Posts Tagged ‘Universal Design’

  Design is intelligence made visible. - Alina Wheeler   Each year I attend the ASA conference on Aging and reoccurring themes begin to emerge and persist throughout the week; this session remained true to form. One mantra I picked up early; “Design is for all.” Design on the Brain Each of us has a brain equipped with a tightly bundled grouping of nerve cells about the size of an apple wedge located from the top of the spinal cord into the middle of the brain. This part of our brain contains about 70% of its estimated 200 billion nerve

  “Marriage is a wonderful institution...but who wants to live in an institution?” -Groucho Marx   Valentine’s Day Valentine's Day traces its origins to an annual Roman pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, which was held yearly on February 15. Seems the lovers' holiday has its roots in raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, says classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Celebration was disapproved of by the Roman Catholic Church and thus linked the festival

  Accessible design is good design. -Steve Ballmer   For most boomers our first encounter with Universal Design came in the form of either cut-curbs or automatic doors. I can recall as a young man the fascination I had with the first “automatic door” at the Richie's market up the street. Stepping on the heavy black floor mat and watching the thick cord pull the door open was like opening a portal to the future...look mom no hands!   Universal Design Universal design is the creation of environments and products which are meant to usable by

  “Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.” -Stephen R. Covey   Stephen Covey’s seminal work on how to create a better human species titled “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” was first published in 1989 and has sold over 15 million copies in 38 languages since first its release. The concepts are timeless and can be broadly applied as I have done here with aging in place. What follows is The

                              “Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.”  -Ann Douglas   My wife and I just moved across the river to a nearby city in a neighboring state. The move was done mostly by us. This meant we placed our hands on everything we own at least twice. Further, we had to notify all the entities modern humans deal with in life of our change in contact information; a time-devouring endeavor if there ever was one. After weeks of moving stuff, Thoreau’s adage: “Simplify, simplify, simplify” was resonating; and a philosophy