Mobilizing disability experience to inform architectural education lessons learned from a field experiment

Abstract

Through their bodily interaction with the designed environment, disabled people are able to appreciate qualities designers may not be attuned to. In architectural practice, however disability experience is hardly acknowledged as a valuable resource for design. Since attitudes developed in the educational settings are carried into people's professional careers, this paper examines the added value of mobilizing disability experience to inform architectural education. To this end it analyses the course work of 29 architecture students who attended a course on inclusive design and, in this context, analysed a building in interaction with disabled people. Findings suggest that this interaction contributed to raising students' awareness about the built environment's impact, human variability, and the limits of empathy. In addition, it fostered students' insight into accessibility issues beyond the legal standards, and enriched their understanding of space. This awareness and insight in turn triggered a change in students' attitude towards disabled people. Further research is needed to examine the sustainability of these effects after students have graduated and gained experience in architectural practice.