| Autor: |
Clarkson, John, Langdon, Patrick, Robinson, Peter, Bichard, J., Hanson, J., Greed, C. |
| Zdroj: |
Designing Accessible Technology; 2006, p227-236, 10p |
| Abstrakt: |
The accessible toilet has become symbolic of access provision for people with disabilities. However, for many disabled people, even the accessible toilet has a number of design limitations. This can be seen to derive from standardised guidelines developed from a ‘special needs' perspective, which continues to separate the disabled body from the able body, by means of a tight design specification that has not been developed from multiple user consultation. This is an essential point, as away from home toilets can be considered one aspect of the built environment that potentially everyone will use at one time or another. In addition, as our audit study of Clerkenwell away from home toilet provision has shown, the lack of standardisation within the design and fitting of the accessible toilet has meant that many disabled people cannot count on the facility being fully accessible to them. For many people, even after the implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act, poor design still forces them to ‘make do' with the level of provision that is currently on offer. Users of public toilets are rarely consulted about their design requirements, yet user perceptions and social conventions would seem to have a large part to play in whether or not people appreciate or reject the different types of provision that are currently available. This is the crux of the matter. The inclusive design of an ‘away from home' toilet superficially presents itself as a mere technical affair, where successful design can be reduced to a matter of getting the specification right. In reality, wherever the designer attempts to intervene in the design process, the inclusive design of public toilets unveils fundamental social processes that not only regulate relationships between different user groups but also cross the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: |
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