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'Architecture and ability' OR 'Design and Diversity'? - Michael Timms
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So now a few more hands go up in the air, preceded by "building material" and followed by the cry: "But I can't go around consulting every Tom, Dick and Harry about these issues". Well, the good news - if you've stayed with me thus far - is that you don't have to. The highly-acclaimed and much-consulted: "Buildings for Everyone" has been revised and updated. The new edition, published in 2002, is titled: "Building for Everyone". Note the title change, which transforms the first word from noun to verb, and carries with it the idea of positive action.

It may feel irritating to have to consider accommodating such a small percentage of the population. But the trouble is that we don't actually know just how small - or big - this percentage is. There are no usefully precise statistics available. Then again perhaps we shouldn't be focussing just on "the disabled". There are other minority groups to be considered. For instance, that dished pavement you put in for a wheelchair user is a god-send to the mother with a buggy or the older citizen with a couple of heavy shopping bags. The automatic doors, which you put in to assist people with impairments, make life easier for those carrying heavy loads. The signage you designed having people with learning difficulties in mind will be of assistance to those whose first language is not English. Bearing in mind that we are getting older all the time, both as individuals and as a nation, making our world accessible to people with disabilities is making it accessible to a far greater proportion of the population than those covered by the term 'disabled'. In fact, it's making it accessible to everyone.

This leads us to the notion of Universal Design - a concept that was well defined in a recent government Bill as:

The design and composition of an environment so that it may be accessed, understood, and used by everyone to the greatest practicable extent in the most independent and natural manner possible and in the widest possible range of situations, without the need for adaptation, modification, assistive devices or specialised solutions to provide for persons of a particular age or size or persons having any other particular physical or mental feature, ability (italics are mine) or disability"

It's an idea whose time has come. Actually, its time arrived a while ago, but the key players were standing on the wrong platform. Someone in the corridors of power thought having an Irish Centre for Excellence in Universal Design was a jolly good idea. But rather than launch a Bill in the Oireachtas to set it up, they tucked it away in the Disability Bill 2001. This is the Bill that collapsed in a heap just before the last D�il did the same thing. The Bill collapsed for very good reasons - all of which had to do with people not thinking things through, but none of which had to do with the section on the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design. So, we missed that train and, like our fellow travellers, must wait for the next one.

Dr. Michael Timms PhD. is the Academic Director at the Centre for Disability Studies, University College Dublin