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DESIGN FOR ALL ”Design for All is design for human diversity, social inclusion and equality.”http://www.design-for-all.org/images/Stockholmdeclaration_1.pdf Design for All is a methodology dealing with the process of design rather than the product that results. Design for All seeks to ensure that the issue of Social Inclusion of Disability People With Disabilities is taken into account at all levels of Decision Making within an organised Social Structure such as the family, a Social Organisation , a Business Enterprise or a government department. Design for All defines the elements of the process of decision making as "Awareness" , "Audit", "Consultation" and "Impact Assessment" . Today, Planning and Design for All are being recognised increasingly as necessary elements in pro-active strategies for sustainable development. Design for All first came into use in 1993, the European Institute for Design and Disability (EIDD) http://www.design-for-all.org/ developed the mission statement: “Enhancing the quality of life through Design for All”. Over a period of ten years, EIDD provided the European platform on Design for All, culminating in the publication of the Stockholm Declaration on Design for all in 2004 http://www.design-for-all.org/images/Stockholmdeclaration_1.pdf Design for All aims to enable all people to have equal opportunities to participate in every aspect of society. This calls for the built environment, everyday objects, services, culture and information to be made accessible, convenient for everyone in society to use and responsive to evolving human diversity. Design for All enables a person (actor) to achieve an effect by employing a tool that interfaces with the sensory/physical/intellectual modality preferred This enabling interface calls for an enabling environment, enabling society and enabling processes. The medical model of "disability" is the Medically Defined loss of a bodily function. It is true that this loss disables a person from one or more particular modalities. However, the human body does not strive to act in ways that are not enabled. The person who experiences such a loss of function immediately turns to one or more modalities that are still available to use. The social model of disability defines disability as: ‘the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.’ This definition recognises that the enablement comes from the environment that is expects a person to act in any modality. Design for All offers a methodology for working out how this enablement can be guaranteed. The disablement that such a person encounters is actually due to the fact that the interface which he or she uses is not being enabled by the environment in which the person is operating. The enabling interface is a set of multi modal factors and Design for All calls for clarification of what environmental factors will enable them in order to make it possible for the "disabled" person to function in society. This is a new approach that targets the environment and not the person. The details of the approach must be developed or we will continue to call on service providers to "cater" for people with disabilities and to "include" them without ever explaining how to do so. ENABLING INTERFACE Examples include:
It does not matter whether a person has lost a function or just simply wants to interface with the environment in a different way. It is the business of the designer to know about the interface that must be enabled not the condition of the person who might or might not use the completed design. ENABLING PROCESSES ENABLING ENVIRONMENTS ENABLING SOCIETY THE PROOFING MOMENT |
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