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Abstract:

All too often buildings are still designed for a so-called average user, “a six-foot-tall, 20-year-old male, with perfect vision and a good grip” (Fletcher). People who differ from this average user, e.g., because they are living with an impairment, are associated with accessibility legislation, which is felt by architects as hampering their creativity and taking away their challenge as designers. The aim of this contribution is to counter this association by demonstrating that the perspective and experience of people living with an impairment or particular condition can represent a valuable resource for architectural design. Because of their specific interaction with space, these people are able to appreciate spatial qualities that architects are not always attuned to. To some extent, their perspective may thus be considered as an example of connoisseurship, a form of expertise that develops through perceptual learning, i.e., discovering distinctive features and invariant properties of things and events. As a result of this perceptual learning, experts are able to differentiate, in their body or surrounding world, variables that are meaningless to novices. This holds for people living with a mobility or sensory impairment, but also for people living with particular mental conditions such as autism or – the focus of this conference – dementia. First we provide an overview of the research methods we apply to gain empirical access to these people’s experience, and of lessons learned so far. Subsequently we zoom in on the case of a women with early onset dementia. All too often, dementia is assumed to obliterate people’s ability to share their experiences with others. By writing poems and making changes in her house, however, this woman makes her experiences explicit both as verbal account, and in the (re)organisation of the little worlds she creates. Because of her altered relationship with space, time and her sense of self, the little worlds she creates make observable how she tries to maintain as many connections as possible to the house she had made her own before living with dementia, and what adaptations she makes in order to feel comfortable. In living with dementia, we argue, this woman thus helps architects to gain a nuanced understanding of how to design living environments where people (with and without dementia) may feel at home, or at least may feel at ease, by reducing their feelings of confusion, anxiety and loneliness and by enhancing agency and feelings of relatedness and security.