Designing for People with Disabilities

I have worked directly with and for people with disabilities since 2011 at various academic institutions. This one-on-one work has allowed me to hear from people with disabilities the numerous ways that urban environments are structured to exclude their presence from scenes of everyday city-life. From 2018 to 2023, I worked as an urban designer for the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire en réadaptation du Montréal métropolitain (CRIR) on the projects outlined below.

Since 2011, Alexis Nihon (owned by Cominar Real Estate Investment Trust) has been the site of a Living Lab, allowing researchers and practitioners to have a naturalistic environment to conduct studies centered around disability and technology, planning and architecture, and communication. These studies have resulted in the redesign of Alexis Nihon to improve access for people with disabilities. In the summer of 2018, I conducted environment-behavior research to investigate how people with disabilities use the redesigned public spaces in Alexis Nihon. This approach allowed me to observe how mall-goers use various locales in the mall, with attention paid to how easily people with disabilities were able to use the existing furniture and environments with the least resistance possible.

The findings of the study demonstrate that people with disabilities often attempt to transform or change their environment to make it suit their needs and wants. Barriers to use were identified, including: a lack of movable furniture, inadequate seating, furniture that was unusable by people with mobility issues, and poor signage that made it difficult for people to navigate the mall. The recommendations put forward at the end of the study recommend that Cominar improve the signage throughout the mall, increase the amount of seating, and make it explicit what parts of the mall are for ‘public use’ and what is ‘private’.

The findings of this research are now available here.

Improving the accessibility of information and communication in the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts

Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, this ongoing project aims to explore how to overcome the difficulties experience by people with communication disorders when reading texts that accompany artworks in the museum’s exhibitions, and in particular, in the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace. This has involved conducting walkthroughs with people with disabilities to see how they navigate the museum space, and what their experience is reading the existing texts accompanying artworks, and then giving them modified texts that use different terms and language. Another component of this work has been to evaluate the space to see what improvements may be made to the design of the space and the placement of the work of arts, taking into consideration the circulation of museum-goers, the ease of wayfinding and the quality of signage and the lighting and contrast.

The findings of this research will be available in 2024.