We believe that every person who encounters environments we design should have the best experience – feeling welcome, secure and with nothing to distract from the reason they are there. Effective inclusive design goes beyond ramps, lifts, accessible WCs and correctly sized doors. It covers all of the protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010 including disability which can be broken down further into physically disabled people, people with vision and hearing impairments and people with disabilities that you can’t see (80% of disabled people fall into this category).
Our inclusive design team cover all of the protected characteristics but have an additional specialism in Neurodiverse Inclusive Design. This includes designing for Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and other neurodivergent conditions.
But what are the other aspects of Inclusive Design? Our Consultant Stephanie has answered some of the questions you might be asking.
What is inclusive design?
Inclusive design goes further than accessible design by considering many more factors that affect a person’s experience of the space they are in. Inclusive design considers vision and hearing impairment, design for hidden disabilities including physical conditions such as fibromyalgia or Crohn’s disease and neurological conditions such as Autism, Alzheimer’s, and dyslexia. Inclusive environments, including landscape and master planning, are also more accommodating for variation in religion, gender, language, age, sexual orientation, class and everything else that makes people unique. For example, some of these characteristics can be better accommodated with gender-neutral facilities, logical signage with icons and colour, and making spaces safer and friendlier for people likely to face discrimination, including designing in sightlines and reducing pinch points.
Why do I need an Inclusive Design Consultant?
All buildings, especially buildings used by the general public or visitors, require inclusive design because it is not known if anyone currently using the building has inclusive design needs or if people using the building in the future will.
Housing residents will have guests, commercial, educational and leisure buildings will have visitors. Employees, students and other building users may have physical or hidden disabilities, may speak English as a second language and be from various religious and cultural backgrounds. Every building has the potential to be sold on or repurposed and every person has the potential to have life changes requiring a different environment: travelling with luggage, being pregnant, the effects of ageing, a broken ankle playing football, a weak arm after a vaccine, experiencing a migraine, hangover or another temporary sickness, a new medical diagnosis which can come any time in life, a temporary disabling state following an operation, the side effects of medication, or a permanently disabling accident.
With the current changes in equality, diversity and inclusion policies following the Black Lives Matter movement, the changes that Covid-19 is having on physical and mental wellbeing, and the recent news regarding women’s safety, inclusive design is even more important.
The Equality Act replaced the Disability Discrimination Act in 2010 which makes discrimination against the nine protected characteristics illegal (of which disability is only one), although it does not set out how this can be physically achieved through building design and standards. This means that at any point, a business or building owner can face legal challenges if a user finds the building to be inaccessible or discriminatory to them. Having an inclusive design consultant as part of the project ensures the building not only meets the basic building control requirements for commission but can improve the value and favourability with the planning committee and mitigates the risk of non-compliance if regulations are changed in the future and reduces the risk of a potential lawsuit significantly. Most importantly, it makes the environment so much better for the users. This could mean attracting more talented or highly skilled employees, increased productivity from staff, better engagement and performance from students, more positive feedback, reviews and marketing, and more footfall, enjoyment, repeat custom and spending power in a public, retail and leisure environment.
What does the inclusive design consultant do?
An inclusive design consultant at maber can:
- Give preliminary advice to the client, and assist with the preparation of the brief.
- Perform assessments of the way a current building is used (e.g. a previous building that the new project will be based on)
- Provide consultants/contractors with preliminary advice or a report of recommendations for inclusive design when submitting a competition design, proposal or competitive tender
- Perform access audits of existing buildings
- Provide appraisals of the design at the concept design and planning stage
- Provide architectural design solutions to better accommodate inclusive design principles
- Prepare specialist inclusive design strategy for planning applications
- Assist with public and user-group consultations
- Attend design team meetings to coordinate inclusive design with other services
- Work with other consultants where they may not be aware of inclusive design requirements e.g. wayfinding design guidance with the signage specialist, accessible window controls with the glazing specialist, accessible facilities with the kitchen designer, finishes with the interior designer, inclusive design with the landscape designer etc
- Remain client-side to ensure inclusive design principles are being met by the design team in a design and build contract
- Specify products and provide technical design drawings and specifications
- Provide an inclusive design strategy for building control approval
- Visit site periodically to ensure installation is correct
- Site audit at practical completion to ensure the building meets the accessible and inclusive design requirements of the client
- Provide advice to the client on operation and maintenance when the building is in use
- Provide ongoing assistance to the client once the project is complete
- Grant funding advice.
Isn’t inclusive design expensive?
No. Inclusive design does not have to be any more expensive. It might cost nothing more and it will save significant time if done correctly from the early stages of a project. The additional costs associated with inclusive design are often because there hasn’t been an inclusive design consultant as part of the project team, enough consideration wasn’t given and physical space wasn’t allowed for at the concept design stage, and everything has to be redesigned and retrofit during the construction stage. Walls are going to be painted anyway so specifying the correct finish type and colour contrast adds nothing more. Signage is going to be made anyway so why not ensure the font is dyslexia-friendly and the correct international access icons are used? Having an inclusive design consultant on board from the beginning of a project can actually save costs and the time spent consulting can be less than an acoustician, fire engineer, principal designer or lighting consultant. The service will help you meet your mandatory obligations and dramatically improve the experience your building offers.
Shouldn’t architects be doing inclusive design anyway? Why is it an additional service?
Architects can comply with the Building Regulations “Approved Document Part M: Access to and Use of Buildings” on a basic level, the same way that they can comply with Part B: Fire and Part E: Acoustics, but you still appoint a fire engineer or acoustician to resolve things that are not included in the approved documents or to achieve a fire-engineered solution. It’s the same thing with inclusive design. Part M covers the bare minimum for physical disability but inclusive design includes hidden disabilities, gender, age, religion and all of those other categories. There are specific things like dimensions that architects can comply with but “engineered inclusive design solutions” require an inclusive design consultant.
Inclusive design is about incremental improvements and context sensitive approaches; there is rarely a case that can be defined by a number like a fire or acoustic rating. There is so much to consider about travelling to a building, the approach to a building and how every element of the building is processed, used and experienced – most of these things are not covered in Part M. Architects and other designers do not necessarily have the level of knowledge to cover all of the environmental requirements of people with physical, vision, hearing and neurological impairments, the environmental requirements of different religions, ages, backgrounds or the many design principles for gender-inclusive facilities.
Why Maber?
maber is one of the very few practices in the country to have an in-house inclusive design team, making us ideal for projects requiring very specialist inclusive design such as extra care living, supported housing, religious space and buildings for the general public use. Being a multi-disciplinary practice, your project is already in our hands so the inclusive design team will already be aware of your project.
- Benefit from efficient coordination between architectural and inclusive designers reducing the overall cost of the design package compared to procuring these services separately
- Inclusive landscape and interior design advice
- Whole design team working in a single coordinated ISO 19650 BIM compliant model
- Coordinated office systems and processes
- All services contained in a single fee and invoice.
We can also provide the following one-off services:
- Access Audits and Inclusive Design appraisals of other architect’s proposals
- One-off client advice / project consultations
- Provide Inclusive design CPDs ranging from general awareness to specific inclusive design topics such as neurodiversity, autism or ADHD
- Provide bespoke inclusive design sessions that are tailored to your industry or requirements e.g. planning policy.
Contact us
Contact us if you want to discuss any of our Inclusive Design services.
inclusive@maber.co.uk
