Authors: 
Matteo Zallio, Senior Research Fellow - University of Cambridge | Department of Engineering
P. John Clarkson, Professor - University of Cambridge | Department of Engineering.

(Note: opinions in the articles are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the EU).
 

Introduction

Designing buildings and environments that accommodate the needs and desires of a wide variety of people according to Inclusive Design (ID) principles has become an emerging and urgent priority. The design urgency was initially focused on design for disability, borne out of the difficulties faced by disabled soldiers in the US Army returning from WWII. The growing demand in the second half of the 20th century for the design of assistive products and barrier-free buildings for people with physical disabilities resulted in the development across the world of several standards and regulations.

Technical standards and building regulations evolved for the most part as a result of addressing the needs of people with physical and sensory disabilities, such as ANSI 117.1–1961, the first accessible design standard from the American National Standards Institute, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1), which generated documentation that included a variety of new needs of building occupants.

Examples of recent guidelines and technical standards addressing these emergent priorities are the Building for Everyone, A Universal Design Approach, the BS 8300:2018, Design of an accessible and inclusive built environment British Standard Institute. (2009), “BS 8300-2:2018 Design of an accessible and inclusive built environment (2), the EN 17210:2021, Accessibility and usability of the built environment (3) and the recent BSI PAS 6463, Design for the mind - neurodiversity and the built environment BSI (2021), PAS 6463: Design for the mind - Neurodiversity and the built environment (4).

Despite the increased number of regulations and guidance available to support building industry professionals to design and deliver accessible and inclusive built environments, many buildings still fail to provide a fulfilling inclusive experience for their occupants.

Previous research from the authors highlighted two major challenges that continually impact the design of inclusive buildings and how they are perceived by their occupants.

• Firstly, education and awareness in relation to ID is limited across the building industry and therefore the traditional design process tends to be less focused on the needs of users, their capabilities and journey, but more on sustainability, form, function and budget.
• Secondly, there is a manifest lack of evidence-based tools, methods and processes to support building industry professionals in collecting and evaluating unbiased post-occupancy user feedback on ID with a focus on equity and diversity principles. The apparent scarcity of tools to assist in collecting accurate data and evaluating the metrics regarding perceptions of ID in the built environment is strongly associated with a lack of awareness of how to design more inclusively.

When building industry professionals are not able to access and recognise the correct data, it is difficult to envision a strategy for the design or redesign of an inclusive building other than by ticking the boxes of the minimum requirements within currently available standards and regulations. In order to design or redesign an inclusive building and before any intervention can take place, it is essential to take into account a variety of metrics when evaluating the quality of inclusion, access to spaces, the comfort of occupants with a diverse range of human needs and motivations, and the equity of opportunities. When evaluating the impact of the various interventions it is necessary to correlate the data from the initial stage of life of a new building with data collected at different stages in its lifecycle.

This apparent need, in combination with the scarcity of tools, limited number of metrics to assess ID in the built environment, and the general lack of awareness within the building industry, raises the important question: How can we implement and deploy a tool to evaluate the perception of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility in the built environment across the building industry?

Within the IDEA project presented in this article, researchers developed transferrable foundational knowledge used to create tools to assess and gauge inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility in the built environment.

Inclusive Design: How limited is the level of education and awareness?

A recent study (5) found that accessibility is overall recognised and embraced in architectural design practice, however, the adoption of Inclusive Design is limited so far. Another challenging factor that was discovered brings the attention to the limited level of education and awareness that designers, architects, and clients have regarding Inclusive Design.

These challenges were further validated with a large-scale survey in which around one out of ten survey respondents reported that clients and building owners are well informed about the benefits of designing inclusively (6). As a result of this biased perception the scarcity of client’s awareness was understood as the dominant driver of the insufficiency of clients’ requests and limited design of inclusive, accessible, equitable buildings.

Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) surveys have become widely adopted over the last two decades as procedures for collecting a variety of information from occupants of buildings. Some of the main purposes of POE surveys are to measure the building’s performance, assess the perceptions of occupants of the building and to provide insights for building industry professionals and facility managers as to how to improve the design and operations of the built environment. Currently available POE surveys tend to focus on measuring the performance of a building and very few surveys include a holistic assessment of ID in the built environment.

A previous study highlighted the existence of surveys that measure specific characteristics of the built environment by using descriptors of the performance, sustainability, and objective comfort that a building offers to its occupants.

The emergent need from companies and business leaders to understand more about how the workplace can offer a better (and more inclusive) experience to all employees, recently initiated various endeavours to establish new metrics for measuring DEI and procedures to design more inclusive spaces. As companies, building regulators, and the building industry are increasingly paying more attention to fulfilling both the basic and higher needs of building occupants (including comfort, safety, inclusion, and personal satisfaction) this provides an opportunity to offer new insights to those who have the responsibility for securing built environments suitable for all.

To find a possible solution to tackle these challenges and help increase knowledge of Inclusive Design, the research team, with the support of several expert stakeholders, developed the IDEA Toolkit, a set of tools to advance Inclusive Design in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) sector and across different organisations.

The IDEA Toolkit

The IDEA Toolkit is composed of the IDEA Audit, which helps building industry professionals and business leaders to collect feedback from building occupants on inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility with a novel, scientific approach. On the other hand, the Inclusive Design Canvas supports teams in developing community engagement exercises and co-design processes by considering the variety of human capabilities and needs to redesign spaces and teams with a more inclusive approach.

To effectively track and evaluate IDEA, it is essential to constantly understand people’s perceptions and motivations, and to ensure that professionals, managers, and organisations can quickly receive actionable insights and implement them in a timely fashion.

To achieve this, it is important to clarify the subjects, topics, and themes composing the IDEA audit, their weight, and significance, the procedures employed for data collection and how data will be analysed to provide actionable insights.

The IDEA audit

The IDEA audit is framed as a mixed methods building occupant feedback collection system composed of three major subjects including people-centred data, perceptions of people-space, and people dynamics. Each of the three subjects includes different topics, themes, and subsequent subthemes that constitute the core of the IDEA audit.

The IDEA audit will be deployed as a standalone web-based system to offer an accessible and inclusive experience to all users with diverse abilities and plans to increase the number of features through third- party applications and services in cooperation with businesses.

The IDEA audit, over and above offering new insights about built environments and the perceptions of their occupants, tackles a challenging issue present amongst other POE surveys. Currently, several POE surveys compare data collected from a building against the average results of previous surveys related to many different buildings. These results are normally averaged, which seemingly means that the benchmarking will be potentially less biased, however, there is a methodological inadequacy in this process.

As each single building can be considered as a unique prototype, developed as a result of a bespoke process, it can impact the occupants and their behaviour in several ways. The geographical location, structure, distribution, layout, materials, colours, furniture, and aesthetics of a building strongly influence the occupants who all have different needs, motivations, and perceptions of the space.

The IDEA audit aims to assist with taking a snapshot of the building, in its given context and with its occupants, and provide a view of people’s perception with the ultimate goal being to help researchers, building owners, design teams and organisational leaders understand points of exclusion, challenges and pain points experienced by users and enable actions that will increase the quality of life for the building’s occupants.

Conclusions

With the IDEA Toolkit, researchers, building owners, design teams, developers, facility managers, tenants and organisational leaders can achieve a baseline of understanding of what people feel in regard to inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility, and can clearly identify pockets of inconsistency and use data to decide how to address challenges with bespoke action plans to improve the built environment or develop Human Resources policies that effect a positive behaviour change and promote a culture of well-being.

Early-stage validation results proved that these tools represent an impactful advancement in the field of Inclusive Design for designing environments that are inclusive and guarantee diversity, equity, and accessibility for all.

The IDEA Toolkit seeks to democratise the process of understanding the value of Inclusive Design by increasing awareness and education about inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility across all people and geographies. To this end, the IDEA Toolkit not only offers the opportunity to discover the possibilities of inclusion but has the potential to become a form of social sustainability for future generations.

Guaranteeing inclusive environments for all is a fundamental step towards reaching the targets set by the United Nations with the Sustainable Development Goals and enables communities to thrive.