Assignement 1 – People in places
Matthew Macuso & Mira Shami
ARC624 | Spring 2020
Universal design is about designing for people. But, architectural design and design communications focus on drawing and modeling buildings and spaces. Thus, despite a designer’s efforts to design with people in mind, they usually have difficulty showing how a design actually fulfills the needs and desires of building users because their attention is focused on the building itself. Without better representation of how people use buildings, it is also difficult for the client and the public to understand how a building is addressing their needs. The most challenging experiences to communicate are those that are invisible in typical architectural drawings – illumination, acoustics, thermal comfort, mobility challenges, emotions.
The objective of this assignment was to find examples of real places that are not designed well for people based on the Goals of Universal Design and take photographs and/or videos to document the design failures that incorporate human response, e.g. a person trying to read a computer screen with lots of reflections, a door that is too narrow, etc. Lastly, the best examples was selected to be manipulated or replaced by an example of good experience in a better setting.
