Lived everyday family experience
My 20 years of lived everyday experience as Mother to Greta, who is a wheelchair user and has Cerebral Palsy, gives me an understanding of what life can be like with additional barriers, and allows me to implement this gained knowledge and understanding to provide inclusive solutions in all my consulting and collaborative projects.
Bringing these qualities to each project
As an architectural designer with understanding of design processes, and 20 years of lived everyday experience of being a neurodivergent family with a wheelchair using child, I have developed a sensitivity to, and awareness of, the variety of ways in which the built environment, and our social ways of using it, can become barriers to inclusive use and experience.
This knowledge feeds directly into how I structure design processes, and how my role as consultant supports specialist clients and enables communication between them and their designers.
A sensitivity to clients needs and hopes, and an understanding of the full design process, enables me to determine within each specific project what information is needed and when. This enables me to plan an interactive collaborative process that feeds into the architects timeline and ensures that the whole team is heard and seen.
Selected projects below:
The Ramp House
When we knew that Greta would need an adapted environment to support her everyday life, it seemed to be one of the most obvious things that we could do for her. We have always had the philosophy that she is part of everything, and that we need to find ways around (physical or other) obstacles. The house was designed with her, and the rest of the family, in mind from the start, which has allowed us to build a uniquely enabling inclusive environment that works for us all.
It has also had the advantage that it has changed the way that people think about moving around and through spaces, the way that spaces can connect both vertically and horizontally : we have had many people visiting and saying, why can’t buildings always be designed with ramps?
We approached the design process in the same way that we would with anyone’s project : lots of talking and listening about what we needed as a family to support our everyday living, then spatialisation of this, then more discussion, then refining of the design, and so the process continued. We were lucky that any time there was a question to be answered we could all sit around the kitchen table and discuss it. We also used models all the way through, these are very tangible things for children (in fact for anyone) and easy to interact with and adapt.
Inclusive Family Home
To design a fully accessible, inclusive home, where all the family can enjoy everyday life together.
During the design process, I talked with, and listened to the family in order to fully understand their needs and wishes in their inclusive family home. My lived everyday experience of having a daughter who is disabled, allowed me to ask the important questions of the family, and to collaboratively develop a design for a home which works specifically for them.
Our design intention was to make the spaces inclusive, providing easy connections between living spaces. This enabled their wheelchair using daughter to develop independence and allowed her parents to observe this whilst standing back, and enjoying seeing her and her brother so easily able to go in and out of the house to the garden to play.
We also designed good visual connections between many of the spaces, which is very important for a child with mobility support needs.The clients say that the difference it has made to how they live inclusively is immeasurable. Being able to watch their children play outside, feeling part of this, whilst also seeing their growing independence is a delight.