Patterns to support the implementation of Universal Design in architectural practice

Abstract

With demographic ageing as one of the major drivers, social awareness of existing barriers between peoples' needs and the built environment has grown considerably over the last decades. The same shift of focus can be observed in design, where design practice is moving away from designing for the non-existing average man or woman, towards designing for the real diversity of people. A new design paradigm has gradually emerged, replacing the 'design for special needs' approach to human diversity. This new 'Universal Design' paradign aims to stimulate new, creative solutions that will contribute to a better quality of life for all users, including people with permanent or temporary disabilities. The implementation of this new design paradigm into design practice requires detailed knowledge of the needs of the largest possible diversity of people. However, gathering this information and making it available to designers in a way that supports the design process calls for a new concept of design support tool. For Christopher Alexander, the entire community of users - both past and present - works by means of innumerable large and small, formal and informal 'structure preserving transformations' of a built environment to provide accomodation in a meaningful and versatile way for human needs and aspirations (Alexander 2003). He developed a pattern language (Alexander, Ishikawa and Silverstein 1977) as a generic system to nurture and to guide human building processes. Both Alexander's pattern language and the more recent specific initiative of a group of software architects to develop collective design patterns(Gamma et al. 1995) provide inspiration for the development of Patterns as a tool for the implementation of Universal Design in architecture. Successful collective web-based projects in open content further inspired the development of models of UD patterns and the search for strategies for implementation.