 Thank you all for coming tonight. I'm Ellen Lupton. I'm Senior Curator of Contemporary Design here at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and we are so happy to welcome you. We have been closed. Now we are open. We have brand new exhibitions for you to see. And amazing programs. Check our website every week. We have just amazing things happening, and I'm so glad to share with you tonight what we're doing. I curated an exhibition upstairs called Beautiful Users, which introduces the public to the idea of design as a human-centered activity. And we look at a range of projects and how designers have transformed from looking at an ideal or normative user to a more inclusive and individual approach to who it is that uses the stuff that designers make. So tonight we're going to talk about universal design. And what I'm going to do is briefly introduce our panelists. And I'm going to turn it over then to Amy Hamre, who will be our moderator tonight. So Amy Hamre is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, where they study the intersections of design, disability, and knowledge production. Their current book project, Building Access, Universal Design, Technoscience, and the Politics of Knowledge studies the history of universal design in the US through the lenses of feminist disability theories and philosophies of technology. So cool. Amy works in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies, feminist science studies, and the history and philosophy of science and technology. Wow. So great. Amy is going to start our event with an overview of universal design, looking at where it came from and how the conversation is changing today. And then each of our panelists will come up and talk for 10 minutes about what they're doing in this field, new stuff happening in this field. So the first of those panelists is John Marshall. He is Co-Founder and Design Director at MAP, a London-based creative consultancy whose clients include some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Virgin Atlantic, Google, and Panasonic. John graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1996 and then worked at leading design firms, Pentagram, and Ross Lovegrove. He joined Barbara Osgerby as studio director in 2003, and he co-founded MAP in 2012. And his work with everybody is included in beautiful users. In fact, all of our panelists have projects on view upstairs. Jean Franco Zakai is President and Chief Designed Officer of Continuum, the Global Design Innovation Consultancy behind some products you may have heard of like the Reebok Pump and P&G's Swiffer. Continuum has worked with Herman Miller Company to develop new patient care rooms, exam rooms, and the NALA Patient Chair. The Metaform Transgenerational Personal Hygiene System, which has been featured here at Cooper Hewitt and other places, facilitates independence for people with disabilities and their extended families. Ree Noragard recently became director at Quirky, a community-powered innovation company. Previously, Ree launched OMHU, a boutique designer and manufacturer of award-winning mobility books. She also served as creative director at Frog, Organic, R&L Group, and Smart Design in New York City. And finally, Scott Summit founded Be Spoke Innovations in 2010 based on 20 years of experience and research and design and additive fabrication, which you make also called 3D printing. Be Spoke believes that an integrated approach connecting design, medicine, and technology stands to offer meaningful and above all individualized solutions to address a wide variety of human needs. Be Spoke was acquired by 3D Systems in May of 2012, and Summit now leads the company's industrial design efforts. And he has many products on view here at Cooper Hewitt right now, as do all of you great designers. So with no further ado, I'm going to pass the event on to Amy to get things started. How's my volume? Well, welcome, everyone. Thank you all for coming. And thanks to Ellen and the Cooper Hewitt for organizing this amazing panel. I'm just going to talk a little bit about the history of universal design in the United States today. Universal design is typically something that we talk about as the idea that buildings and products should be accessible by design for as many people as possible. I won't be talking today about any specific examples of objects or spaces if you would like to see some of them. There are many in this museum. There's also very good historical work that you can read about this. What I'm going to talk about instead is the concept of universal design, the methods that come out of it, and communities of practice that have formed around it. So groups of people who over a period of time came together to come up with this idea and to innovate it. It's especially exciting that this is happening here at the Cooper Hewitt because this has really been a place that has driven the concept and theory of universal design in very interesting and innovative ways, primarily under the leadership of a previous director, Diane Pilgrim, who did a lot of work both to make the museum building itself accessible and to deepen the collections to include more objects in human-centered design, the types of objects that you would see upstairs in the beautiful users exhibit, which I hope that everyone will go to. In 1998, this museum actually had the first exhibit of universal design products and was part of asking questions about what universal design should mean moving forward. And so what I'm going to do is go backwards in history and tell you a little bit about how we got to 1998 and then talk about where we can go from here. One other thing I want to mention really briefly is that the Smithsonian Institution itself, of which this museum is a part, is a federal institution that has been bound by disability access laws since the late 1960s. And because of that, it has actually innovated the movement towards universal design in really significant ways because it has so many museums and so many visitors. And so beginning in the 1990s, the Smithsonian actually worked to implement universal design principles into a kind of set of guidelines for all of its museums. And I think there are like 15 or 18 museums maybe. And so this place is kind of part of the largest network of places where you can actually observe and interact with universal design features. And you probably wouldn't know that they're there because they're all built in. The people who were in charge of that, Jan Majewski and Beth Zebarth, are people who have run the accessibility office and have done a lot of work in this. And I just want to read something from a letter in 1993 that Jan Majewski wrote to David McFadden, who was then at the Cooper Hewitt as a curator. And he was the one who was helping to curate the Unlimited by Design exhibit that came up in 1998. She wrote, I think that two important points to convey in the Smithsonian Access Guidelines are that accessible universal design is not inherently ugly. And the people with disabilities should be first, not last, in the audiences that designers consider when designing environments, programs, and publications. If it works for people with disabilities, it'll work for many others. But the reverse is not always true. It might also be interesting to look at instances of design developed for people with disabilities becoming designed for everyone. And the reason I read this is that I think it really reveals a lot of the experimentation around the concept of universal design that has taken place in our very recent history, that this isn't always a stable concept. It's always changing, and it includes a lot of different components. And so I'll talk about what some of those are and where they've come from. The first time the term universal design appeared in print was in 1985 when the disabled North Carolinian architect and industrial designer Ron Mace wrote an article entitled Universal Design, Barrier-Free Environments for Everyone, in which he argued that design should keep all users in mind, not just the average, and not just users that are labeled as exceptional. And so the ideas that came out of this were one, that design should have multiple use, that there should be multiple users for an object or a space, but also that things should be flexible and be able to be used in different ways. That these designs should have access built into them rather than needing changes later. And that this has added value for everyone who's involved. But words like universal design and phrases like all users or everyone should also give us a little bit of pause, because so often these ways of talking about users actually flatten the differences between them instead of appreciating the differences that are significant or that would require different access needs. There's actually nothing about terms like universal or all users that ensures that designers will remain accountable to disabled users. And there's also nothing in these terms that recognizes the political demands of marginalized users. And the way that marginalized users, such as disabled people, have contributed to the history of design, particularly in the case of universal design. So why do we even use these terms? This is something that people have asked pretty much during the entire history of universal design and other terms have been proposed, such as design for all or transgenerational design, design for aging. But the reason why we use these terms and why the word universal is in the title is because disabled people have been denied access to membership in the universal historically. And because these terms have been ways that designers and advocates have talked about the relationship between disability and design for decades. Since after World War II when there were, there was kind of an influx of a lot of disabled veterans into US society, as well as moving out of institutions and nursing homes by civilians with disabilities. Since that time, designers have been thinking about users, whether average or non-average, in different ways. In the late 40s there were actually two competing paradigms for what today we call user-centered design. The first was taking place within industrial design and you can see a lot of examples of this in beautiful users actually. The industrial designer Henry Dreyfus came up with the idea of human engineering or what now we might call ergonomics. But it was frequently for the average person and he saw human variation as a resource for design but didn't really have a consciousness about disability and so disability was entering into design elsewhere in architecture of all places. There was a movement towards barrier-free design which was the idea of removing architectural barriers for disabled people and desegregating society to undo the work of institutionalization and things like that. And barrier-free design actually saw disability as a resource for design rather than a deficit and it saw disabled people as resourceful designers themselves and so there are a lot of examples in the historian Bess Williamson has written about this. Examples in the 1940s and 50s of, for instance, people with polio who do these kinds of DIY hacks in their houses or invent different technologies themselves and their resourcefulness as part of this process of removing barriers in society. It's actually ironic that these parallel tracks are happening at the same time because today it is industrial design that pays a lot more attention to disability and in architecture disability tends to kind of still be marginalized and associated with kind of minimum standards and legal codes. Some of the things that took place in the early days of barrier-free design and these are really old scans of very old pictures so I'll try to describe what's happening in them, different kinds of wheelchair ramps, hydraulic lifts for public transportation. These are images from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign which was one of the first accessible campuses in the United States beginning in the late 1940s and into the 50s and 60s. There's still a program there. And in barrier-free design as you can see in these pictures buildings and products were integrated so architecture and product design had to happen together because you needed access and both for it to be meaningful and from the beginning the emphasis was that this was beneficial for all users not just disabled users. And so part of the research that went into the first barrier-free design standards actually reported that at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign they had developed these shower seats for people to use for instance like for a wheelchair user to transfer into the shower and they were made of really good materials but they broke very quickly and when they investigated to see why they were breaking quickly they found out that all of the non-disabled students were using these shower seats too and so it was exceeding the amount of use that was necessary and so from that they gleaned that many of these technologies actually are beneficial to a wider user base. The language of all users appears again in 1967 when the Rehabilitation Services Administration wrote a report in support of a bill that came to be known as the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 was the first law that said that public buildings like federal buildings had to be accessible and this report which was called Design for All Americans made the argument that disabled and elderly people were citizens and so they deserved access to desegregated spaces. What was interesting about this though is that even though it was happening at the height of the civil rights movement there was really no consideration of racial integration and a lot of these laws and so even the way that the user was constructed and barrier-free design was very white and it was not until much later that for instance the Federal Housing Act was amended to include disability to look at some of those intersections between racial segregation and disability segregation. The Architectural Barriers Act was poorly enforced and so was another law, Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act which would have made the bill enforceable and so disability activists famously protested, they conducted some of the longest sit-ins in US history and forced the federal government to enforce these laws. This is a sit-in in Washington DC, they were also once in San Francisco and while they were waiting for those laws to be enforced what they did was they invented curb cuts and this is a really good example of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of disabled people as designers. Curb cuts are the technology that we most commonly use to talk about universal design and the idea is that wheelchair users can use them, bicyclists, people pushing strollers and people walking and people getting around in all sorts of other ways. But where these come from and there's kind of like a lot of lore about this in disability rights movement history, the lore is that disabled people would go out under dark of night with sledgehammers and bust up the sidewalks and pour cement curb cuts in their place just so that they could get around and so there's actually a piece of one of these curb cuts from a Denver Adapt protest from 1978 in the Smithsonian in Washington DC which is what I'm showing here and there are also examples of this that happened in Berkeley and in other places. So you kind of get a sense of this social movement activity towards barrier-free design and the idea that people were innovating different ways of having built environments so that everyone could use them. In the 1980s, the design professions started to kind of catch up with all of this and there were specific organizations that were kind of integrating more of a disability consciousness, the Industrial Design Society of America, the Environmental Design Research Association, as well as design schools began teaching about disability. So people like Elaine Ostroff in Boston, Ray Lifshe in San Francisco at the University of California, Berkeley began to kind of look to what they called user experts or the idea that disabled users could also be experts in the design process. And then communities of practice began to form around what would later be called universal design and these were necessarily interdisciplinary communities and they were kind of united around a shared investment in disability access but bringing different perspectives together. And so in 1982, there was a conference called Designed Environments for All People that happened at actually in New York City and this was where Ronald Mace got the idea for universal design and it was partially through talking to all these people and I'm about to list some people who may or may not mean anything to some of you but I'll just tell you. So the disabled politician Max Cleland before he was a senator, Hale Zukis who was a leader of the independent living movement in Berkeley and allegedly one of the curb cut smashers. Victor Papanek, just as he was finishing his book, Design for the Human Scale. Architects Lawrence Halprin, Charles Moore and Stanley Tigerman. Barrier free design experts. I already mentioned Ron Mace. Also other people you may have heard of, John Salmon, Gunnar Dibwad, James Bostrom, Paulie Welch, Ray Livchet and Patricia Moore and then some social scientists who are kind of leaders in this field of accessibility today, Gary Moore, John Zeisel and Craig Zimmering. So this was 1982, it was kind of like a meeting of the minds all these people got together and said, how can we actually make barrier free design kind of successful in the built environment? And this is reportedly where Mace came up with his idea, which he wrote about in 1985. So fast forward a few years to 1990, this is when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. And this was landmark legislation, civil rights legislation, but one of the things that it did was that it made barrier free design basically synonymous with meeting kind of minimal code standards and people started to use other language to talk about what barrier free design had meant for the 40 years up until then. And the language that they sometimes used for that was universal design. Sometimes universal design also meant anything that was outside of the law. Sometimes it meant anything that had built in accessibility. Sometimes it meant design for aging. That's still a really common thing. And very frequently it meant any kind of design that had nothing to do with disability at all, which is really strange and unfortunate. And the argument was that disability design was either what you'd enforced through a code or something that was inherently about quote unquote special needs. And that universal design was about good design for everyone. I think that this was kind of where things started to get a little weird because what that definition encouraged was this idea of disability as a hindrance to design rather than a resource. And so disability kind of became a liability for marketing or for what could be counted as good design. And that's still a really dominant conception of universal design today that I think is very problematic and that I think that we should kind of, I do my historical work to show why this is not the case because I think that it's more important to think about disability as a resource and to remember the history of disabled designers and activists who contributed to this idea. So between 95 and 97, a group of designers and experts came up with the seven principles of universal design to kind of remedy some of this problem with not everyone really knowing what universal design meant or agreeing. And what they did was they sort of combined all of these ideas. So they emphasized equity and flexibility which are kind of more disability inclusive. They also talked about things like tolerance for error, allowing multiple mediums and sources of information and providing adequate space for users to interact which are kind of things that come from where the industrial design or human factors side. And this is basically the most often cited document in universal design and it's been contested a lot but it's pretty much the one that everyone always talked about. And what it did was it turned universal design into a process and a methodology rather than a single unified concept by recognizing that it was not a unified concept. And so that is kind of like the dominant paradigm of universal design and I'll just show one last thing which is where I think universal design is going in some ways and what it should be doing kind of going forward. This is a picture from the Blouson Spinal Cord Center in Vancouver, BC which is a completely universally designed building down to every feature but it's primary aesthetic and functional feature is this ramp that goes to every floor of the building and it's decorated and it's in a glass atrium and it kind of proclaims the existence of disability and celebrates it as a resource in the design of the building itself rather than trying to hide it and trying to distance the concept from disability. So I'll just leave that there for us to think about and we'll have our other speakers now, thank you. Thank you Amy. So my name is John Marshall. I'm director of a design studio in London called MAP and we're in Shortich which is the east part of London and we do industrial design with a I think user centered approach based on a lot of research and strategy and there's something quite unique about our studio. We're part of a group that includes Barbaroscopy which is a furniture studio and also Universal Design Studio which is an architecture practice and the name is really, really confusing in the context of today's event formed over 10 years ago before the term was widely used in the UK at least. So what I really love about being in this studio with all these different scales of things going on at the same time is the kind of focus on user or people. So you have furniture designers working alongside product designers where product designers are pushing millimetres around on products that you hold in your hand next to them you've got architects with big chunks of material thinking about environments which you pass through and I think this kind of cross-pollination between the different scales of product design furniture design and architecture is something that I find very exciting about our studio and very interesting and brings us all the time back to the user. So the sort of projects that we do at MAP are things like a meal tray for Virgin Atlantic that was a better experience for the passenger but also was lightweight and therefore saved energy. An exhibition for Google which was about the power of the internet so we created some experiments which enabled people to interact with objects in the museum but also online over the internet so musical instrument you could play or a robot which could draw your face in sand and is actually one of these robots here in the museum. We also work with a lot of technology companies so for instance working with Yamaha on flexible speaker technology. And also we've done quite a number of projects with Panasonic and Panasonic have a very multi-generational approach to design. A good example is this induction hob which in order to kind of communicate with the new technology of induction cooking uses these lights which are just around the area where the pans are put and that sort of is symbolic of the flame on a gas hob. And so that's a really good communication method to get across a kind of a new technology. The process we use as I said, I think it's very user focused and there are sort of four pillars to it in my opinion. First of all, research. So we like our designers to go out and do the research and largely speaking that means going into people's homes and talking to people about the products they use. The second thing is that before we start design we actually build stories or strategies which articulate in written form what we intend to do and what a measure of success would be. And sort of true to the stereotype it involves a lot of post-it notes. The third thing is that we, although we're a consultancy we tend to co-create most of our work with our clients in the room together so there's a lot of meetings and workshops. And the fourth thing is that we, we're always prototyping and making models of our work and we use those to test the design with users as part of the process. So I've actually picked out two projects which I think are good examples of that process I've just articulated. And also I think there are elements of universal design in both of them. The first one is the Cano Computer Kit. So this is a computer kit aimed at kids and you can build a computer and then learn to code using this kit. So the process was very much as I described earlier so there's a lot of meetings with the client and this was a startup so we were actually starting from scratch really. And we also spent a lot of time observing the target group who were kids in this case. And we also tried in this instance to combine together the product design and the packaging as a single unified experience through using models and mock-ups to try to refine the design and test those with the user. So a couple of things that I think came out of it that were quite interesting or insights that were interesting. One was when we were watching the kids play with a kit we noticed how much they used colour to organise what they were doing. So in the final design we used a lot of coloured cables and we kind of codified what the cables did and that runs right through the product and the packaging and also into the instructions. And the second thing is that it was really interesting watching kids as young as six using a trackpad. So they didn't seem to be able to do click and drag which I don't know if you're familiar with using a trackpad but it's something you use a lot to sort of drag and drop things in a computer environment. And so since kids were not able to do that we actually designed the keyboard with these separate these two grey buttons on the bottom left separate left and right mouse buttons so that enabled kids really young even those without much dexterity to manipulate things on the computer. So I think those kind of points on this project were quite interesting for us and they are I think quite universal design processes. The second project I wanted to talk about and as I mentioned there's some pieces from this in the exhibition here is Sabi Space. So Sabi is actually an interesting brand set up by a guy called Asaf Wand about three years ago specifically to target baby boomers. And the first range that was created were these really sort of super slick pill organisers. So we were approached to do a follow-up range which is called Sabi Space and really the only restriction on us or the only brief was to do something that still appealed to this core demographic of baby boomers but was just for the home anywhere in the home. And we have quite a young team map so one of the first things we did is we kind of dug into all the available desk research on baby boomers and tried to kind of understand what the issues were for this target group. We also did a lot of workshops with the client and we also spoke to a lot of experts in this field and what we arrived at was an idea around agility. So the things that seemed to be issues were around reaching, eyesight and memory. So a typical product that we thought we might design would be a sort of a reaching stick to help grab things from a high bookshelf. When we went out and actually spoke to the users as part of our home visit research we found that they didn't really like that idea of emotional connection with these agility enhancers like these reaching sticks. And instead what we found is that these baby boomers they just thought they were young so they didn't really realise they were aging and why not? So however well we can design something a kind of agility enhancer they weren't going to buy it. So instead the themes that came up were around organisation, neatness solving simple problems and very much in the bathroom actually. So we refocused our attention onto the bathroom and we took these three sort of key ideas one was to design things that were not stigmatising so it didn't look like they were for aging people. The second one was to empower people to use products to change simple things in their daily life and the third one was just around quick fixes, simple things. So there's kind of no better quick fix than sticky tape and actually the range that we came up with is all based on this 3M tape which is on a little peg that you can stick onto the wall and then you can use that to put on the wall really quickly in any room but primarily in the bathroom a range of functional devices. So things that are quite decorative in a way like a rail for a hook rail or things that are about self, so mirrors things that are about organisation like a shower caddy and some things that were more about function for instance, moving a toilet paper holder if it's in the wrong position and you have to twist around is really hard in a bathroom with a tiled wall but with this adhesive pad it can be done really easily. So the range looks really nice and kind of universal and appeals to old and young alike but one of the things we wanted to do is include at least one of these agility enhancer type products in the range so this round kind of halo like blue thing that's on the wall is actually, it's a grab rail to help people get in and out of the bath so one thing we notice with bathroom is that a lot of accidents happen when people step in and out of the bath and we wanted to solve that as well as solving all the other things that I mentioned. So we were searching for a kind of format that was non-stigmatising but also worked really well for its core functionality of being able to grab or lean on and we did that through a range of models, phone models and just testing them using video to kind of communicate this back to the client. The one that we sort of went with in the end was the round shape and it was mostly because it offers different ways to grab around it so if you're a couple, one's tall and one's short you can grab it in two different places and also the curved shape itself is quite easy to grab if you have arthritis so partly this was done through testing and partly it was done through discussion with experts and I think above all it meets this sort of no stigma approach that we wanted so you can throw a towel on it and it doesn't really look like a grab rail. So one final thing I just wanted to mention and it's a kind of personal passion of mine is about how packaging can significantly improve products so you can design a great product but if you can't get into the packaging it's massively frustrating so on this range in particular we took care with the packaging to create very clear simple packaging that was easy to open and we even added things like a template to help you put it on the wall with a little spirit level to make sure you got those beautiful hanging rails straight and we also took a lot of care on the instructions so instructions for products typically are not done by the core design team but in this case we brought them into our scope and took a lot of care to make sure that they were very clear so that's the Saabi space range I think just as a final note you know with those two projects which are for growth companies universal design is not only good for the user but I think for our clients it's a kind of business imperative so with that I'll hand over to Jean Franco Well thank you very much so I took the theme very literally about whether it's myth or reality and I really think that it's a little bit of both that it's really about design for all and all is a very broad distribution of people and in some cases we make things better for many more people and in some cases making things better for making more for more people creates problems for others a friend of mine, Jane Thompson once said I love to quote her she said that most problems are caused by solutions and I remember meeting an individual who was part of the drafting of the Americans with Disabilities aid who was blind and he mentioned that curb cuts actually created a problem for blind people because they can't detect where the sad walk ends and the street begins of course that's been taken care of with some textures and so forth that allows people to understand that transition but I think there are a lot of it's a very broad brush that we talk about when we talk about design for a universal design and there are many kinds of disabilities there are physical disabilities there are intellectual disabilities and in some ways there are also cultural and racial disabilities because we create them so I think that the idea of looking at areas of common desires for mobility for example among a very broad and diverse group of people is absolutely valid but I think it's also important to think about designing for one because the needs of people at the extreme ends of the ability spectrum are very very different so I think we have to be nuanced in what we do now I think designing things that are easier for all just makes sense and a number of years ago it's now 16 or 17 years ago we came up with the Swiffer for Proctor and Gamble so that's just about cleaning and we realized that using a lot of water and detergent to clean the floor it was both messy and unproductive because most of what's on the floor is dust and the best way to pick it up is with static electricity and a simple disposable piece of paper and that's easier for everybody and when the product was introduced my sister who had a small grandchild at the time was delighted because her grandchild started cleaning the floor for her because it was kind of fun so doing things that are non-stigmatizing and fun actually is a really good objective removing barriers is also a good objective so 27 years ago we started a project for Herman Miller called Metaform and part of that and Metaform for us was all about personal hygiene how people can be independent in their own homes and personal hygiene becomes really important and that's really where we learned and the speaker spoke about the importance of not stigmatizing people because we were looking at a broad range of older users and we realized that even though they needed help many of the tools that were available like grab bars and so forth were not present in their bathrooms and my own father at the time was aging and his ability was decreasing rapidly and he didn't want to hear about any of that but he would love to go to a supermarket and push a shopping cart around because there was no stigma to that never you would use a walker however so anyway so we designed a number of components to a bathroom including this barrier free drain that would remove water without requiring any kind of a curb and where the covers could go into dishwasher because that would be easier to maintain but we also want to think about mass optimization because we have the technology allows us to do things that can adjust themselves for individual needs and that also allows us to overcome some of the stigma issues because we're thinking about older people with grandchildren why should we stigmatize either one of those so as part of the metaphor we designed things like these modules that would fit into a wall and where for example a sink with storage, lighting, mirrors would all adjust at the touch of a button or better yet would adjust because a ceiling as you entered the room measured you and everything would appear at the proper height and a toilet that would also adjust to different heights and why is that important? Well because we're really designed as human beings to go in the bushes and squat and when we do that it requires less effort but it's not very decorous and most westerners are not comfortable doing that but also we have a problem because men miss the mark so you'd like to have a toilet much higher for certain functions and children who are just learning to potty train would like to have a toilet that's much lower so they don't have to fear falling in so we designed this toilet that would rotate into the wall where it would be clean because nobody likes to clean the toilet but you could sit at it on it at any height, you could transfer from a wheelchair you could sit at a very high height and ride it down to a semi-squat position to facilitate elimination but we also realized as we developed more solutions that sometimes solutions that disappear are the very best because there's stigma even in overcoming diseases like diabetes so this is a wearable disposable insulin pump which was developed about 7 or 8 years ago for a startup company in Massachusetts and the whole idea was to be able to dispense insulin over a constant period controllable based on someone's activity and what they've eaten with a remote controller so you clean a part on the body and apply the pump and then it automatically inserts a cannula and then dispenses insulin over a 3-day period and the great thing about this was that up until this time a lot of type 1 diabetics that tend to be children would not be using insulin pumps and the reason they were using it was thought to be because they would often have infections because of the exterior lines would get snagged as they play and you know the area would get dirty and an infection would ensue but we really thought that that was only part of the problem part of the problem, yes, children want to play but they also want to look just like other children so they don't want to be stigmatized so the idea of a pump under your clothes you could wear when you're sleeping and it would just go away seemed like a natural and very desirable solution so this product was developed, we developed it over a 2 or 3-year period in 3 years it was gotten FDA approval and I got an email from a 14-year-old girl in India saying how the pump really had made diabetes that would be a very important part of her life so that was extremely rewarding and sometimes I think designing for everybody doesn't mean reducing effort or eliminating effort sometimes it means calibrating effort so this is a chair that we did for Herman Miller for healthcare and it's a chair that's designed for patient rooms and we realized that the function of a chair in a patient room is not just for people to sit in and maybe sleep in but it's to facilitate them getting in and out of the chair as easily and as frequently as possible but also with some effort because that ability to regain mobility after you've had an operation or any kind of medical procedure is extremely important so the chair seat is slightly higher when you approach it you have room to put your feet behind your knees which gives you mechanical advantage because we want people to use their own muscle power at that point the arms are forward so you can feel where they are and you can sit down because we also wanted to not make necessary calling a nurse to guide you into the chair and then when you sit down and you release a lever in the arms the arm rest which prior to that was actually up leaning forward to greet you let you know that you're in the right position would guide you into a semi-reclined position where you can very comfortably sleep but when you wanted to get up it would put a little bit of pressure moving forward the seat would rise a little bit and would help you to get up but I think there's also another dimension of accessibility which is economic accessibility so we tend to think about solutions that are wonderful solutions but they require a tremendous amount of financial capital to access and this wheelchair that you see on the lower image was actually designed by a postgraduate student at MIT to help people like you see in the left picture in developing world in areas that are very difficult to traverse if you're in a wheelchair and the whole idea of the wheelchair is it uses bicycle components that are very inexpensive it eliminates the derailleur which is the most expensive part of a bicycle and it uses these levers so that if you put your hands up high in the lever you can exert a lot of force down low you get a lot of speed so that a local artisan can well frame apply the bicycle components and you have a wheelchair that would allow someone to actually get to work the only problem is that this wheelchair costs about $200 and for many people $200 is a year's income so we designed the wheelchair at the top which is exactly the same principle but it really leverages the leverage of the arms to create an off-road wheelchair that outperforms almost any other wheelchair that's out there potentially for a fraction of the cost but it's priced competitively with the idea that the sale of each one of those would pay for three of the ones below again to provide accessibility to more people that would not have the financial wherewithal to have it and sometimes we also I think need to design things that will change constantly because new abilities and new disabilities are happening all the time this is a small example of that but this is another project for Herman Miller which is a compass patient room an exam room and it's all based on components that can be mounted to a wall and can be repositioned and adjusted as new technology presents itself or different levels of acuity in a community presents themselves I think the same notion in the design of a home can also have a great deal of merit and I think there are many realities one thing that I'm thinking a lot about these days is intellectual disability and the interesting thing about intellectual disability is not just about people who have a very very low IQ but if we look at manufacturing jobs they're often require skill sets that require being able to program a computer for example so if half of the population in the world has an IQ of 100 or below they're going to have a very hard time finding gainful employment you know how can we make an environment a society of places that engage people productively give them the kind of dignity that they want to be able to work productively and navigate a community productively you know even though they may have an IQ of 90 95, 80, 85 you know that's part of the spectrum of disability so thank you hello so I took the universal design in the future part to heart but in order to do that I'm just going to go back a little bit first I was very lucky to start my career working on the then small team with smart design that designed the original line of products for a now well known company called OXO it was a formative experience for me and the team what we learned and then acted upon was that by looking at the outer edges of ability we can make a much better experience for everyone in the middle which is sort of another way of looking at universal design if you're familiar with the products it's now a very extensive line of products in the market and some of the prototypes from that original line are available for view also here in the museum so that's what I took with me when I many years later launched with two other women a company that set out to change the way we think and feel about disability and aging through design, nothing less and we did that by launching with a cane, a cane is obvious because no one wants one yet it's a very useful object for people who use one and need it and a fabulous item for a number of people who could use it but would not for all the reasons that we've discussed earlier so that was our mission we made a design deliberately based on modes of transportation we knew we all had positive feelings about namely using the bicycle as a material and a skateboard and a hiking boot and put them back together in the cane so that the feeling and the joy of movement would still be there in an object although a person has a very different view of the world when walking with a cane on the other side you see an Amhu cane power user I don't know this woman it's a photograph from the streets of New York and you can see what happens when you actually enjoy using an object for moving around it's a very safe, comfortable product but it's also in this case a personal accessory and it's something that people still write to me and say to me I could not get my mom to use a cane or I didn't want one when I was recovering but if I could have one of those ones and the nice turquoise one then I would do it and design has that ability to change how we think and feel about a certain situation in life or about a whole category of products and this one, durable medical equipment is one where there's lots of opportunity and that was exciting to work in then I wanted to talk a little bit about the opportunities of what universal design can mean in the future as we're entering a time when we can customize equipment things that are close to the bodies we can 3D print them, we can scan we can make better fits and we can design for the one but I think that the area of shared spaces and public space is still an enormous opportunity and this is a project that I didn't have anything to do with at all but I thought you would enjoy seeing it it is the world's most accessible office building is what they call it it is the headquarters of the Association of People with Disabilities and it's in Copenhagen, it's about two years old I got a fabulous tour from the director of that association, she's in an electric wheelchair with very limited mobility and she's able to get anywhere in that building by herself without any help so you can see just by paying attention to acoustics, creating open spaces where you can have intimate conversations providing guidance using color as coding that's very bright both on the floor and on the walls around you can make it really easy for people to move around the indication that you reach floor included into the handrail and you can get the elevator by using your foot and not your hands which seems very obvious it's actually kind of handy if you have your arms full as well and as the day progressed in that building I started doing the same thing if you use your foot the elevator knows to go local because it knows that you can't obviously push the button when you go on the inside things like that we keep seeing them they seem obvious when they're all put together when a group of people work together on requirements that actually fulfill the needs of in this case a very large group of people with various kinds of disabilities then you have again you see results that are beneficial and really super pleasant to use for everyone else okay, fast forward to I follow quirky for a number of years I'm very interested in how the process of design can evolve and I joined them recently and I'm working with them now so quirky is a community powered invention company or platform if you will you can submit an idea for an invention, for a new product most of the ideas that we get based on real life problems that people have we vote as a community we have over a million members every week on Thursday night actually and if a product is voted in then quirky the company will work with the inventor to design develop produce and market this product so it changes how designers and users can work together and I find that fascinating so an inventor will have access to a community of potential like-minded people or users that can give feedback along the process and they have access to design and engineering resources and we on the inside have access to a community of people that we can work with in real time on the designs that we are developing so this notion of designing for versus with really comes to life in this setting and it's pretty exciting it also means that invention can happen anywhere this is one of our inventors her name is Maria she has four kids under the age of six and was shopping for wireless speakers didn't find anything she liked submitted an idea to us and became an inventor with a product on the market this is her product and these are the lotters one of the things that happened at quirky was that the ratio of concepts ideas for smart products app-enabled products to let's say home and gardening products really changed in the past couple of years so in response to that wink a company was established so that all the inventions all the products that people make that are app-enabled can play together wink is an app and a platform that allows your nest GE and other products to work together seamlessly so that's another role I think of access to design is kind of like the universal kit that's shown upstairs is that wink is this part that allows all these different types of inventions to work together and that's another role for designers and people who are interested in accessibility to really focus on is to make systems paths and environments that are usable for people imagine that in healthcare that would be amazing so is to make home automation accessible to as many people as possible and in doing that we've made a series of small movies with people who you may not expect are in the forefront of home automation and here are the lotters we have wink and we love it and we're the beginning of something big wink easy to read he turns it up to make it warmer, I turn it down when he's not looking I love this process it goes on automatically when you work it with the iPhone that's wonderful because we could be sitting and watching television we've got to turn out lights, they won't yell at me we want the 43 years to be 44 years I know keep your hands on my thumb I'll do all of you just think I'm Irving I'm Maxine we're the lotters I live in Delray Beach, Florida we Hi, so my area of interest is in those in-betweener parts of design where you can't really detect if a product is mass produced or custom made if it's craft, if it's fine art just where it falls if it starts defying the silos and defying the categorization I think that's where things really start to get interesting with design and I think especially this holds true when you're talking about a medical product because these are the ones that we interact with when we are at our most vulnerable when we actually have to use something because we don't want to we don't have a choice and we would love it if that product actually respected us in return also the bar is very low there because it's traditionally been designed by medical personnel without regard for design or fashion or the human beyond the most utilitarian perspective very often and so they're also very limited by the means of creation in this case the traditional fiberglass wrap for exo-sternal stabilization all of a sudden you change up some of the tools that you can use to fabricate these and you change everything so for example when you throw in 3D scanning you have fairly new but now made very convenient and haptic manipulation it's a tool that traditionally was beyond the realm of most people now it's very easy all of a sudden the cast can look like a very different thing in this case Anais here refused to give us the cast back long after she had been healed because she kind of fell in love with it so that she could put one in the dishwasher every night and wake to a somewhat hygienic clean warm fresh cast that doesn't happen in fracture stabilization she had a broken arm or these two girls who both broke their tibias falling down the stairs they played in the sand every day and they took a bath and the sand evacuated you can't do that with a fiberglass cast where the first rule is it can never get wet so all of a sudden this changes up the rules and the quality of life for everybody is about October with the diagnosis that I had a torn TFCC ligament in my wrist this would have been a real pain otherwise except we did what any self-respecting nerd would do which is you 3D scan my arm design the parts based on not getting in the way of circulation or muscles or bony prominences design it, modify it a few times and then 3D print the brace and we can probably safely say that this is the best brace that any human has ever received for post-operative stabilization I'm able to, the first thing I did when I came out of surgery was I took a shower you can't do that with a normal brace I go in for regular acupuncture I apply heat and cold directly to the surgical site I can I have quality of life this has never been given to somebody going through post-operative surgery recovery same applies to carpal tunnel major problem with the data world most people think that if you buy the brace you will be healed and that's actually not in fact true, you actually have to wear the brace and that's what people don't do they don't wear it because it's an awful miserable experience the human being was never considered in the process but what happens if you 3D scan the arm design it, let the person choose the type of brace in the fenestration pattern that best suits their fashion sense and their lifestyle and 3D print something that is tactily transparent to them that's invisible to the lifestyle and comfortable they will wear it more if they will wear it more they will be healed and now you scale that up to scoliosis which is especially difficult because the means of production and this mentality that is devoid of fashion and that human squishy human component leads to this this is state of the art this is the best money can buy in scoliosis treatment today the entire treatment hinges on the idea that you can get an 8 year old girl to do something she's absolutely determined not to do which is to wear this horrible thing what could possibly go wrong so what we did instead was to attack the real problem which is the desirability of the product we made it something that was invisible under clothing so we could afford her some discretion we made it 40% open area so her skin would breathe so that she had her creature comforts during recovery but most importantly we let her choose from a library of patterns that turned it into a fashion item that she chose instead of a medical object that was imposed upon her that little switch meant that she was going to wear the brace more if she wears it more she will be healed that's the way this compliance based medicine works we actually debuted these in Paris a few months ago at the Louvre and we had some interest in the medicine value of scoliosis treatment but we had far far more interest in the fashion we had many requests for people asking for if we could make them corsets and bodices this way we haven't gone down that path we're just not set up to or the next generation that we're working on here which is fully dynamic which allows the body full range of motion during treatment we haven't proven this out yet but if we can it means that scoliosis treatment will be a slight inconvenience but not the kind of miserable condition that it currently is my main focus has for many years been on prosthetic limbs in the sense that it's this odd hybrid of a collection of assembled mass produced metal products and this carbon and fiberglass socket which is very ill juxtaposed against the grace and the beauty of the human form it's a prosthetic device but there are prosthetic devices around us all the time we just don't see them that way because they were designed and not simply engineered so when you start thinking about this approach and you can 3D scan the person and capture their unique form their uniqueness their sense of flow of their body what their shape is their contours their lifestyle you can start creating something that really captures a lot more about them it represents who they are as a person what is their lifestyle how they outwardly project themselves how they describe themselves it becomes something that is much more a part of their life than simply something that keeps them from falling over this woman asked if we could do chrome fishnet stockings and we did she's an actress in Hollywood now she buys her clothes to match her leg a boston bombing victim was asking if we could do something that was akin to jewelry that's exactly what we're hoping to do we're hoping to start blurring those distinctions between what is a medical product and what is something that has more of the connotation of fashion and beauty and that really augments the body and accentuates it really showcases it as a thing really celebrates the condition instead of either trying to hide it or disguise it or treat it as anything else now developing countries it's especially big challenge because access to medicine is really the gating factor so what we're hoping to do is one day transform this into something that is entirely designed by script and by algorithm where the doctor is removed from the equation because that doctor will not exist in much of the world where they're most needed we can create this by 3d scanning we all have 3d scanner in our pocket now with the smart phone running the script up into the cloud where it gets parsed and created a functional leg can be printed and something that is not only body symmetric so it starts to reduce the stigma it also something that looks beautiful is again to reduce some of the social stigma that is sometimes as debilitating as anything else for people who have lost limbs in much of the world the leg can be fully functional if not more functional than your typical leg and the dividend here is that you can take advantage of all of the different opportunities available now which is that you can create an application which scales as rapidly around the world as a video game with very very minimal upfront equipment because your smart phone becomes essentially your hospital in your pocket and the 3d printing allows the kind of versatility that lets you create something that is otherwise very custom very complex very nuanced but the 3d printer doesn't care it simply prints any data that comes its way so you can create a very sophisticated otherwise price prohibitive leg for significantly less cost than the traditional leg might be now this is still in development it has years to go but I see this as ultimately the way we will see prosthetic limbs in the future through much of the world and one final project that we've worked on has been where the group called exobionics that one day we see that this will be augmented or replaced in many cases for some by this which is an exoskeletal robot which helps people who are paraplegic or hemiplegic to walk right now it's in its nascent stages but we can see the pathway and this is fairly clear ultimately Amanda here who is paraplegic from the L6 down she was asking us well could we end up with something that was more like this something that was an intelligent active robotic fabric and that itself is not too far fetched of an idea because you could actually create a cellular matrix of distributed power essentially swarming robots that become her secondary skin and power her through walking short of that which we can't do immediately we were able to begin with a 3D scan of her body and that essentially then co-created her into the equation we captured her standing and sitting and then the idea was to really downplay the military component of that robot and that company is military half a civilian and really accentuate the fluidity and the flow of her lines and how that robot works we actually added 3D printed sterling silver has a little bit of robot bling and we really want to capture her form she's an athlete and she said she just wants to feel beautiful when she's wearing the robot around town and so we also try to give a suggestion of not only the breathability that it offers but the musculature that the robot is replacing with hers that's no longer active this is the final result a year and a half ago we debuted it on stage in Budapest in front of the government and a number of other people absolutely unsure of whether or not it would work or whether she would tumble right there on stage but she was able to walk and she fell in love with the new variations of this robot and we're now looking at how the next generations of this robot may work now remember she's paralyzed from the waist down she has no sensation from her navel downward and so when you're talking about the combination and the opportunities offered by the combining 3D scanning haptic manipulation, 3D printing it's pretty boundless and we can see that there's a pretty exciting trajectory ahead and it really doesn't just relate to people like Amanda here it relates to all of us because we really have to consider that everyone here is, was, or will be disabled thanks is this one on? okay yes so we're gonna take questions from the audience now Simi and is there someone to oh there you go there's the microphone thank you hi thank you all for this I'd like to take just a moment to tell any powers that be here at the Cooper Hewitt that as a wheelchair user I encountered three or four obstacles between entering the museum and at this moment which I would like to share with you some of them by design and some of them in practice that I was disappointed to see in this museum so at some point maybe we can convey that thank you for your presentation and Amy thank you so much for centering disability it is so rarely centered in these conversations you talked a lot more about architecture and spaces the other presenters and one of the things you pointed out is that there is a disconnect between both the process and the focus of the designers of objects and that of architects I experience a great deal of what I label as aggression of from the design of buildings and public spaces the segregation and the separation of disabled people from the general public and I wonder if the panelists and you as well might respond to what I see I mean your process you talk about collaboration and that's fantastic I don't see that happening in architecture and I wonder if any of you designers could address what the difference might be between you and what architects do can I answer? so I'm both an architect although most of what I do is products but I think part of the problem is that architecture and the way architecture is planned and developed is usually not really at the human scale not really usually at the human scale it's you know historically it was planned in elevation in sections and until it was built it couldn't be experienced now increasingly with and I'm going to be very critical so I hope no one is offended but with the advent of computer aided design and the technologies associated with that you can build almost anything that you can design that doesn't mean you design it means you build things that iconic that may brand a city or a site but it very little attention is paid to the to the way human experience moving through that space and I think that's a valid criticism of architecture and there are many architects that don't want to do that but there often are forced to do that also by the sort of reality of developers I think what we try to do as product designers though is try to look at how we can create kits of parts that help to facilitate dealing with those points of contact or develop solutions that allow people to overcome barriers that can't be designed away such as I don't know sand on a beach but I do think that a lot more collaboration needs to happen not just between industrial designers interior designers and architects but city planners and politicians and people who design legislation any other questions I see I'm picking up on your point about legislators and policy because I think that going across disciplines okay let me put it a different way I'm a parent of a 26 year old who's always used to work here and there's an assumption that there's curb cuts they're not there 90% of the time and there's also the funding issue and there's also the design and planning of entitlements and budgets and what I think happens that's very discouraging is we know there are good products out there we can't get them we can't get the budgets and the people in the field that should be making modifications more easily more easily obtained because insurance policies on durable goods have reduced and it seems to me harder than ever before to do what you've explained and that's with a lot of advocacy and I had wanted to bring attention to the fact that the plans that states are offering which supposedly are customized and individualized the design of that plan I think has gone back in time and does not reflect inclusion it's all in the rhetoric but very difficult to implement so I just wanted to pick up on that I did have a specific question on the wheelchair that's in the museum I was curious about the front wheel and the position of that because the radius of how that turns takes up a great deal of space and obviously for what you've designed it for it's probably less of an issue but if a person had a wheelchair similar to that here getting through a doorway turning the space, the bathroom space or whatever would be very difficult and I wonder if you've addressed that at all because the motion of not having for many people with physical disabilities who can't manipulate the wheels that's a marvelous advantage the long frontal wheel is a problem if that makes sense the wheelchair was designed primarily to overcome obstacles in the environment, in general environment it also does navigate in tight spaces in fact the levers come off and it's quite narrow to allow it to go through fairly narrow spaces because the objective was to allow people to be able to work in any environment so it does turn in a surprisingly tight way the wheelchair that we designed so the higher end wheelchair was really designed for outdoor use it's really for people who want to go out into the wild in difficult terrain we'll take the next two questions together and then open it up to the panel to answer I'd like to thank all of you I think all of your designs are tremendous and thank you for coming this evening and sharing your products with us the gentleman in the middle, what's your name? Scott Summit I think what you're doing is tremendous as we had talked about as Amy had talked about in the beginning a lot of time regarding their disability and that happens with every generation people might look at someone in a wheelchair and that's already fading now but maybe 10 20 years ago you would say well you belong in a nursing home or something because they had a wheelchair so a lot of times people would almost wish that their wheelchair would vanish that they could still be the same person obviously they need to use a wheelchair but that people wouldn't see that in them a lot of the products that you've created or that you've shown this evening allow a lot of people to heal without feeling embarrassed because they're injured so I definitely commend you for what you're doing Amy I thank you for explaining about the concept of the ADA and universal design in general and how it helps people and that's why I wanted to allude to Ms. Simulinton's question in regards to architecture when it comes to designing I don't think we should allow a computer to design for humans obviously it's a human who's controlling the computer to design similar to all of what you've created you created your designs with the aid of a computer and it helped assist you but I think if we have modern invention currently such as a beach if a wheelchair user wants to go to a beach there are inventions now such as mats or beach wheelchairs that allow people to go across the beach be with their families it's about inclusion so I think when it comes to architectural design if they follow the basic rules of the ADA it allows for everyone to use it so when we're talking about universal design I think it comes to the designer to kind of think outside the box to say hey if this is universally designed everyone and we follow the rules that have been said everyone can use it wheelchair users especially because of their mobility impairments but I think that a lot of times going forward when we have new construction everyone should follow that universal design guideline because no one would lose similar to all of the products that you've created it's for use for everyone so that everyone can enjoy and that even comes down to some of the buildings that we go to and I think we need to raise above the level of oh well it's not that accessible we couldn't do that it's just behind the person who's putting it together to do it but I definitely want to commend all of you for your designs and your inventions I hope that you continue to invent more and to help people to be themselves thank you for that and then we have one more question and then we'll answer and then unfortunately we have to wrap up also because the interpreters need to leave in a couple of minutes but thank you all so much for your questions so one more right here hi like the previous people I want to say this was a really excellent presentation I didn't know what to expect but you've covered quite a great area I do a blog on older women's issues and that's because I'm having older women's issues myself several years ago I had foot surgery and I needed a cane and it was so boring I went to Staples and I bought polka dots adhesive polka dots and put it on my cane and two years ago I broke my wrist and then the the brace was so boring that I bought a sock with Marilyn Monroe on it and I cut off the end and I put that over the brace so that I was looking at it so all of this really resonates with me and I appreciate what you're doing I have one further issue which is scoliosis I was diagnosed as a kid but I didn't have it treated so I still have it today and most of my life it hasn't really been an issue but as you get older you lose your bone density and you start to get dowagers blah blah blah and so I'm thinking the reason I came here tonight actually was because of Scott Summit's design for the young people with scoliosis I understand that braces don't work for people of my age but I just want to everybody's ear I don't know if anything is being done in this area but I don't know could I be a guinea pig? could I be a consultant? if anybody plans on doing anything about this I can answer that we actually don't have an age limit one way or another to be active during the pubescent period of skeletal maturity but for an overall comfort or to combat lordosis that can be done at any age to improve comfort and we have been working with people of all ages for that so it certainly is not an age-defined treatment thank you thanks everyone applause and thanks again to Ellen for organizing the panel and we'll all be here if folks want to talk to us individually I think so thanks for coming