Riflessioni sulle strategie di progettazione universale

The essay offers food for thought on universal design (UD) strategies. The author sees UD strategies as an epiphenomenon of overcoming the bio-medical model of disability and recognises their pivotal role in emancipating accessible design from disability. Thanks to this, accessible design from design for disability becomes design for inclusion. UD strategies, however, also have some conceptual and applicative limits of which the designer must be aware. The essay briefly describes these limits and highlights that the challenge of making public spaces more accessible often leads the designer to insert support measures and devices (including those based on assistive technologies) aimed at satisfying even very specific needs expressed, perhaps, by a very small group of people, onto a ‘universal’ basis. The same scope of application of the UD strategies is not universal. If products, places and collective services, websites and digital applications are privileged scopes of application of UD strategies, there are other arenas ‒ like home environment adaptation ‒ where generalisation should be set aside for a different approach ‒ personalisation ‒ striving to understand and alleviate accessibility problems that a defined space generates for a specific person who lives inside a specific family and social context.