A study to depict challenges and opportunities building industry professionals face when designing inclusive and accessible buildings

ABSTRACT

Inclusive Design has been widely promoted in the fields of product, engineering, and user experience design. Despite the educational efforts made by scientists, practitioners, and institutions to raise awareness about accessibility and inclusion, Inclusive Design has not been widely embraced in architectural design practice, where it is often associated with design for disability. This multidisciplinary study, spanning behavioural science, ergonomics, and the social sciences of architecture, explores the challenges architectural design practitioners face when designing inclusively, and identifies opportunities to promote the adoption of Inclusive Design. The results of a questionnaire completed by 114 architectural design practitioners underscore the lack of client awareness of the benefits of inclusive design, highlight the important role practitioners can play in advocating for Inclusive Design, and emphasize the need to develop practices and tools that enhance the design and post-design phases of buildings to ensure inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive design
• accessibility
• architectural design
• toolkit
• equity
• diversity

Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement N°846284. The authors kindly thank all participants for their availability and for sharing their insights and valuable advice. Prof. Matteo Zallio conducted the research, analysed data, wrote the introduction, rationale and study design, results and discussion, depicting opportunities sections, co-wrote tmplications and future work section and developed the infographics and tables. Prof. P. John Clarkson co-wrote implications and future work section and supervised the study. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of interest statement

In accordance with the policy of Taylor & Francis and my ethical obligations as a researcher, I am reporting that I received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement N°846284 that may be affected by the research reported in the enclosed paper. I have disclosed these interests fully to Taylor & Francis, and I have in place an approved plan for managing any potential conflicts arising from that involvement.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, MZ, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Marie Curie.