Did you exclude or were you excluded?

For decades now, accessibility solutions and inclusive design have been developing mostly in parallel with architecture, intersecting only in certain cases, usually at the end of the project. I agree with this view that these topics are considered the “uninvited guest” or the “special case”. And I have felt the same while trying to discuss with other architects or designers about these topics and why we should prioritize them in our professions. Because it is clear that, even though inclusive and inclusion are on the tip of everyone’s tongues nowadays, they are not a regular part of the architectural design process.

I used to see these topics the same way, until I had my aha- moment, an empathy exercise while I was in my last year of Architecture University (2013-2014), doing research for my diploma subject. I am part of Generation Y, I am a Millennial, so it is fairly easy to understand the somewhat vigilante spirit that stimulated me to strive to find a topic that might have a beneficial impact on the community as a whole. During a break from this research, I was taking a stroll through one of Bucharest’s parks and I noticed a couple of blind people with their baby in a stroller. At that moment I realized that during my six years of university, the topic of designing for somebody who cannot see never came up. A lot of architects and designers like Juhani Pallasmaa or Kat Holmes raise the concern that a far too big amount of the contemporary world is built out of images and visual information, and that architecture has lost most of its complexity. There is a lot of pressure to have great renderings, good looking iconic projects and not so much interest shown to other social and physical aspects of our projects. Back then, that was the day I realized that all the discussions we had in the design workshops about accessibility came down to ramps and, most of the time, at the very end of the project. Bringing not much joy to me or my colleagues. Thus, I started looking for as much information regarding people with disabilities and the involvement architects have on this topic.

Getting out of my social bubble I quickly found more information on how powerful social segregation is in our country. So much so, that you might even say that there are two separate worlds, that of people with disabilities and that of those without disabilities. People with permanent disabilities face an isolation phenomenon that is caused by at least two reasons:

• The subjective one: the attitudes of people without disabilities towards people with disabilities. Those without disabilities tend to take too much pity on people with disabilities or they are afraid to talk to the person or they completely ignore the person and the topic of disability.
• The objective one: the unfriendly and most of the times completely inaccessible built environment. Space is a powerful instrument that can amplify or limit a person’s abilities even if there is no disability certificate. This is why in 2014 I decided to start an NGO, AMAIS, because I feel that we, as architects and designers, are directly responsible for the impact the built environment has on society.

If we wish to improve the accessibility of the built environment, we must first change mentalities about human diversity in all its forms (age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, abilities, culture, education, profession, etc.). Architectural education plays an important role in overcoming this perception of ‘special cases’ that accessibility and inclusion have.

The real success in building an equitable society will come when the word INCLUSIVE is part of the definition of the word DESIGN and no longer needs a separate category for it.