 Alright, first I just want to start off, we try to start off most of our programs with a land acknowledgement, so we acknowledge that the town of Arlington is located on the ancestral lands of the Massachusetts tribe, the tribe of the indigenous people from whom the colony, province, and commonwealth have taken their name. We pay our respect to the ancestral bloodline of the Massachusetts tribes and their descendants who still inhabit historic Massachusetts territories today. Welcome everybody, this is our first ART event of the season, Arlington Reads Together was lodged in 2002 as a way to bring Arlington together through literature. The goal is to address issues, understand differences, and create connections through shared experiences. This year's selection being human was picked for all those reasons and because of the inspirational life story of Miss Human. Judy Human lived an exceptional 75 years. Passing away this weekend on March 4th, she was a true hero fighting against the injustice of the world and her work in establishing and protecting disability rights leaves a beautiful legacy. One that will continue to inspire and inform generations of activists. We are all saddened by her sudden passing but we hope to honor her legacy by spreading her message. I also must thank our sponsors for ART so we couldn't do these Arlington Reads Together program without the Arlington Library Foundation, the Friends of the Robbins Library, the Diversity Task Group of Envision Arlington, the Arlington Disability Commission, Arlington Public Schools, and the Arlington Human Rights Commission. And without further ado, we have Val Reflector and she's going to be presenting on what is inclusive design. She's the Executive Director of the Institute of Human-Centered Design, a leader in the global movement for inclusive design since the 90s. Good evening everybody. Lovely to be here. Obviously, when we made this arrangement, we didn't expect that the woman who has brought this wonderful effort together wouldn't any longer be with us, but I wanted to take a minute to give Judy the first, less than two minutes, but this is the end of something that we did and of course involved Judy in 2020, the 30th anniversary of the ADA. We were concerned that it was time to tell the story about what disability is today versus trotting out the same old stories from 30 years ago because disability has changed fundamentally in America. And one of the things that we have failed to promote, acknowledge, talk about is that for many people, disability is a life reality, but the language of disability and the adoption of an identity as a person with a disability does not work. And many of those people are people of color where an identity based understanding of disability has simply failed. And we really wanted to do a story that brought forward the reality that today we are looking at high proportions of people of color with disabilities and a very high proportion of older people, you'll see some of those stats I'll share with you, but that we don't talk about it. And it's partly because if we don't talk about it and people don't self-identify, it ends up always being kind of an identity related phenomenon. It is far greater than that. And the issues like the social determinants of health are terribly important to understand in their relationship to disability. And for us, it was a chance to basically say we really have to look at this. We did a documentary and a research paper and put that out there. And we brought Judy into the mix, of course, because of her credibility as the mother, the grandmother, the dowager queen of the disability rights movement. There was none like her. It is an unrivaled identity. And Judy was somebody who, you know, as a young woman who grew up in Brooklyn with parents who were refugees, their parents, their parents both died in the Holocaust. She was, you know, as American as it gets. And she and her cohorts at that moment in time learned the movement from the women's rights movement and the gay rights movement. At that point, it was really about identity. It was pride in identity. And that has worked brilliantly for a lot of people. What we have to understand today is it worked brilliantly for a lot of people, and we can't take that away. And it's important to sustain and nurture. But it is also true we have to understand that many people with disabilities do not identify in that way and have just as equal rights as the people who do. This issue of race and economic status remains a challenge for us to try to understand better. And just as a couple of examples, we don't count people with disabilities in our correction system. We just don't count them at all nationally. We also don't count people who are unhoused relative to disability. Both populations have enormous proportions of people with disabilities. They are also overrepresented by people of color, and we haven't talked about it. So Judy understood those things, and this is a big priority of our organization to try to establish a correction and find out ways to talk about it that are respectful of culturally preferred ways. So we have a five-year research project underway, a participatory action research project to go right into communities of color in southern New England, the most diverse communities, and learn about what people are comfortable talking about, what people are comfortable talking about relative to their own disability. And to find out how poorly information has been designed to tell them about their rights under the ADA, and that has been a painfully embarrassing situation. We run the New England ADA Center and have since 1996. We have been testing paragraph by paragraph. What does this mean to you? We're finding out it means nothing. We're finding out that people, for whom English is the second language, people who have limited education, a lot of people do not relate to specialized language and legalese. And so we have a big challenge because everything that is out there has been translated from those original complex documents and are of no use to people, even if they're in their own language. So lots to do. Let me share Judy's few words here at the close of this piece. Let me. Come to find and understand that I've had so many challenges and struggles in my life and that life is in fear, but that I am the master of my destiny. I believe that more people are really understanding that we're talking about the concept of universal design. By universal design, I don't mean just the physical environment, but universality of needs that people have and not looking at needs of disabled people as being something that's always different from the general population. From a disability perspective, our numbers going up also means that we have a larger population of people to draw on who can be speaking as disabled individuals about what they may need now to support themselves. So the changing reality of disability in America is the changing reality of America. At the same time, because of the emergency and urgency of COVID, I really want to make sure that as we move forward, disability in a more prominent way will be included in our activities to help advance our society coming out of this tragedy. In memory of our friend and colleague, Alan R. Meyers, a leader in understanding disability in relation to public health. Probably too many slides, but I'll go through quickly and get another bite at them. But what design can do? It's a perspective on inclusive design, and I'll tell you a little bit about Judy and I traveling together, probably in 18, testing ordinary folks whether they preferred inclusive or universal. And they actually preferred inclusive, but Judy in the tape uses universal, which is totally fine. And I'll just use another giant human here. People know who Stephen Hawking is, and Stephen Hawking was just as irreverent and just as extraordinary as Judy. So we were all different. There's no such thing as a standard or run of the male human being, but we share the same human spirit. What is important is that we have the ability to create just brilliant stuff. And this is, you know, not from a designer. This is from an economist, Herbert Simon, a very important economist of the 20th century. Everyone who designs, who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situation into preferred ones. We don't have to be trained in design to undertake this work. This is a way of thinking. This is a posture in the world and how we relate to it. So though I have no particular truck with the economists, I think this is an extraordinarily important message for our work. And who are we? So we're a 45-year-old international design and education nonprofit, and we were founded in Boston in 1978. That was the year that Judy's success, actually, to get regulations for Section 504 of the Rehab Act resulted in actual implementation. So it was a very important moment, so that was one of our first responsibilities. We were always about the role of design and social equity. And originally about children and adults with disabilities, it quickly expanded to include aging, and now we really are looking at ability, age, culture, gender, and economic status, and really the intersection of all of those things. We recently moved, like just about everybody else, in COVID. We were downtown by North Station for 17 years, but last year we moved to SOA, Art and Design District in the South End. Please let us know if you'd ever like to come visit. We have a library we love to share with people. It has books that don't exist anywhere else, and we welcome visitors. These are two points I do want to take a minute to talk about. These are the things that really underlie everything that we do, and it is that idea that design matters. It is not fluff. It profoundly influences our sense of self and our sense of confidence, comfort, and control about ourselves and our relationship to the world. And the other thing that is absolutely bedrock conviction is that design matters most at the edge of the spectrum, and if it works there, it works better for everyone. There is this assumption that if it works there, it's not going to be good for anybody else. We have not found that to be true. And we look a lot more like a design firm than a non-profit. We do no fundraisers. We never send out a solicitation for money. We've never done, well, not in my time, it's 25 years, we've never done a gala. We actually earn our money by consulting and design services. And we also run the New England ADA Center, but mostly we're earning it. So we do education and training, mission-driven consulting and design services. We actually did your ADA transition plan for the town of Arlington. We've just been asked if we would do something I bet the people in this room think would be pretty special, which is reviewing wayfinding and signage in town hall. So we're hoping to be able to do that. We have to give them a proposal, but we'll see. We'd very much like to. And we do research with real people. We believe that you can't understand what design needs to be unless you are talking to the people at the edges who know what they need. And they show you what you need if you actually engage people to participate directly. So for example, we work a great deal in museums. We work with, of all things, the MBTA. We work with museums all over the world. We work with curiously since 2020. We work with a great many Fortune 100 companies who all of a sudden think the idea of inclusive design in the workplace is a swell notion. Pretty amazing. How long it will last, I can't tell you, but right now there's tremendous interest. Run the New England ADA Center. They don't do the consulting and design services, but it is an invaluable free service available to everyone. And it is just like nine more spread across the country geographically oriented. This is one of the toughest things is to get people to understand the ordinariness of disability. It is so not about them over there. It's really about the human condition. Global prevalence of disability, one in seven people on the planet. Mostly this is absurdly inaccurate because great swaths of the planet don't count. They don't count chronic illness as a disability. They don't count aging as a disability. My colleagues in Japan where I work a lot stop counting disability at 60 because it's the retirement age. I don't know what you are after 60, but you are no longer a person with a disability. Not counted. So they have an absurdly low disability rate only because they don't count them. But we're talking about big numbers. We're talking about a bigger number in the United States partly because we just think about it differently. Largest minority in the U.S., 40% of people 65 and over. And I would wager and jump in here if I'm sure people have an opinion. The overwhelming majority of people 65 and over with any number of functional limitations that we might categorize as disability do not raise their hand when asked. It just doesn't happen. I mean I often use my dad who was blind. He was deaf. He ate through a stomach tube. He used a cane. And he insisted, honey, I am not a man with a disability. I have never used a wheelchair. So it didn't matter. His long roster of things, it didn't count. And I had a slim influence in that sphere. We also count the spectrum of brain-based disabilities and that's a very important piece of the story today. In many countries, sadly, do not. No matter how much there's international policy on that. Global aging can't get away from this reality and what this means for us in thinking about the design of the world. Because this reality of global aging at a rate that has never existed in human history is not feasible in any economy in the world without people being independent and contributing longer than ever. Because we don't have systems that will take care of people. It's just not viable unless we provide a very different priority on places people can live all of their lives and not be driven out of their homes because they can't manage them anymore. In the United States, the story is quite dramatic. We are not an outlier and we're looking at 98 million people by 2060. That's a massive portion of the population. Our ability to ignore that is phenomenal but it is extremely dangerous. And just for those of us who are older in one of these categories, this is just a pitch I make to designers that I work with, especially young ones, please don't think that everybody over 65 is exactly the same right until the end of life. You really have to be thinking in a fairly nuanced way. The young old, the old, the oldest old, but to recognize that's not simple. Too many words here to go through it. I just want to make the point here that in 2008, Congress actually made an amendment to the ADA to clarify the broad intent of the original legislation about who was included because it had been shaved back over and over again by court decisions. And these major bodily functions are included. So things like cancer, autoimmune diseases that we often just don't think about, circulatory, respiratory, all of that counts. This is just one of our illustrations of the changing reality. And it shrank. It was a big umbrella in 1990 and then it shrank back because of court cases. And now it is back to what it should be, 43 million in 1990, we're up to 61 million. I would wager that this is actually no longer very accurate because long COVID, President Biden pointed out, is covered under the ADA. And that's a big number. Here in Massachusetts, I wanted to make the point that we, like all six of the New England states, have as our primary reason for disability what CDC calls cognition. This is actually the spectrum of brain-based reasons for disability. And this is mental health, it's neurodiversity, it's brain injury. It's also those chronic conditions like Parkinson's that have not just a brain impact, but may have a brain impact. It's an extraordinarily dominant reality. It's been the dominant reason for disability among children and youth for decades. Of course, now it is the dominant reason for adults. And we are still giving it short shrift. I want to shout out for young adults who have never bought into disparity and stigma of brain-based reasons for disability. They see it absolutely as equal. So important that we just recognize this. It is also important that we recognize that in this number, mobility, still number one nationally, the number two here, 10 times more people have trouble walking than use wheeled mobility. And we forget that. We forget to create design amenities in the environment that acknowledge that reality. If you have difficulty walking, the likelihood that you will go out if there are no benches on the street is slim to none. And it's not apparent. We don't see it. So I just wanted to make the point that we really need to be thinking about designing environments for the fact that we have enormous proportion of people who don't hear very well. And we keep designing environments that seem to poke them in the eye, like we don't really care. And we like a buzzy restaurant where you can't talk to one another. And we talk about vision. We're talking about a very small percentage of people who are literally blind. So that we have to really solve design problems of the environment, thinking about people with low vision. So the overwhelming majority of people, and of course, you are legally blind, I would wager, but you have a vision problem that is absolutely not blindness, or certainly not total blindness. And you have to design a world in which we've anticipated that diversity of sight, because that is a sweet spot to try to figure that out. And conditions are so different from person to person. I will tell you the one sweet spot on the amount of work that we've been doing for a long time on low vision. We are finding that many of the techniques that work, particularly in work and school, for people with low vision, are just as effective for people with a lot of brain-based conditions. Second bites at the apple, different formats of information, the use of task lighting, extraordinarily important for people with low vision, just as important for people with a lot of brain-based issues. There are sweet spots that can be pretty exciting once you start to see them. It can be terribly complicated, but we're really talking about physical sensory and brain-based reasons for functional limitation. And the general facts, for the most part, disability experience is a continuation of severity, from mild to significant. You may know that the leading cause of blindness in America, do you know what it is? You know, diabetic retinopathy. So how long does that take to happen? You know, that's decades, for the most part. And by the time you actually are really legally blind, you also don't have any sensation in your fingertips. You're never going to learn braille. And these are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about. And remember that we have epidemic rates of diabetes in black communities and in the Latino community. And they don't think of it as a disability. Non-apparent conditions are the norm. If I hear one more person at this point in my life tell me that they can spot someone with a disability and they'll do whatever they can to make it possible for them to have a good time. Forget it. Forget it. The ignorance of that makes me mad. Over one majority of disabilities are required over the course of life. And I think that's a really important thing to remember. It's part of why it's about us and not about them. You'll get there if you aren't there now. This is our publication. This is available for download and you can get to the YouTube video to watch the full documentary. This intersectionality is one of those words that sort of overused. I'm in a library with people who care about words and I'm sure intersectionality is in the category of innovation. Please spare me another articulation of either of those words. But there's a legitimate case to be made that we have to be paying attention here. And this is behind Judy in the slide. This is our depiction. So 26% of adults in the U.S. have a disability but it doesn't fall equally on everybody. So we have 40% of the non-Hispanic Indigenous community and I'm sorry to tell you that these are 2020 numbers and that 40% was exactly the same when the ADA passed in 1990. Hasn't budged a bit. And 25% black disability also hasn't budged a bit. That was one of the few data points we had in 1990. And then of course people 65 and every. We have poor data on the Asian community and the Latino community relative to disability. We have local studies, we have very poor national data in hoping that that might change. The head of the agency that funds all the ADA centers is on a campaign to make that happen. And accessibility, I don't want to take anything away from accessibility. Accessibility is absolutely critical. And as a person who's had the privilege of being all over the world working on these issues, I got to tell you nobody has the rigor of a system with real infrastructure that we do. You can buy your way out of accessibility responsibilities in some parts of the world. And in some places there's just no penalty for not doing it. There's no DOJ, Department of Justice, that's going to come and sue you. You can't file a complaint with the Department of Education. Basically you complain to the wind and I deeply value what we've done. I also just want to point out, and this is something we don't talk about much, accessibility under the ADA was built on top of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the 1964 Civil Rights Act was missing a critical element, design. You could extend rights to people of color without thinking about the role of design as a civil right. So this was the first time in the world that civil rights for design as a civil right was actually codified. So it's a big idea in my book and it's one we don't often talk about. And this is where we are, almost 33 years after the passage. An assumption because what are the standards focused on? What population do the standards focus on? It's like my father thought. It's people who use wheeled mobility. It's them over there, not us. There is no sharp line between us and them. Unfortunately people persist in thinking that. And unfortunately many of the people who think that are people with the responsibility for implementation of the law. So talk to architects and they are surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of people with disabilities do not use wheelchairs because they look at the standards as the ceiling, not the floor. And just how we want to have to do doesn't cut it. And I think that's part of what happened with the school. You know you had a situation here in Arlington and you can be fully compliant and fail to really meet the needs and preferences of all the people whose lives could be changed by anticipating what they bring to bear in an environment. So this is inclusive or universal design. We won't spend a lot of time on this but we are fortunate to have been among the pioneers in this movement. It was building from accessibility and partly building from accessibility. One of the things that became very clear very early is that a lot of people benefited who did not have a disability. There's only a few of you in the room that are old enough to remember like I do, we used to pick up our suitcases and walk down the street with them with a handle. We didn't have wheels on our suitcases, we didn't have curb cuts. It's just absurd how many things we've come to assume we can do because wheels can go so many places today that they couldn't in the 50s for example. These principles were developed in 1997, we were one of the five organizations, we were all US folks who developed these principles to sort of guide this movement. And they are the most ordinary principles of design, equitable, flexible, simple and intuitive, perceptible, tolerance for error. Now there's one we don't see often enough tolerance for error. Low physical effort, size and space for approach and use which are more familiar from accessibility. We have shifted our language to inclusive design and we began to do that in, it was 2017 we really made the shift. We're fine, we're Catholic in our taste, we can call it human centered design, we can call it inclusive, we can call it universal, we can call it designed for all which has often been a European preference. Our British colleagues have always called it since the 9 days inclusive design. But as human diversity is not celebrated but threatened, inclusive design more directly states a commitment to that. Inclusive design resonates with a wide audience who intuitively grasps the idea, inclusive, of course it means it's about everybody. And inclusive design more accurately communicates a continuous process of evolving ever more responsive solutions. I've been working with people, big corporations who are trying to figure out how do we accommodate a workforce that has a percentage of people who want to come back to work part time and they all have long COVID. You know what are the things we should be doing? You know we have to constantly be figuring out, I mean everybody's doing nap rooms, meditation rooms, that was unthinkable five years ago. It's just like what are you talking about? We don't need that, we can't afford that kind of real estate, they can now. And part of what we find exciting is that there is a global conversation that has been underway for over 20 years now from the World Health Organization which changed the definition of disability in 2021. They released this in, I'm sorry, 2001 and it is the contextual definition and this is a big deal. So here you can see this is global policy. Functional limitation is a universal human experience. It was they kind of woke up and said oh well it's not about them over there. It's really about if you live long enough you're going to experience this. And of course the alternative to living long enough if there aren't many people who think dying young is a great opportunity. So all of us would prefer to live as long as we can. So we are likely to have changes in function. Equity between mental and physical reasons for functional limitation. And I've had the privilege of traveling in countries where this is not acceptable. It is public policy at the federal level but at the community level this is still very very difficult. I live in Boston, even in our town. There are people who are recent immigrants and if they have a child with a disability they are hiding them in their apartments or homes. Because they are deeply ashamed and believe it is somehow a bad reflection on the family. We are still dealing with those things today in 2023. This is a reality much more intense than that in other parts of the world. This is in Bangkok just before COVID. I am in a school of architecture and an architect takes me aside and says you know that is karma. That is not a disability. It's like oh my god this is a faculty member who is explaining to me that children with significant disabilities are indications of family bad karma. That was not very long ago. We have to remember that that is still the world we live in. The focus on the role of context. It's like okay wait a minute what is that about? It basically means regardless of functional ability what becomes disabling about functional ability is really at the intersection of the person and the environment. It's the stairs where you didn't notice the ramp in front of the library. It's the fact that there is no place to sit on the street so you can't actually get your own groceries. It's the inability to participate in class because you've only got one way to participate and get the information you need to participate. Our context, the physical context, the information, the communication and God knows the attitudinal context of our lives is really where disability happens. That is where the bad stuff happens. And all of that can be changed. That's what's so thrilling about this definition that we're looking at context is what people make. That's what designed us. We make that context and we can make it differently if we're thinking straight. They called for inclusive design or universal design as the most promising framework. It was a great gift of saying we've got to start thinking about this. We've got to have a sense of urgency in a world that is changing dramatically and where the evidence of more functional limitation in broader swaths of the population demands that we find an economically viable way to make that possible. Design is much more economically possible than human caring, which is kind of the alternative. If you've ever had to hire people to care for someone who is extremely functionally impaired, good luck. Good luck. Even in our very fortunate part of the world, I went through 12 agencies trying to hire private pay home health care workers and found not a one in Boston, Massachusetts. And it's much worse in other parts of the country. Much worse. We do not have the capacity to have human carers pick up when people can no longer take care of themselves. We've got to figure out in every way where can design supplement what we can do with physical caring. Is that surprising that it's difficult to find any workers? Believe me, if we didn't have immigrants, we would be up a creep. Start counting how many people you see who look like they are original Americans in the next assisted living program you visit. I deal with one that's close to my home and 92% of their staff are from Haiti. It is one of the most prestigious assisted living programs in the city. If anything changed about that immigration status, they couldn't stay open. Using user expert. We engage what people we call user experts. You, sir, are a user expert. You have lived life figuring out how to work with your eye limitations. That is a quality of expertise that is precious for designing. I trust you agree. And in order to create facilitating environments, we're talking way beyond barrier removal here. We're talking about how to create a world that really makes people feel whole and like part of the community. This is contextual inquiry. Real people in real environments. Everybody is paid for their time. And we have over 400 people in greater Boston. We have 125 in Washington where our lab is in partnership with the Smithsonian. We learn so much from this process. And it is also the fuel that keeps us going because we get these insights about what works that in many ways are cost neutral. They cost nothing. But if we just tinker with things a little bit, if we approach something in a slightly different way, all of a sudden it works better. And this is invaluable information. You're never going to get a 25-year-old designer imagining what it might be like to be an 80-year-old woman with multiple chronic conditions. Because they do that every day and they're not very good at it. You've got to learn from the people who have been there. These are some of our user experts. And a few illustrations. Let me just walk you through a few examples. What do these principles look like in practice? Equitable use. We admire and love to work in cultural settings partly because people tend to want to raise the bar in there. They very seldom say, just tell me what I have to do. They want to do it better. They want to go beyond. And this is Sarenan's Arch in St. Louis. And this, from the moment of the conception, they're going to reinvent this space, make it a place that everybody can enjoy. They were talking about state-of-the-art universal or inclusive design. This I added in this because plain language is actually one of the things where finding can make a difference in the barrier on information design. Are you aware that the city of Cambridge has undertaken a policy change to not issue any digital or print products that are not plain language and accessible? As far as I know, they're the first city in the country to do it. Can you say that again? Policy that none of their publications, print or digital, will be other than plain language and accessible. It's remarkable because it is not easy to do plain language. And it is one of the things that we have been learning from in working with people of color in relation to their rights under the ADA and finding out that our own information fails the plain language task and is inscrutable. One of the things that we do a lot of is actually get people to understand the role of tactile experience. And this is a partnership we did with the Museum of Science and Industry in Paris. It's a tactile book of Da Vinci's drawings. And it's quite astonishing. The woman who did it was the world-leading expert. It was her 26th tactile book. She herself was legally blind. Unfortunately, it was her last book. But if anybody is ever interested in looking at it, please come and visit us. And if it is of interest to have it in the library, we're also happy to make it available. And just a reminder, equitable use, pedestal tables are not equitable. Pedestal tables don't work for people who are using a rollator or a wheelchair or pushing a stroller under the table. It's a barrier. And having a mix, you don't have to have all four-legged tables. But you've got to think about the fact that you're going to have different kinds of people. That happened to be the Getty Museum in LA. Flexible. Who wouldn't want, you know, flexibility. This is a project of ours. Anybody been to the Paralympic and Olympic Museum in Colorado? It's in Colorado Springs. This is a really interesting project because we were partners on the exhibit and everybody agreed that we needed to come up with something that was really unusual because the Paralympians were all over how exciting it was that they were equal partners in this museum. And so working with a firm in Manchester, England, came up with a way for every visitor who wanted to have a tailored experience. If they had site limitations, if they had hearing limitations in particular, or brain-based issues. There was an opportunity when you got your ticket to basically identify what you wanted in your experience in the museum. If you wanted audio description, if you wanted ASL, if you wanted open captioning. And every time you approached an exhibit with your RFID card from your ticket, it would flip into what you needed. It's kind of amazing. And it was seamless. No big deal. And it didn't require that you have a special Tuesday at 9 in the morning, but you went when everybody else did. It was a pretty great experience. The Sit-Stand Desk, flexible use. The Sit-Stand Desk has kind of seized the American imagination since COVID, partly because we often have to share desks now in our workplaces. And we've actually had the opportunity to work with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts when they moved from Fenway into the Huntington Avenue location that they've been in for some years. They'd spent two years testing people on what did they like this. And they had an overwhelming support, so instead of having a couple of them, everybody had a Sit-Stand Desk. You don't have to make it go up and down if you don't want to, but you can. And it is far healthier to do so. This is a library story right down the road. This is Mass Ave, or not Rest Ave, I guess it's Memorial Dive in Cambridge. This is the Hayden Library at MIT. And the librarians ran this job and they put out a call for proposals that basically said, we want you to design a library for a population with an epidemic of anxiety. And they did, to the best of your ability. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's got a load of good ideas. Among the things that they found in talking to students was that students wanted to avoid having to step up and cross the room and go up to a highly visible information desk. So they broke the information desk into multiple satellite information desks and it worked much better for students, just as an example. Small things like choice of cubicle, this looks like a shower curtain, but it gives you visual privacy that meant a lot to students. Simple and intuitive use. Can we please stop making the gender choices in toilet rooms so complicated? You know, have you been to the ICA? What the heck? We've done testing there with user experts. They know it's an issue. But you should not have to study whether this is a toilet. It should be readily available that this is a toilet. And then we have the example on the far right. You really have to read a paragraph. And just to test your fortitude, it's in brass. So you put your nose right up to it and you're thinking, what the heck? While the law requires gender binary restroom signs, we welcome you to use the restroom that most closely aligns with your gender identity or gender expression. Gender binary restroom is available to your left. By that point you've wet your pants. We did testing at a very high-profile cultural institution in New York City recently where I took that picture. We were testing with 15 people with lived experience of disability. In order to tell them finally, we've been telling them for a year and a half, this signage will not work. You cannot have quirky icons as the way for people to find toilets and elevators and do not put the emergency information on a brass wall in brass. We had to test it with real people for them to believe us. Simple and intuitive use, if you really want to know what works for simple and intuitive use, spend the day with a child because they don't read instructions very well. This is a marvelous exhibit and this is a permanent Noah's Ark exhibit at the Skirball in Los Angeles. It's just a terrific exhibit, very interactive, and there's no signs anywhere because it's all for little kids. It's a great way to remind yourself that you can make things work through the kind of intuitive choices people make interacting with the environment. This is a reminder that I like to harangue architects about that there are no right angles on the human body. Humans actually respond very well to curves and the neuroscience explosion of the last 15 years has reinforced that reality, that our brains and our bodies take satisfaction from curves in the environment, that it gives us a sense of comfort and less anxiety. This is a charming project, it's in Portland, Oregon. It's a former church that now houses homeless families. People who are extremely vulnerable almost all have histories of trauma where it really mattered to get it right, perceptible information. In many cases we look at multi-sensory information and the Brits get a lot of things right and this is the Treasures Gallery at the National History Museum and it took 20 of their millions of objects in there and they brought them out because they were the favorite 20 objects and basically gave people a chance to kind of interact in an intimate way with them to be very close to them, to be able to touch a replica of them, to be able to read about them, but everything is multi-sensory and there's a quality of intimacy here. It is kept fairly dark, much of this is very valuable and needs to be protected and they did simple things like light the bottom, light the ways that you feel, okay, I make my way down here, even people with low vision or people with significant mental or cognitive limitations. This is another, this is partly because perception is often a place that multi-sensory answers are the way to go. This is a favorite of mine at the Louvre. This is actually the Islamic galleries in the top of the building and there are, I believe they're close to 30 of these tactile tables. So they have replicas of the object that is behind glass, of course, and it has even a breakdown on those tactile tables and they include Braille and they're multi-lingual, but they actually explain how things were made in a number of cases. Tolerance for error, this is one that we don't pay much attention to and this is one that I'm sure you could imagine why this might be useful. It is a requirement in some countries in much of Europe. It has been for decades and that's that you don't have a plate glass wall that doesn't indicate that it's there. If you've ever done a face plant in a glass wall you'll appreciate why glass manifestation might make some sense and a very important laudable foundation in New York did a massive renovation of their headquarters and did tons of glass walls. Basically, the glass curtain walls on the outside and on the inside they replicated that with vast expanses of glass and they did that in an area that was supposed to be a great idea that it was going to be serving nonprofits that they were going to open up more of their building to be of service to people who didn't have an easy place to go downtown for meetings and events. This lack of attention to plate glass as something that everybody doesn't see in the same way became a trial because people came to hate it. They felt disoriented, they felt the lack of privacy, it was commonplace for people to whack themselves in these glass walls. So just an example of some very tiny things. This is a very tiny thing again. The small amenity of a little cafe where I can charge my phone or my computer and I can hang my bag while I'm sitting here and I don't put it on the floor. You know, these are the tiny things. It's the tolerance for error. Give me a three inch peg in a lady's room in the airport and I will send you flowers. Do you want to put your bag down on a wet public toilet room? No, but these are the small things to think about. I don't know if you ever saw this in Japan. These are commonplace in Japan, very unusual in America. These are little chairs to take your kid out of a stroller or carriage and while you are using the toilet room put your child safely and securely into this little seat so that they are not crawling under the toilet room stall which isn't really a very sanitary thing to do. Low physical effort, we know this better from accessibility but I want to do a hats off to our own Museum of Fine Arts. They are at least as good as anybody in the world that I know and caring about seating in the Museum. It's quite extraordinary and they have the please be seated collection and this is craft furniture, fabulous, probably the best collection in America but they also thoughtfully create seating that is intended to reflect what is going on in that exhibit room. I just think they really need to be called out for their attention to something that's so small but really changes who goes to the Museum and who spends time. This is a low physical effort. This is a place, a real classic of a traditional Museum. This is the Worcester Museum of Art and they reinvented the entry. This entry had been closed for years because it was inaccessible and they were troubled by it. There's a really complicated round about the back way you could get in but they hired this firm to design a brand new way to get in that is actually an experience in and of itself. It's not just a ramp, it's really, you know, wow, what is this? This is so cool and it's been extremely popular. Low physical effort, you probably know about complete streets. This was the first of complete streets, this was in London and that idea that by changing how we think about design and the demarcation of who goes where you could reinvent how people experience the street. This was originally very problematic and there were demonstrations by people in England, in London who joined arms with people who were blind who really didn't like this and a number of changes were made. In England, children over the 50s and 60s collected milk containers. They counted milk caps and they were all like gathered up and collected and put into a bin in most towns and it was all to support service dogs, the training of service dogs. It was a national thing so that many people have an attitude towards blind, the blind experience in England is really different because of that because they had a visceral sense that I am contributing to blind experience by paying for the training of guide dogs. I can't tell you how many people have met over time who have this attitude coming from a childhood experience. Anyway, they modified this design because they met with the blind community and figured out what would work better, size and space for approach and use, just two more examples. Why in the United States we spend so much money on everything, can't we get a toilet room right? Why do we always look like we haven't slept in weeks in a public toilet room? Why is it such a miserable experience? This is Japan, this happens to be my friend, sometimes called the toilet queen of Japan. She's an architect and she has a firm in Tokyo with 13 or 14 architects and they only do public toilets and they do public toilets that anybody would be proud to use and happy to use because she is convinced in her crowded country that the few minutes of respite in a toilet room can get you through the day. I love it. Everything has good lighting, everything has a place to put a peg for your bag and a shelf for your toilet, whatever, just thoughtful. This is just an amusing one. This is our friends out in the Discovery Museum, you may know it, and it's a wonderful place and when they decided to do a tree house that they wanted for all children, they decided they were going to do it for two categories of children and those who use wheelchairs and those who are blind. And we were part of the team helping them to do it and we advised them that that was kind of missing the boat. It was good to do that but that was way short of what was needed. So in the end they did a two-story tree house and there are all kinds of features that work for kids who use chairs and need to make the transition into the experience of the tree house either in the lower level or the upper level and there's lots of opportunities for kids that are blind or low vision. But one of the largest populations of kids are kids with brain-based issues and they're needed to be away for those kids to have choice to be able to play with other kids and then to pull away. So that under part of the tree house is really designed for those kids and it was designed with those kids to figure out what would make them happy which would make them feel like they could go here and not be overwhelmed. So just another example of what we need to think about. Last point. I think we're in a really pivotal moment and it's partly because of COVID. It's just if you're going to upset the entire world you've got to change the thing differently. And I think it's the old Winston Churchill don't ever waste a crisis and I think we must really hold on to the crisis of COVID and recognize it's a chance to change the world for the better. Focus on the all important opportunity to change the human context. We have this opportunity. I mean we were talking about a public building that you know it's been there for a long time and it is a slap in the face for a lot of people and it's got to be better in order to sort of shift to that idea of not just bear or move but how about facilitating the sense of welcome and experience in that building. Just a reminder, this is not a just tell me what I have to do. This is really energizing and creative to really think about a world that will support people for all of their days. In our office we have a quote by a wonderful designer. He worked for Human Scale, the office furniture company. Why design if it doesn't change the human condition? And another colleague of ours, our old office had quotes in seven languages of down over 100 feet of window down by North Station. And one of those quotes was from a guy who was a professor at RISD and he said design for your lifetime, not your prime time. Now these are the things that this is a challenge but it's a worthy challenge and it can be as satisfying and deeply creative as anything that you do. And that's you know, I'll leave you with that.