Interior Design for Special Needs

The elective that teaches a designer to make interiors that work for everyone, whatever their body, age or ability, and it treats inclusion not as a constraint or a kindness but as a responsibility and simply a better way to design. It begins with an introduction to design for special needs and the diverse classification of disabilities, mobility, visual, hearing, cognitive, speech and age-related, and it clears the field's most damaging myth from the start, that accessible design is just wheelchair ramps, by showing that disability is diverse and that much of it is temporary or situational, so a good design serves the whole range of human ability. It teaches the functional needs a design must serve, the physical and psychological and social and sensory, on a human-centric basis of space and light and safety, and the standards it must meet, IS 4963 and the Harmonised Guidelines and the National Building Code under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. It teaches spatial relationship and accessible circulation, the step-free connected routes and the convenient relationship of interior rooms to outdoor areas, and the barriers to movement that must be removed. It teaches inclusive and universal design, distinguishing barrier-free and accessible design as a minimum from universal design as design for all built in from the start and from inclusive design as the human-centred process, presenting the seven principles of universal design and the inclusive design process, and it corrects the second great myth, that accessibility is an ugly and costly compromise, with the curb-cut effect that shows a feature built for disabled people benefits everyone, so that universal design designed in from the start is elegant and cheap and better for all. And above all it teaches the social model of disability, that a person is disabled by the barriers in the environment and not by their body, so the designer's job is to remove the barrier, and when the step becomes a ramp the disability disappears. It ends in the design activities and clearances of real life, the walking and passing and kneeling and bending, the accessible kitchen and toilet, the tactile and visual and hearing and cognitive supports, so that a student can design a genuinely inclusive interior. Throughout, it treats the interior designer as a resource person for a non-handicapping, barrier-free society, doing a real and quiet good.