Space for Inclusion

DisOrdinary Architecture was invited by Foster + Partners to collaborate on the development of a toolkit that provides architects across the practice with knowledge about, and guidance on, how to practically embed inclusive design in their work.  The aim was to create guidance that went beyond basic functional access and code compliance, highlighting the alignments and conflicts across different access needs and design requirements .

To capture diverse lived experiences that could inform the toolkit, we started by visiting five Foster + Partners projects with 21 Disabled creatives and examined each through the lens of three key themes – entrances, urban rooms (interior public/social spaces) and toilets.

At each site, two pairs of Disabled creatives and a note taker explored the site and captured their responses through a variety of media – photos, audio, video, notes and sketches.Key themes were consolidated in online workshops, which brought together all creatives and aimed to deepen and add richness to the data through discussion. This Disabled and creative-led data was then transformed into a series of reports, which brought together the site visit data, and workshop conversations into key themes using grounded theory. These reports were then compiled with the practices’ own technical guidance and made available to all architects at Foster + Partners - alongside the practice’s in-house training - to support their work as they make more inclusive design decisions.

This project was also a moment to model and test a process that rethinks how Disabled people can be involved in conversations about access and inclusion. Rather than either an access forum (which is often under-resourced and reactive to existing projects in progress) or an access consultancy (where disabled experts are brought in to ‘do the work’ of functional access in new projects) we wanted to test alternatives. By bringing relatively large numbers of disabled creatives to review their lived experiences of existing buildings, we hope to build up a body of research data that can ‘illuminate’ design work on every building project. The aim is not to provide a checklist of barriers, or to offer simple design ‘solutions’ but to open up to view the alignments and differences across and between various disabled people in using buildings.  

We are particularly interested in providing detailed – but also complicated – information about diverse access needs, that can help shape designers values and priorities around inclusion.  This has too often been implicitly framed by both an assumption of ‘normal’ users, and through the aesthetic and conceptual trends of architecture as a discipline.