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Hello all, just thought to pass along some helpful links to materials in compact and helpful format. The Center for Universal Design provides these fine resources online:
http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/univ_design/princ_overview.htm Folding Brochure Format.
Thinking, these principles earliest associated with physical mobility features and adjuncts may perhaps inspire us to think about attitudes/ belief systems.
Derived therefrom,
Seven Basic Principles are:
1. Equitable Use
2. Flexibility in Use
3. Simple and Intuitive Use.
4. Perceptible Information as to devices, equipment.
5. Tolerance for Error.
6. Low Physical Effort.
7. Size and Space for Apprach and Use.
(There are btw as may be recognized some resonance with historical concentration on "User Friendly Environments" in computing and information systems, and relating to todays precepts on accessible ICT - Information and Communication Technolgies).
These environments can but needn't tend to be service delivery oriented, and on recipient as compared with interactive/participant models we begin to enjoy in our times.
Hence looking in both or all directions, can we perhaps apply these principles to attitudes toward persons with disabilities, and how we feel about ourselves as well? Just for example, and a quick parallel sketch:
1 - Do we feel equal - or segregated and given separate, segregated, or stigmatized "treatment" (a poor word perhaps!!!) by attitudes? Do we conduct ourselves toward others' beliefs with equality?
2 - Do we perceive others as comfortable with flexibility, diversity and the richness of individuality as regards personality and presentation? Are we flexible, allowing others to have different styles and approaches to life and to us?
3 - Do we find others and the world easy to understand from our different vantage points? Do we reach out in fundamental ways to make life easier for others whose "home locations" intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, differ from ours??
4 - Does information as to affect and attitude as well as matters of reason flow to us in useful/usable ways, and do we communicate our own outward productively?
5 - Are standards of thought and feeling of varous sorts too restrictive and zones of safety for mistakes and errors established, by others and by us?
(Are thought and feeling and belief hazards and barriers around us reduced as much as practicable and do we avoid moats around us ourselves because of injuries experienced or felt poverty of resources?)
6 - Do others and our surroundings accomodate by recognizing basic honest effort? Do we extend these courtesies to others?
7 - Again, what spaces lock us in, and what spaces do we ourselfves create? (moats,barriers, hurdles as opposed to ramps, bridges, scalable challenges)...
Well, this is hardly a moralizing exercise, it's a set of practical challenges some of us talk about in background, and with much discussion of Universal Design it seemed aprt to post.
As a person with physical challenges and with particularity physical pain, I have to ask myself every day if I am doing my best to scale the barriers felt from within and communicte outward to others in stress reductive ways, and was wondering if universal design principles often associated with mobility could also be helpful in terms of mental and emotional arhitecturee and agility ... hence this post, hoping it connects some, and which is sent along also with the very best wishes for the windup of 2003 and the great prospects for even more progress in 2004 and beyond.
:) LDMF.
This is Individual Email. For reference only: [L. D. Misek-Falkoff, Ph.D., J.D., U.N. Disability Convention Rep./Recording Secretary of NGO: Communications Coordination Committee for the U.N. (CCC/U.N.). Member, NGO Committee on Status of Women/ Sub-Committee on Older Women. President, Co-Speaker, the National Disability Party and Chronic Pain Caucus Chair. Staff, Disability Grapevine Online Daily Newspaper. Moderator, Internet disability/law discussion groups. Petitioner to U.S. Supreme Court on Disability Issues. Member, Assoc. Computing Machinery, AAPD AARP AAUW ACLU American Pain Society, NYOrg, Trigeminal Neuralgia Association.
- Sign-line revised 072003 : Recipients, please share where there seems a fit: http://home.att.net/~ldmf-docs/announce-c.htm invisible-NO-MORE (peer-2-peer) ; C-O-P-I-N-G_UN (both peer and support/providers, Community of Pain Interest Networking Grps for UN Participation.
- Sign-line revised 072003 : Recipients, please share where there seems a fit: http://home.att.net/~ldmf-docs/announce-c.htm invisible-NO-MORE (peer-2-peer) ; C-O-P-I-N-G_UN (both peer and support/providers, Community of Pain Interest Networking Grps for UN Participation.
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