Dr. Janice Rieger On Co-Designing Inclusive Architecture With Diverse Excluded Communities
Dr. Janice Rieger is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
She is an award-winning researcher, educator, curator and designer with expertise in inclusive design and disability research. Dr Rieger has been advocating for people with disabilities for over twenty-five years and has been awarded an International Universal Design Award (IAUD), 2 Australian Good Design Awards, a Mayor’s Access Recognition Award, and a State-level disability award for her leadership in promoting inclusion globally.
She has recently been appointed as a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts & Sciences, held appointments to international design juries, disability congress committees, scientific advisory boards, and was recently invited to be the first international member of the European Institute for Design and Disability. Dr Rieger’s work in creating cultures of inclusion has led to code, policy, curriculum and legislative changes in Australia, North America and Europe.
Dr. Rieger discusses how built environments have historically excluded diverse communities from accessing them, and the opportunity this creates to critically analyse and redesign the world we live in.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in inclusive design and academia?
[Dr. Janice Rieger] - Unlike most people who aren't sure what they're going to be when they grow up, I from a very young age, probably around the age of five or six, knew I was going to be a designer. Those little yearbooks where we would have to put in what we did that year and what we wanted to do when we grew up, I always put interior designer from a very young age.
In my teenage years, I was obsessed with fashion and style magazines, the real aesthetics and beauty of design. I would rearrange my room constantly, and I came from quite a poor family. Mum and I on the weekends, to do something fun that was free, we would visit show homes. From a very young age, I was quite obsessed with high end residential design, and I thought I would end up being a residential interior designer for high-end homes. Interestingly, throughout my life, I have gone back and done that as part of my practice. But I think that throughout my university career, I became a little disillusioned about interior design and the idea of designing big mansions for the wealthy. In many ways, it's interesting because it didn't seem to be the path I was supposed to travel. I decided to go to study interior design at the Faculty of Architecture in the University of Manitoba in Canada. It was the only program, which was a full four-year Bachelor of Interior Design, so I was very excited to move interstate by myself, to a city I had never been to before. The first project I received was in residential design, but I was assigned a seniors housing complex. I remember thinking, "this is not fun, this is not sexy design work!" Then from there on, we did this abstracted model project, and my client was bipolar. I happened to get a job in the summer that first year working for a local design firm that designed the most accessible and sustainable homes in Canada (at the time). Even though I had this pathway marked out, I was constantly taking the other road or shifting in the other direction, and then I happened upon this door in the basement at the Faculty of Architecture, and it was called the Canadian Institute for Barrier Free Design.
I had no idea what ‘barrier free design’ was at the time, and so I wandered in and realised there was a whole different side to design, in looking at creating accessible environments, inclusion and working with people with disabilities.
It was from that first year I started to shift directions and figure out what I wanted to do, and 25 years later, here I am doing that.
As an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the Queensland University of Technology, can you please share a bit about what your research has focused on and any projects you're involved in?
Interestingly, at some point I didn't understand the value system that was underlying the work I was doing. People would always ask me, “why do you do what you do? Why are you such a passionate advocate for people with disabilities?” I would say, "I don't know why." Then, I was one day being interviewed with a friend of mine who is blind, and he said to me, "did you have anyone in your family that had a disability?"
I said "no," but then I thought, "oh, wait a minute. My grandmother was blind, and I lived with my grandmother for a good part of my life as well as travelled across Canada with her as her companion." When I really started to reflect on that experience, I realised my grandma and I were out of the box tinkerers; her home environment was not designed for her abilities and because she was blind her and I would figure out designerly ways to redo her environment to make it accessible. We would alphabetise her soup cans, and it always seemed to end up with us creating solutions using red nail polish. Because she couldn't see most of the dials on her washing machine, microwave, and stove, we took red nail polish and put it at the 30 second mark, and wherever else she needed to maintain her independence. I had forgotten those early formative years of co-designing even before we knew what co-design was, with my grandmother to make and adapt her home environment to be accessible to her. I think I forgot because I didn't see her as being disabled, I saw her as having these super abilities. It never occurred to me that was also the foundation of my work today.
My work begins to address three decades of pleas to make our environments accessible. It provides new, innovative methods and methodologies for practitioners, researchers, and students. I'm looking at how to create best practice for design for all, and to promote this humanising design globally in design, design education and to create this catalyst for change.
Now, getting back to your question regarding what I'm doing now, this road has been very long, windy, and hilly. I spent 14 years in university completing several different degrees to get to where I am today. Now my shift has been towards this idea of spatial justice and social justice, and that people have a human right to access. A lot of the work I'm doing now is coming from a justice lens. I'm working for the Centre for Justice and the Design Lab at QUT, and I'm working on, for instance, a project where we're working with a disability service provider and designing accessible housing for people with Prader Willi Syndrome. This is a very complex, disabling condition, and this project is at Moreton Bay. I'm working on two Australian Research Council grants now. One is to create the first national disability arts archive in Australia. Even though my work dabbles in the arts, I'm usually brought in as the designer or co-designer to create better access. In this case, this is access to an archive and to create best practice in that. Most recently, I was awarded an Australia Research Council Fellowship, and so for the next three and a half years I get to dabble in my own research and look at a particular sector. In this case, I have chosen the museum and gallery sector across Australia, to create a toolkit for them to create better access and inclusion. I wouldn't say I work only in one sector or with one industry. I would say that because I create cultures of inclusion, I can work with multiple communities, in various spaces, whether globally or locally, in architecture, urban design, museums, exhibitions or multi-sensorial work. That's the direction my work is going into now.
How has the design of our infrastructure historically excluded communities from its use, and how severely has that been felt by these communities?
People think in the last couple decades it has gotten significantly better. I would say for someone who's been doing this for almost three decades, while we've seen a bit of a shift towards more inclusive design and accessible environments, we really haven't gone as far as we could. It feels like as soon as we make changes in one space or with one community, then they impact another community. It's interesting, because most recently I got the opportunity to redesign the spatial histories or the architectural design history unit for 550 1st year students in my faculty. I wanted to flip this understanding of what we have come to understand the history of design and the history of spatial design to be. It's often this western canon with these 'starchitects'. We often look at exemplars: design is always based on exemplars. I thought, “why aren't we looking at the untold stories and histories?” I flipped the entire curriculum on its head to talk about ableist architecture, to talk about segregation (in the United States in particular) we saw early in the 1900's in terms of black and white entrances. These were places where only people who are white could go, and we know about the famous bus as well that showed segregation. But we still have that segregation today; it's still manifested in the built environment and is still exclusionary. There are gendered spaces as well, even since early Victorian times we looked at the home and these gendered spaces that were created. Now, we're talking about the gender problems with toilets. It's not like anything in some ways has changed or really improved in terms of creating better access and inclusion.
We've made small steps in the right direction, but we still have a very long way to go. We're now starting to look at gender neutral toilets and things like that. More than anything, I became an educator rather than a practitioner, because I continued to see the inequities in the built environment and continued to work with builders, architects and designers who did not understand the importance of creating just access to public buildings (for instance). You put stairs in, and suddenly, you're excluding people.
People aren't necessarily disabled, it's their environments that are disabling. for me, it became my passion to re-educate designers and practitioners to think about ableist architecture and be critical of what they were designing and how exclusionary it was.
Why should businesses consider inclusivity as a fundamental aspect of developing their products and services?
The economic question always comes up when I work with builders, developers, and architects. They often say to me, if I'm trying to make a space more accessible for let's say people in wheelchairs, that, “it takes up a considerable amount of square footage.” Suddenly, my footprint is bumped out and my budget is bumped up. But the myth busting we've done in the industry globally for the last 10 years is to make people understand that actually, designing for inclusion, designing to accommodate people with differing abilities, does not cost any more money. In fact, what you are doing is creating not only just access (a human right people should have), but you are creating a bigger consumer. For instance, if you're a home developer, and you only design homes that have stairs and were two stories, you are excluding the entire aging population. As we know, the silver tsunami has hit us, and it's significant. You are also excluding anyone maybe that has a child in a pram that needs to get into the home. You're excluding anyone that uses a wheelchair or a walker, or even someone who's temporarily not able bodied, for example they may have broken their leg. There is a massive economic gain and benefit to creating for inclusion. Right now, my work has transformed into working with the tourism sector, which was decimated globally with COVID. What we're telling them is that the one place they can increase their revenue exponentially is to look at accessible tourism. It’s a one-billion-dollar industry, and if you can offer something your competitor can't offer, then you're getting that whole market share from those individuals. One of the things I have come across, I would say probably since 2019, is this understanding of design for all. It’s a bit different in Australia, and I've brought it to Australia because mostly in Australia we talk about universal or inclusive design. The concept of design for all, which started and is mostly embedded into the European fabric, is that if we design something well, and maybe co-design it with people with disabilities, it is designed for everyone. It's complex sometimes to try to think about designing for all, but it is possible, and just requires designers to think outside of the box, be creative and inclusionary in the way they're thinking. I always ask my students, "who are you including by the virtue of your design, and who are you excluding by the virtue of your design? Is that okay?"
What strategies do you and your colleagues apply to identify opportunities to effectively redesign built environments?
Over the last five years specifically, my practice has become almost completely about co-design. I in no way shape or form think that I'm an expert in inclusion or universal design. I essentially am just a facilitator, helping communities and designers come together to create better access and inclusion. Co-design is really at the foundation of what I do now, because in the disability world, there's this sentiment of, "not about us without us."
Why would we be designing for people with disabilities, culturally and linguistically diverse populations or Indigenous populations without the inclusion of their lived experience, embodiments, knowledge, and perspective?
It's completely ridiculous to think we would do that, and so what I've been doing is trying to inspire others to think about the necessity of co-design and individual voices. For instance, I've worked with large national museums all over the world. This one museum in Canada (at the time) was declared the most accessible museum in the world. I thought that was a great invitation for me to come and audit them for their accessibility! I was the first researcher who went in there when they first opened their doors, and don't get me wrong, they had done some amazing things. They had designed some universal design technology which was ground-breaking. It involved user testing, but when I went in there to do a post occupancy evaluation, and took individuals with me who were blind, deaf or had other disabilities, the technology was redundant. The technology was not intuitive, and it was completely useless for them. It hadn't maybe been co-designed, but it definitely had not been evaluated post installation. There are other things; like people often get excited sometimes and they create tactile maps. What people don'trealise is knowledge through vision is very different than knowledge through touch. I've gone to places where they have said to me, "Janice, we're really excited we've made this tactile map of the institution for people who are blind." I bring someone in that works with me who is blind, and they run their hands across this tactile map, and they say to me, "this is nonsensical.
All they have done is to take a floor plan and extruded it into three dimensions." That knowledge is knowledge for vision, it's not knowledge for the hand. Now, when I create tactile models, maps, or multi-sensorial work, to be inclusive, I do it with people with disabilities. Every week, myths that I believed for 30 years in practice are challenged, and I think, "oh my gosh, I don't even know what I'm doing." I will get told, "that's not the way we would do it." Doing audio description, and my friend Mark who is blind said to me, " for those of us born blind, we don't understand middle perspective. We have no sense of perspectile space." When you say that something is in the foreground, background, or the middle ground, he would ask, "what would a middle ground be?" My message would be you need to be work with the people you're designing for. I know the process is longer and that it's very often not in the budget, but it's of absolute importance. Otherwise, you're designing things you think might be accessible and inclusive, but at the end of the day, they're very tokenistic and not inclusive at all.
If you're going to create something for a community, you're not a part of, then there must be a consultation process, is this correct?
Absolutely. From my work with the QUT Design Lab and the Centre for Justice, I learnt there are some real champions doing co-design work in other areas. The other thing we're starting to do is incorporate creative methods as well. Obviously, when you work with people with disabilities (say they're blind), you can't exactly do a lot of visual mind mapping, cultural probes, photo elicitation and those kinds of things.
You must think about people's abilities and how they can interact in the process, so quite often we use creative methods. I've started to make films and animations, fibre work with fibre artists. It just depends on the community, what they want, and then what creative methods we use to create cultures of inclusion together.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?
I'm inspired by so much work that's happening at a global level. Recently, I started working with a scholar in Canada, Dr. Sitter. She is creating a world first multi-sensorial lab (called the Multisensory Storytelling Studio). She's creating a lab which has a smell station, touch station and a taste station, where we can start to work with different communities and understand this sensory ethnography in a way. Then, we are looking at the way knowledge can be translated into design services, products, and environments. Even though she's not a designer (she comes from social work), I find it fascinating when you see people doing co-design who aren't designers. They don't have this (in some ways) negative designer lens we all come with, for those of us that are designers, but they're very open to curiosity and taking risks. She does this process of digital storytelling with vulnerable communities, and it's quite fascinating because I've never really seen digital storytelling done this way. The impact of that spreads out into the community. I'm bringing her in Australia and QUT this year, for us to start doing some really fun playful work in multi-sensorial research and digital storytelling.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
As an academic, I rarely get time to read because I'm reading people's PhDs and all of these things. But I was just reminded of a book recently. I tend to like old French literature and French design books, and one of the ones I've come across again (which I used as the foundation for the redesigning of my architectural history unit) was a book published in 1974 by Georges Perec. It's called Species of Spaces. Try to say that fast three times! He talks about this poetic understanding of spatiality and the typologies of space, and he talks about this infra-ordinary. I'm always interested in not the extraordinary, and unlike that younger girl who wanted to design fancy, extraordinary 'McMansions', I'm now very fascinated with the mundane, ordinary, and habitual aspects of everyday life. If you haven't checked out that old book from 1974, really all designers (but also anyone) will find it fascinating. The other thing is I would recommend the work of Jos Boys. In 2014, she came up with a great book which talks about doing disability differently, and it's titled (Doing Disability Differently:) An Alternate Handbook on Architecture. It's great for anyone in the built environment space to start to understand how we can design differently from the way we've been taught to design architecture. Lastly, I have a book coming out in 2023, in July of this year. It encompasses two decades of my work globally across Canada, the US, Europe, and Australia. I'm hoping it will contribute something to the conversation! I'm always in love with new inspirational projects and theoretical ideas to incorporate into my work.
