Design for Independent Living : The Environment and Physically Disabled People

Using lived experience to guide accessible design

In 1979, University of California architecture professors Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow published this account of ongoing collaborations with members of a robust disability community in Berkeley, California. In the first attempt by architects to know disabled people and to design from their perspective, they employed an empathetic approach that differed from typical accessible design guidelines.

Instead of presenting architectural designs to resolve existing barriers, Design for Independent Living turns to disabled people to tell their own stories through interviews and photographs of their own homes, workplaces, and lives in public. The disabled informants of the project were members of the Independent Living movement – the activists who shaped the disability rights movement in the late twentieth century in the United States – and their contributions demonstrate the necessity of liberating design from ableist, restrictive ways of thinking about personal and public life.

Now with a new introduction by three scholars of design and disability history, Design for Independent Living is an indispensable resource for architecture and design experts who seek a socially informed practice that looks to the people most affected by design to understand its potentials and its shortcomings.

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