(Inclusive)Design – Everything Begins With Listening
My PhD thesis focuses on the architect’s social responsibility and the benefits of using empathy in design as a way to enrich the individual/ community relationship with the built environment, while defining a new architecture program based on an “inclusive social context” for segregated communities. The book based on the thesis was published in 2023 at Paideia Publishing house.
Inclusive Design: Empathy Exercises for The Design Process
The first inclusive design guide in Romania highlights the experiences of those often overlooked—the “uninvited” and “different from the norm”—who face daily challenges in the built environment. Instead of offering specific solutions, this book serves as a collective manifesto that emphasizes our shared responsibility to the community by reaffirming the importance of inclusive design while reminding us that anyone could become the “uninvited guest” in the conversation about the built environment.
SenseAbility
A long-term AMAIS initiative which aims to create a socio-cultural platform, a meeting place between able-bodied people and those with disabilities. The initiative aims to identify existing spaces that could offer a rich sensory experience and creates a proper context in which these characteristics are amplified while generating an inclusive context of interaction.
The UNINVITED
The UNINVITED is an AMAIS project that involves a series of installations and exhibitions aimed at exploring and challenging society’s perspective on accessibility, inclusion, and disability.
Empathy Retreat
During 25-29th of August 2022, we organised the Empathy Retreat in Sibiu, an intersectional research project that brought together 32 people from different social and professional categories: architects, urban planners, landscape architects, expert citizens, local councillors from city halls, activists, all of them from the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, or with visual, locomotor or hearing disabilities, neurodivergent and (temporarily) able-bodied people.
Inclusive dialogue is the first step for accessibility to become a priority in the design and development of public or private spaces. The goal of the retreat is to challenge individual perspectives on human diversity and how they define our relationship with the environment.