you very much. So we are moving around the world. And we have now reached Australia.
So I would like to welcome Helen Larkin.
>> HELEN LARKIN: Great. Thank you everyone. It is a bit chilly. I am getting a bit chilly standing here. Before I start I want to set a little bit of a context in terms of where I come from. And I come from Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, which is then you destroy a University that is so bring our 44th anniversary. That is quite young. Him if anyone who knows Victoria or that part of the story a, I am at the waterfront campus in Geelong, Australia.
And we are physically located together.
And when I came into thousand five, although we were literally separated by passageway of 100 meters, there had never been an intentional pass to bring these two groups together. And I thought there was a lot of common interest. And this has been talked a lot about already.
So this actually started to happen when I was teaching. I am an occupational therapist. I was teaching my third your students I was teaching universal design in third year and I was showing a lot of photos of buildings and talking about barriers to participation in relation to the environment and same as a things like what on earth were those architects thinking ?
And what of my students put her hand up and she said Helen, I wish my boyfriend was here. He is architecture student, and he would have a totally different point of view.
And at that point I realized we needed to bring the view to the table and bring the two groups together. So that is what we did.
At the same obviously at the same time, obviously there is increasing awareness about social justice and both national and global agendas.
Australia is part of the United Nation convention on the part of people with disabilities.
We have had major reviews of standards and building codes and a growing recognition of the help in city initiatives.
Certainly the University, there is a large emphasis place now on what the student experience should be and what attributes we want our graduates to have ?
What do we want them to be graduating with and what jobs are we preparing them for? And I think this is a really important aspect of what we’re trying to do.
We did not find that anyone else was doing it. There were some studies that have occupational therapy brought with industrial design students, but I could not find any studies where they brought both citizens together.
So in 2010 we developed quite a large student community that was cross faculty with other representations from across the University and what we wanted to do was developed and trial a blended and teaching resources around inclusive design. We wanted to look at what was sustainable beyond 2010 for any professional and educational approach to this and we wanted to look at sustainable partnerships in the future with regards to inclusive design practice and education.
What we did is in 2010 we did a very large literature review first of all as all good studies will do.
We did some consultation across Australia and throughout the focus groups or telephone interviews, we have trimester systems and in semester two of 2010, we developed some online teaching resources. And you can see it was first year architecture students and third year occupational therapy students.
We talked to both teachers and I thought it was important. There is a three year undergrad and then two years on top of that so there is five years total and so we did this in the second semester of our first year architecture program.
There were about 120 architecture students and 60 to 70 occupational therapy students.
We did face to face teaching and online teaching and in the face to face teaching we did arrange.
(Comment off mic).
Nation activities. We wanted to compare the difference between what I call real life and simulation.
So we sent students using wheelchairs and vision impairment classes, using a delivery trolley, using a pram, we did this in a large regional city to experience what it was like in this sort of simulation, and we wanted to compare this with Second Life simulations. So through the use of an avatar, the navigated through a Second Life simulation.
And we evaluated that.
So any stakeholder consultation, just briefly, we had 28 people who participated in the focus group or a telephone interview.
The main experience of the group was pretty high, over 20 years of experience.
They came from a range of professional backgrounds, architecture, occupational therapy, access (Indiscernible) and a range of advocacy groups.
Just to talk briefly about a couple of the key messages and some of the quotes, but it was a very large study that we did.
I think some of these key programs were some of the terminology we have heard today.
Some people in those focus groups and telephone interviews preferred the term “universal” because the other implies that you are sort of doing them a favor. But other people did not like the word universal design, and particularly architects felt it was a one size fits all, sort of a dumbing down part of the process.
So there was no real agreement in terminology, no real preference.
Quite a few of our participants commented that sustainability is really now, has taken a lot of ground from accessibility if you like and actually, we are making more ground in Austria 10 or 15 years ago than what we are now.
So I think also some of the comments from participants is that in the pursuit of looking at environmental sustainability and design solutions, some of those solutions were actually becoming more accessible with a range of abilities.
And clearly, I think that as an occupational therapist who is quite old in the tooth and have been around for a long time, I have seen lots of design solutions for individuals that are really poor design solutions and I think that very much came clear, it is not one or the other. No one is the expert. The old person who is the expert is the person who has a particular needs and wants a design in relation to their life.
And then architects and occupational therapist have a role to understand and respect that we can each bring to the table and contribute.
What we wanted students in this 2010 project to do was to be able to described the principles of universal design. This is both for architecture and occupational therapist. We wanted them to talk about these design solutions and one of them to be able to critique a design solution from that perspective as well.
So we did some face to face teaching. So one of the lectures and architecture came into my third year occupational therapy and I taught an architectural drawing and design she does a much better job of it than me.
Several of the occupational therapy academic stuff, teaching to architecture, we taught this in the first year design studio.
We talked about universal design. We talked about diversity. We talked about using the international classification of functioning as a basis for that and we explored some of those issues.
We had a one day workshop with both students were we brought them together, and we had some guest speakers. We had a lot of discussions and that is when we did the simulation. Each student with through both a second and a real life simulation.
I hesitate to use the word, “Real life” because I don’t think any of put ourselves in their shoes. Despite the fact that we can sit in a wheelchair, we do not understand what it is like 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Although was nice to hear Patricia evaluate that experience and we should talk about it from her own experience and the power of transforming the views of major corporations. So I do think there is some use in trying to change attitudes.
So we also had occupational therapy students and architectural students contributing to this as well.
So just on the left you will see an example of a poster presentation from a group of occupational therapy students in terms of this is one of the things they are required to do do some basic architectural drawing skills to communicate on a case study that they’re working with a client.
Obviously we are not expecting them to be architects, but we want them to understand what an elevation is, what a plan is, so when they are working with architects, they have some basic knowledge, and they can make an informed comment.
And obviously, as you can see from the posterior, we had to critique these plans also in relation to universal design.
On the right you will see some design solutions that some of the architects came up with when they had to embed universal design characteristics within their designs.
Second Life, that was a really steep learning curve. I never really heard of Second Life before we embark on this project, and there wasn’t many people in the University with the skills, but we did have one person who is very, very keen to try it out.
So one of the biggest problems is technical support in the computer hardware.
So the computer hardware that we used, it wasn’t good for the student support. The use of second life in terms of the hardware was hard so we had to upgrade quite a few computers.
The biggest problem with second life is making it real. So we are doing everything that is counterintuitive to second life. Second life is designed, so people can fly, they can go upstairs and they can do wonderful and magical things.
So we actually try to make it more real.
So there were a lot of cost associated with scripting and building this second life environment and problems to scale. We did not want wheelchairs to fly. We wanted real scale in buildings. We wanted to build an environment where sometimes the person in the wheelchair could never go through a particular area.
So we wanted students to experience those issues of accessibility and inaccessibility.
There were also risks to second life for anyone who is familiar with second life environments. It can be risky for people, and there are cases around things that happen to people. We wanted to make sure that people who use second life were using it and no one could access it other than our students.
It is very, very costly and very time consuming.
In the evaluation we need to just first the evaluation at the beginning and end of the semester the demographic information but what I want to share with you is we used the readiness for the scale that was developed in 1999.
It has been used a lot to measure attitudes to professional learning with healthcare students, medical, nursing.
It has never been used with architecture learning.
So there is about 18 to 20 questions that students answer. Both the students did the questionnaire at the beginning of this particular project and basically occupational therapy students were particularly more positive, but less cognitive even though they were third year, about their own role.
Architecture students, they were more likely to think that learning with other disciplines was a waste of time.
They thought problem solving could be learn more effectively within their own profession, and they had to apply more knowledge and skills than other professions.
At least in comparison to occupational therapy students.
When we did it at the end, we had the online teaching, we had the face to face teaching, we had the one day workshop, and then at the end of the semester we did the second questionnaire, we asked the students the same things again.
The difference is mostly remain the same, but the gap had narrowed in some areas.
However, the occupational therapy students became more positive. became less positive. They thought that problem solving could be learn more effectively with professionals in the same background and the became less positive about the benefits of shared learning.
As disappointing as this is, it is not surprising because within their help, professional, educational learning, this is very them this is very common.
So you have got to do more than just bring them together.
So the usefulness of second life, not very really. At least not from the student perspective and in terms of time and money in regards to building that environment. They were not really all of that positive about its effect.
Particularly it does not mimic obviously the physical and social and tactile challenges that a real isolation does.
So students were very positive about real life simulations and that is why we are still doing them. And we have been doing them I did occupational therapy for 35 years, 40 years ago and we are still doing it. I still think it is a powerful educator and a powerful transformer of attitudes and beliefs.
Unless someone has a better idea, I do think we have to be conscious that a few disability advocacy groups don’t like us doing them. But it is important that we do them carefully, tactfully, and with sensitivity.
So since 2010, just to finish off, we now teach first and second year architecture. We also continue to teach occupational therapy, and we do real life simulations and we have had an increasing rate of students in this area and now we can say that within the architecture program, there is more by and then there was and now they are employing tutors within the design studio projects to have an active interest in inclusive design, whatever we might like to call it.
Lots of challenges. It really is about buy in and being a champion of change.
It is very difficult to find the time and the space to make that interprofessional education happen, but I just want to finish off this is a quote from last year with a first year architecture student who spoke to his colleagues. He used to be a chef before started to study architecture, before his injury. Universal design is like a good way. It is very enjoyable. I think that really sums up what the messages that we are trying to give to students. And finally in the words of one of the very per students in 2010, she came up to me at the end of the session, at the end of the semester, after completing her design project, she says it has been a life changing experience. And that is what I am hoping we are doing through this project, transforming values and attitudes and beliefs. Thank you very much.
>> HOST: Thank you. Questions?
>> GUEST: In the real life experience, we have always had a problem with getting enough equipment. Do you have any tips?
>>: What we are trying to say is that it is not just about wheelchairs. We are trying to get the message across to the students that we all know this could be any of us at any stage, either temporarily or permanently.
So we’re trying to expand. We used to livery trolleys. We use prams as well as wheelchairs and crutches and so on. So we do have a number of wheelchairs within the occupational therapy program. But it is challenging. Because the architecture program would like to get it done in one day and I think it is very insensitive to say that 100 plus students could do this, not all of them have a disability or a health problem, but it is a challenge.
>> GUEST: Do you bring people with disabilities into the studio?
>>: Yes. Interestingly enough, we do have someone that does quite a lot of lectures for us, a gentleman with several policy.
This year we used five students, all of you are first year architecture students and have a disability of some sort that impacts their ability to navigate the environment.
But the thing that is interesting is that one of the students is one that I just quoted here before. He has a spinal cord injury and uses a wheelchair. He is doing a design project and he is talking to one of the lectures and saying I am sitting here with my six other people on my team, and they are still designing buildings with steps and stairs and here I am and yet the message is still not getting through. It is tough. Really tough.
>> GUEST: Thank you. Very interesting. I also have a question. The real life and the Second Life, they are very popular. I have seen them used also by politicians, together with the organizations and then I think it is a bit surprising that after, when for instance, they are discussing difficult topics, they do not really put weight to what they learned in this real life situation. So it could be interesting when it comes to students, also to have them to follow up after a few years to see. Because, of course, there are problems to that method. And so it could be interesting to have a few years.
>> HELEN LARKIN: I think my solution I think we know that people with experience, with a family or friend or disability will get it more. I am really tried to push architecture students to work in a part time, they all have part time jobs. Maybe they work at a hotel or a local McDonalds. So I wanted to get some real experience about what it is like.
>> HOST: Just a short question.
>> GUEST: So the architects noble (Indiscernible) are there some affected differences between
>>: I think the students became slightly more negative. They are in the third year of their course. They’ll have one year to go. They saw the first year architecture students not taking this seriously. So there was a very much of a difference in terms of professional, sort of where they work on the professional scale. So I think that was a contributor factor. But we did it because it was a more convenience issue. So it was easy for me to Ashley modify the curriculum.
>> GUEST: How many ours and how many weeks for all of the programs?
>> HELEN LARKIN: Well, it was several weeks. So in first and second year architecture, it is over several weeks, and we come into the studio design in various points along the way. And occupational therapy, it is only a couple of weeks, in terms of third year anyhow, and then they do their project in relation to the one we saw up there. It is still quite small. We are trying to expand it.
>> GUEST: Thank you very much.
(Applause).

>>: Good afternoon everybody. A pleasure to be here.
>> EDWARD STEINFELD: My name is Ed Steinfeld. And I’m speaking today for Beth Tauke who is the one who let this presentation, but because of family affairs, she was not able to come on this trip.
I am going to talk about our inclusive design graduate architecture program. And I met at part of the State University of New York.
Let’s start with a little quote and it is fitting that the last presentation was from India. I am going to read Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be of any use for them.” I think this really captures the spirit of universal design and many other philosophers and writers who have said good things that we could use in universal design.
We try to take our program in a direction that will continue to develop and we are always inspired by people from all over the world.
Our group I’m going to talk about the challenges for starting a program in universal design, a description of our program, and the lessons we have learned from the many years we have run this program.
Architecture programs in the US have been behind the curve on universal design while teaching accessibility standards is a required part of every architectural curriculum.
Most schools do a very bad job of it and very few schools teach beyond the code requirements, the standard requirements.
And there are many reasons for this and these become the challenges we have to face.
Worst of all the tradition of architectural education in the United States is filed is style and form based.
Second our accrediting organizations have not included universal design as a primary evaluation criteria.
As I said they just focus on evidence in the student work that they have, that they are knowledgeable about the codes and standards and that is kind of minimum in that regard as well.
Inclusive design educators, on the other side of the coin, inclusive design educators are often researchers and writers, and they are not often focusing on topics that are exciting and interesting to creative minded students.
Another thing we find is that the popular media in the states with shape the attitudes of our students favor human interest stories and that you would think would be a good thing except they never talk about what happens after the disasters.
So they talk about the disasters and never really publicize all of the issues that architects have to deal with.
Another issue we see well, it is not an issue, but we see it as an opportunity. Because inclusion through design is essential now to global practice and architects from developed countries, at least or practicing all over the world, and so they are dealing with a great diversity of different kinds of topics.
We have seen this as an opportunity.
So for example, in our research group, one of the things that we do is we have projects on different kinds of issues. And this one, one of our faculty has worked in Rwanda and he is very interested in informal settlements and so he offered a project on informal settlements and basically as we heard earlier, we do try to a diverse we try to address diversity with students of they come from a diverse background.
We also addressed social justice and social participation as well as human performance.
So our focus is not just on design for human performance, but on design for social justice, accommodating differences.
We found many topics and particularly for design studios that appeal to the students. One is human diversity; one is sensory perception.
Another one is health and safety.
And another one is social justice.
And, in fact, when we talk about disability, we often put it into the context of all of these other issues and we emphasize the interrelationship of different issues of diversity.
So for example, disability has a strong relationship with race and income in the United States.
And also has a relationship with gender and aging. So when we tried to explain to students that disability, that universal design is not just about disability, there are a lot of other issues that they have to attend the two and essentially seems to interest the students more than just a focus on function and accommodating function related to disability.
So what is our program and why ?
We have two different Masters programs, our first professional degree is a master’s degree, and we have two different programs.
We have a two year program for students to complete a four year undergraduate studying architecture.
Then we have a three and a half year program for students who have a bachelor’s degree in another field and the first year we teach most of our lecture courses on universal design.
So we have and we teach a studio in every single semester so we have a studio in the first semester and then we have a course call the social nature of architecture.
Another one is called design of inclusive environments.
And then we have a required course in environmental controls that all the students have to take.
Oh, and I should explain our curriculum is set up with four concentrations. So in the Master’s program we are one of four different concentrations and those are one called material culture, which is really about art and sculpture.
We have another one called on sustainable design.
We have a third on integration and information technologies into architecture and then ours is inclusive design.
Students can focus on any one of those concentrations or switch from one to the other every year so they can move around.
So these are the requirements for our students that stay in our concentration, but also there are courses that are available to the other students, and we do have about a third, depending on the course, from one of the other concentrations or not, there selecting a concentration. So in the second semester, we have another studio, and we have a course on ergonomics and building design and a course on human responses to intentional environments, essentially, human response to the environment.
In the second year we have most electives. Students can elect to take the studio, the same studio that the first your students would take.
So we have students mixed abilities in the studio and then they can do directed research in the first semester and finish with a thesis in the second semester, if they want to do a thesis.
But they could also do another studio if they want.
So we don’t require a student to do a thesis. It is an elective thing. They are not allowed to do it unless they achieved a certain grade level in academic performance.
And then we give them a lot of elective so they can choose courses within our school or within other departments that relate to their thesis.
And then we have another Master’s program, which is a non professional degree program and that one is basically the same course except there is no studio require. And this is for students that want to get a Master’s of science, not a first professional degree, and they may come from occupational therapy or this ability studies or whatever.
We actually have not had any students in this program yet. This is also a course the students who are they have a Masters of architecture can take in order to get more knowledge and become a specialist in universal design or we call it inclusive design.
In architecture, the main course is a studio. It cost to its a little bit less than half of all the credits that a student takes every semester. So it is the most important course. These are the kind of projects we would give. We experiment a lot, and we found projects that are exciting to students, give them a chance to do creative work and they have various attributes that make them good topics for universal design.
So the children’s museum is a studio that I gave because there is a new project for a children’s Museum in Buffalo.
It is a real world project that works directly with the institution, with people managing the facility and building it.
Another project like that was a public toilet in an abandoned grain elevator complex and people try to figure out how to reuse this grain elevator, and they are using it as art for art’s events. So people need toilets. So the project was how do design toilets in this facility, which was not as simple of a project as you might think. And in this case, the students actually bought a shipping container and built public toilets that are now used in the facility.
So actually, it is a compass and something with a building that is being used.
Another project’s global informal settlements in which students did research on informal settlements around the world and can up with different approaches that involved participation of the residents of the settlements.
Another project was an office building in Dublin and another one, affordable housing prototype for a low-income community in Buffalo and in this case, we also have a client who wants to build some affordable housing and we hope to turn that into a real world project as time goes on.
Our students have also pursued a number of disparate thesis opportunities a number of thesis opportunities and they do this with faculty members who have a similar research interest, and then they work, for like I said a different semester doing a topic for a thesis and then they follow through with a thesis, their own thesis later.
And one of the thesis is that is going to be presented in the other room in a few minutes, Karen Kim who is done quite a bit of research on stair safety. She has worked with me and she has presented at this conference, and she also presented at a fall conference. We encourage the students to submit their projects to peer reviewed conferences.
Another project is senior housing standards for munities in Toronto, architectural practices in small towns and the importance of knowing about codes and standards and particularly accessibility standards and Megan Basnak who did that research discovered that was a very important aspect of the research.
And then we also have someone do a project on lighting and another one on wellness centers for women.
And one of the more interesting ones lately was classroom design for the autism spectrum and another interesting one was on temporary housing.
So one of the interesting things that occurred, I think we have had this program running now for about five years and one of the interesting things that occurred when we started it, we had very few students, three to five students and material culture was attracting 20 students and sustainable design twice in his.
Now is all reversed. Now we don’t have enough room for all the students that want to study inclusive design.
So it turned out to be a very popular program for students and I want to talk about why this is.
First of all, we have developed a close relationship with our research Center, which I direct, which is called, “The center for inclusive design and environment access” and the center as you may know is probably the leading center in research and development in universal design in North America and we get a lot of publicity. We are very visible in the school and we have reached out to all the students, and we are closely integrating our projects with our courses.
So it exposes the students to the work we do rather than having a research center part from the educational program.
The other thing is we have expanded significantly over the last few years.
So now, we have seven faculty within the school that is participating in our center and teaching courses in our curriculum.
We also have two other faculty in other schools and we recently hired some more people.
So we have actually a very great resource amongst the faculty, and we have reached I think a critical mass.
Honestly, we are very productive.
We are trying to make universal design education meaningful to the students, and we instill in them that they have to really start thinking about universal design as they move into practice. It will be an essential part of architectural practice in the future. We show them how demographics are changing in the world. We have to be ready for that. We talk about the difference; the changing economies as developing economies are improving. If you guys states is declining. I think it has become very obvious in our country that things are not like they used to be and we have to start thinking differently about the way we design our environments.
We demonstrate and encourage them to understand that societies that value human diversity, attitudes about consumption are changing. We are moving from a society in the United States that valued high consumption to the point where it became absurd. We are still in that mode of thinking, but now we really have to reverse our thinking and start thinking about how to reverse consumption and how to do more with less.
Technology is changing the world and mass customization makes universal design easier to do.
We have to learn how to integrate digital technologies, but we also have to learn how to deal with the complexity that they bring with them.
And finally, governments are seeking new ways to improve life for all so there is an opportunity here as we move into the future about the support that the public will bring to this.
And one of the things that we will find is generation Y.
It is much more just it in social issues than Generation X.
Generation X was a, “Me generation” and Gen Y was not like that at all.
That is really kind of a life kind of thinking. I think they had a better education in their lives.
So, of course, I’m going to skip ahead.
Attitudes or shifting and, in fact the architectural profession is changing and even though they are not doing it very well yet, they are starting to think about how architecture can provide a social benefit to the public.
So I am just going to quickly go through what we think is required to get a good program going.
A comprehensive plan and a set of goals, the buy in from the administration.
Committed faculty and a plan for supporting new faculty.
Student interest, a rigorous interesting and realistic realistic, whatever it was interesting research opportunities and real world design opportunities.
And there we need some sort of internal and external support.
Let me skip ahead.
So we would like to offer our systems.
We think we have been quite successful and we are not bragging or anything, but we really have try to, we would really like to reach out and make connections around the world. So if anybody wants to learn more about our programs, come to visit, we would very much like to talk to you, and we had a couple of books that are available that can help you in your own work if you are a teacher.
>> HOST: Thank you very much. You had the opportunity to answer some questions as well. Thank you.
(Applause).
>> GUEST: Do you have an undergraduate program as well?
>> EDWARD STEINFELD: That is a good question. We have a four-year undergraduate program.
>> GUEST: I am wondering how
(Overlapping speakers).
>> GUEST: Better integrated program.
>> EDWARD STEINFELD: That is a very good question
(Overlapping speakers).
So Beth Tauke is the associate Dean for student affairs. So when I said administrative buy in, well, we are I have 1 foot in administration and recently Cory Dunn Smith who recently joined us a couple of years ago, he has taken over for her. So she has been working hard to get the right faculty place in the right positions to bring universal design into the undergraduate program.
So Cory Dunn Smith runs our first year for semester program and we also have another faculty member associated with our group who teaches what is called a comprehensive design project in the third year.
So we are gradually bringing universal design to the other parts of the program. It is difficult because we have a lot of students and a lot of faculty, and they don’t always buy in to these ideas that it will take some time. Most of our students in our gradual program come from other graduate schools and about, I would say about half are from other countries.
>> GUEST: Okay.
>> HOST: I hope we have time for more questions.
>> GUEST: What does this gradual program, is this a Masters in architecture? Is it inclusive In Design or is it a Masters
>> EDWARD STEINFELD: It is a Masters in architecture and what we call inclusive design research group. And students don’t get any particular degree. They get a Masters in architecture, but they have courses that qualify them for, you know, developing a good degree or a good career in universal design. We use those terms interchangeably, design for all, inclusive design, universal design, to us it is all the same.
>> HOST: Some more questions?
>> EDWARD STEINFELD: One way to think of it is it is one way of thinking about being an architect.
>> GUEST: I live in Belgium. I give advice directly to architects. Sometimes we can also in universities.
What do you think of teaching architects who are practicing a long time? Because we don’t have problems with young architects. They don’t ask us why. They are very interested in our experience, but you have a huge problem with elderly architects.
>> EDWARD STEINFELD: Yes. We experience similar things. One of the differences in practice in the United States is the legal context of architecture. There are a lot of lawsuits if you don’t do what you are supposed to do. So from an accessibility perspective, the architects are quite aware that they have to design accessibility, but they don’t know how. They make mistakes. And we have continuing education requirement for all licensed architects. So we have started our center separate from the graduate group. We have started an online continuing education program so we offer about 12 courses now, and we also have a lot of occupational therapist taking those courses and other professionals taking them and we get credit and our courses are approved by the licensing, the professional associations. So we are expanding that. We have started small and try to develop all of the courses, and now we are going to start marketing the courses more extensively. We usually get about five to 10 students in each course, but not that many architects right now. But we hope to market better to the architects.
>> HOST: Thank you very much. You happen to answer the next question as well. So thank you, very much.
(Applause).