“It makes sense now to design products, environments, and communications to work seamlessly for the widest spectrum of users.”
“The concept (Universal Design) is all called design-for-all or lifespan design. The message is the same: if it works well for people with functional limitations, it works better for everyone.”
“Design as a topic for civil rights”
In the 1970's, American architect Michael Bednar introduced the idea that everyone's functional capacity is enhanced when environmental barriers are removed. He suggested that a new concept beyond accessibility was needed that would be broader and more universal.
Ron Mace, an American architect, started using the term `universal design and figuring out how to define it in relation to accessible design…It requires only an awareness of need and market and a commonsense approach to making everything we design and produce usable by everyone to the greatest extent possible.
“Universal design begins with the insight that the environment is not somehow a separate realm that exists beyond the ordinariness of everyday life. All of us - irrespective of gender, race, class, age, size or ability - develop, grow, and change both physically and intellectually throughout our lives. And at any point in our lives, personal self-esteem, identity, and well-being are deeply affected by our ability to function in our physical surroundings with a sense of comfort, independence, and control.
Gender Related…
From Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction
“But it is also the case that to talk of gender is to take a political position but one which is more sympathetic to difference.”
“…The presence of individuals in space in turn determines its nature. For example, the entry of a stranger may change a private area into a public one; similarly, `the Court is where the king is.' Thus, people define space.”
“If space is an ordering principle, so, of course, is gender. These principles are often also linked, though not always in the same way. For the Irish, south is associated with women. In contrast, Chinese see the south as male and the north as female.”
Daphne Spain “…proposes that working women and men come into daily contact with one another very infrequently. Further, women's jobs can be classified as `open floor,' but men's jobs are more likely to be `closed-door.'
**This essay was about the spatial arrangement in the workplace and its gender-based segregation, but I still found it interesting and think that it might give some insight into our value system…
“…Space and place, spaces and places, and our sense of them are gendered through and through. Moreover they are gendered in a myriad different ways, which vary between cultures and over time. And this gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live.”
**This quote comes after the author has just recounted two situations. The first occurred when she was a child and can remember passing soccer fields that were full of men and feeling like she wasn't allowed there because she was a girl. The second was an instance where she was in an art museum with two male friends. The gallery predominantly showed paintings of naked women, and in viewing some of the paintings, the author felt very uncomfortable.
“As a class, women share the problematic status of politically or culturally colonized populations. Both are seen as passively transformed by forced modernization rather than appropriating modernity on their own and, through this appropriation, being able to change the world that is transforming them.”
“Perhaps the `disorder' of urban life does not so much disturb women. If this is so, it may be because they have not internalized as rigidly as men a need for over-rationalistic control and authoritarian order. The socialization of women renders them less dependent on duality and opposition; instead of setting nature against the city, the find nature in the city. For them, that invisible city, the `second city', the underworld of secret labyrinth, instead of being sinister or diseased as in the works of Charles Dickens and many of the writers we will encounter later on, is an Aladdin's cave of riches. Yet at the same time, it is a place of danger for women. Prostitutes and prostitution recur continually in the discussion of urban life, until it almost seems as though to be a woman - an individual, not part of a family or kin group - in the city, is to become a prostitute - a public woman.”
“ For bourgeois women, going into town mingling with crowds of mixed social composition was not only frightening because it became increasingly unfamiliar, but because it was morally dangerous. It has been argued that to maintain one's respectability, closely identified with femininity, meant not exposing oneself in public. The public was officially the realm of and for men; for women to enter it entailed unforeseen risks.”
