Accessible Gardens. What do you immediately think of? I’ll bet miles of clunky stainless steel handrails, railway sleepers and oceans of concrete popped involuntarily into your head. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Let’s talk accessibility and changing demographics. Let’s explode the myth that designing for limited mobility is by definition an imposition, a compromise. It’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s an opportunity.
What we’re talking about here is Design for Life.The Manic Street Preachers know what I mean, they like the idea so much they called one of their albums after it, fifteen years ago.
Is it the language that’s off putting, that people have a problem with – Accessibility? The word immediately conjures up objectionable notions; the aforementioned steel, creosoted timber and concrete. Is Multi Generational Design better, what does that conjure? Exactly, nothing. MGD has no baggage, so that’s what I’m calling it.
It’s not complicated, it can be as simple as a raised timber herb planter that the child with spina bifida loves, that the able bodied children love, that the adults love and that the elderly grandparents love. Facilitating access can also heighten enjoyment. The two should never have been mutually exclusive in the first place, but they were. I’d love to help try to change that.
I designed a garden recently for a household of three children, two parents and one grandparent. The youngest child has spina bifida and uses a modified wheelchair, the mobility of the elderly man is also compromised. The challenge here was to facilitate everyone, not just the two members of the household with the special requirements.
In design terms I am keen to develop the idea of universal accessibility and ease of use. What I mean by this is that more consideration be given to conceiving and executing elements which facilitate convenience and ease for the entire age spectrum while retaining design merit. My Bloom 2015 garden (based on a real world garden of bigger proportions) was wheelchair accessible and child focused but neither of those things were immediately obvious when you entered the space.
The garden contained a number of elements which were specifically designed to cater for the youngest boy but which did not compromise the enjoyment of the able bodied members of the family. In fact the design of the water feature, for example, had at its core a consideration for the little guy but ultimately provided an experience for all the family beyond what a typical or expected design of such an element could provide. And this point goes to the root of what I am talking about; accessibility, ease of use and convenience for the aged and people with disabilities does not have to be a design compromise. It can enhance a design. The ramps in the original garden are another example of this, and the elevated vegetable and herb planters. Things which were conceived to facilitate the disability ultimately heightened the experience of every user.
Can we get to a point where we are looking at these things as design opportunities rather than inconveniences? It also ties in with the idea of future proofing garden design; the elderly are probably our most avid group of garden users. Designing for life. Based on the reaction to my raised vegetable patch from those in the older demographic over Bloom weekend I know that there is a lot of interest in this whole area.
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