As I mentioned the other week, one of my abilities in life is getting strangers to invite me to their homes. Being my father's daughter, I can't help but notice what universal design features their homes incorporate. My dad is low key obsessed with accessibility, an obsession whose roots are a mystery to me.
I was admiring one in a string of several reasonably accessible showers shortly before seeing the latest kerfluffle on Twitter about a proposed pedestrian street. The loss of street parking for cars reliably stirs up our faux concern for the disabled. We can't have pedestrian streets, curb lane patios, streetcars with dedicated lines, or bike lanes because people with limited mobility need parking!
And boy does the topic of handicapped parking get people's blood pumping. It’s both reassuring and disheartening to see Europeans share the car quirks of North Americans. Curiously, people with mobility issues are rarely the ones speaking up.
That's when it occurred to me: the vast majority of us are perfectly comfortable signing a mortgage on a home that lacks the most basic universal design features, yet we get our knickers in a twist about the idea of someone who uses a walker having to park a block farther away.
I know I'm being unfair. These are false equivalents.
I also hate looking for parking as much as anyone else. Part of why I don't drive is because I experience existential despair while circling for parking. I can clearly recall the misery of circling Gowanus in my ex-girlfriend's car even though it's been long enough for us to each have married and divorced other people.
In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein mention how builders are not incentivized to incorporate sustainable design features, since they bear the upfront costs without reaping the long-term cost savings. Presumably universal design features suffer from the same misaligned incentives. The builder is not the one who will break their ankle while getting overly enthusiastic during karaoke and then experience their own personal bloopers reel every time they need to use the toilet.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, yet it seems like a safe bet that at some point in the 30 year life of a mortgage there will be someone in your home who would benefit from universal design features. Well placed rocker light switches are easier for people with disabilities, sure. They’re also easier for children and people who are carrying groceries inside. We all love those Oxo kitchen tools that were designed for people with arthritis because things that are easy to use...are easy to use.
So, we know that disabled people exist and need parking. Do they need toilets? Nah. Do they need housing? Nah, only in those golf course communities and nursing homes.
Why do home builders make homes that don’t meet the needs of many of their potential inhabitants? And why do we buy homes that don’t meet our needs?
Adam Mastroianni has a delightful explanation of why the world is plagued by the type of bad design that leaves us embarrassing ourselves:
“The answer, I think, is that design involves both technological engineering and psychological engineering, and psychological engineering is harder. Doors don’t often fall off their hinges, get stuck, or snap in half—all feats of technological engineering. They do often lock accidentally, set off unintended alarms, and mislead people about how to open them—all failures of psychological engineering.”
“Even worse, taking one perspective is hard enough, but psychological engineering requires you to take several. Bathrooms should be wheelchair accessible and easy to clean, but designers are probably not going to invite people who use wheelchairs to test out their bathrooms, nor are they going to try scrubbing behind the toilets.
Anyone who can overcome these challenges is rewarded with indifference. Psychological engineering problems are hard to spot in the first place, so people rarely notice when you solve them. People hate pushing a pull door, but they don’t think at all when they push a push door. Unlike technological engineering, which can be explained and sold (“This car gets 55 miles to the gallon!”) and thus copied and improved, good psychological engineering melts into the background.”
Adam’s suggestion for helping good psychological design to spread is to create a Museum of Psychological Engineering so we can experience the subtle bliss of a world that’s intuitive.
Does it seem punitive to require people to use the things they design and run? To require builders to live in their own creations, for tech companies to dogfood their own tools, and for politicians to take public transit and live in public housing?
Sometimes they really believe they’ve built something awesome and they’re so confident they don’t feel the need to try it out or talk to the actual users.
After working on various marketing teams, I was horrified to personally experience the buildings I had been promoting as successes. Phase one of a sustainable dormitory project was nightmare of dysfunction, something the architectural team seemed blissfully unaware of as we worked together to raise money for phase two. The engineers I worked with had no clue that the classroom lighting and sound systems they were so proud of were too complex for professors and students to figure out, leading them to come up with their own absurd workarounds.
Maybe they sent out a multiple choice survey to key stakeholders after the buildings were occupied. I took a bus to a kibbutz, shared some beers, and crashed on the dorm couch. I hung out after a conference and asked what was with all the tape on the AV panel. It was a lot more fun and more informative than analyzing survey results in Excel. Surveys require you know the right question to ask. People behave differently when you’re an expert who represents a company.
Why bother, though? These companies are making money. Homes are being sold on the basis of location and countertops. I didn’t embark on an investigation to ruin my job satisfaction. It seemed like it’d be cool to check out the things I’d been a part of making.
When I first moved to Toronto I went through a phase of going to all the condo sales centers. We all have our hobbies. I loved it because the apartments were fascinatingly bad. They seemed to have been designed by people who had never seen an apartment before, nevermind lived in one. They were so obviously designed as financial instruments rather than living quarters. Yet they’d all sell out in presale.
Rather than just take Adam’s idea and translate it to another domain, I emailed him a leading question:
What do you think is behind this willingness to purchase homes that don't meet the needs of the majority of humans? Do you think it's as simple as most people having only encountered hideous ‘accessible design’ in public toilets rather than actually user friendly universal design features? Or are we just trying to preserve the relevance of sitcom hijinks when someone breaks a leg?
He was kind enough to send back his guess:
“I think it’s really hard to imagine being anyone else—it’s even hard to imagine being yourself a few decades in the future. And when something works for you, you never realize that it might not work for someone else. Plus it’s so hard to get at house at all right now that people are forced to get whatever they can.”
My dad taught me how to draw blueprints on paper and in autoCAD. He pointed out universal design and places where it was lacking. I mourn the independence people are denied by bad design. So much care work is a design problem, not a disability problem.
Adam is right that I can’t imagine being myself a few decades in the future. I can’t imagine what my life will be like this time next year. I struggle to imagine being myself as a child, when bathroom sinks and kitchen counters were unreachable without assistance. I have no idea what the future will bring.
The Tamarack Institute has two workshops coming up. On August 3rd they're discussing intersections of social and climate justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities and future cities. On July 7th they'll be showing how Canadian public, non-profit or community sector organizations with a local service delivery or public policy mandate can use the community data program. Both will be recorded in case you can't attend live.
One of the things I like about Substack, which is the platform this is getting to you through, is the way it's sort of social media lite. You can share your thoughts and some people have thriving communities on here. Still, it's different than platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It encourages thoughtful interactions, rather than quick takes.
If you're reading this on an iPhone, the Substack app offers the option to listen to an automatically generated audio version of this post. If you, like me, use an Android...well, they say they're working on it.
Sometimes we need to take a break from sad stories. Other times we need them. If you're in the mood for sad, here's a podcast for you.
We are looking to integrate universal design in a new house we are building. It's been interesting to say the least. Somethings have been pretty easy to get the architect on board with. Other things not so much. We've been using Universal Design in Housing by the North Carolina State University's Center for Universal Design as a guide. We are still in the early stages of the design. It should be interesting going forward.
I think you know how I feel about this topic. As a designer, I have always concentrated on respecting the end user of any of the work I've done, whether it's print advertising, packaging, interiors or display.
As a display designer, how a customer is routed through a store is important re: sales.
But the customer needs to be respected. Ease of access, comfortable dressing rooms, etc.
Re: imagining myself twenty years from now ( if I'm still alive)...moving and looking for a new place to live at my age was an anticipatory challenge. If I wanted the house of my dreams, it would have stairs and if it had stairs, I had to consider walking up those stairs at 80. So much for houses. I had to consider the neighborhood and what it featured. The convenience of shopping. The safety. The security. This was not an easy process. But being a designer I was able to consider all of the factors of the aging process that concerned me and I addressed them.
New York City is becoming more "user friendly" lately. At least re: public transportation. Subways now have digital alerts as to schedules. Buses have vocal and digital alerts re: upcoming stops. At bus stops, you can use your phone to see how close the next bus is. There are charging stations at information kiosks on the street. There are USB ports on new buses.
Traffic however, and parking, are another thing altogether. The Citibikes have taken up parking spaces throughout Manhattan. I don't know who can afford garages. Bike lanes and traffic islands are terribly disruptive. The bike lanes are a necessity, but make sure you look both ways since too many people ignore directions.
Anyway - that's my take. Any good designer needs to imagine themselves as an end user.