"Breaking Barriers Award"
Focusing on Design For All
by Pete Kercher

Pete Kercher

he Breaking Barriers Award is an annual event organised by the European Commission's Social Affairs and Employment Directorate-General to coincide with the European Day of Disabled People on 3 December. The topic chosen for the 2001 edition of both the Day and the Award was Design for All.

Design for All means designing, developing and marketing mainstream products, services, systems and environments to be accessible by as broad a range of users as possible. Primarily, this involves designing products, services and applications that are readily usable by most potential users without needing any modifications. That also encompasses products that are designed to be easily adaptable to different users (e.g. by adapting their user interfaces) and products with standardised interfaces that are compatible with specialised equipment (e.g. Assistive technologies).

Design for All is not intended to make every product in the world usable by every user: the aim is for designers to think holistically at the outset of the design process and create a product that suits as many people as possible, rather than basing their approaches on niche thinking. The result is a significant reduction in the need for the "add-ons" and last-minute adaptations that can be as expensive as they are often obnoxious and the tendency to channel design thinking away from them and towards facilitating the use of correct AT.

Promoters of Design for All have coined the phrase: "Good design enables, bad design disables". This is because the way that our artificial environment is designed at present disables all of us at some stage in our lives: our homes are potential death traps for children and the elderly alike; transport systems and the gems produced by city planers often have more in common with intentionally-designed obstacle courses than with the clear-headed thinking we are entitled to expect from qualified architects, planners and designers.

Even if we only count the officially registered disabled persons inside the European Union, we are looking at a population comparable to one of the larger member states: no surprise then that the European Commission and the European Disability Forum are aiming for the widest possible implementation of Design for All principles! That means getting the message across to industry, consumer organisations, legislators, planners… the European Commission and a diverse range of actors are already including Design for All within a number of policy areas across the European Union, such as transport and the information society... Yet further action needs to be taken. There is an urgent need to integrate the Design for All approach in legislation, as well as in standards, public procurement procedures and other mechanisms. That will ensure that society becomes fully accessible to all users, regardless of impairment.

Open to individuals and business partnerships based in Europe, the Breaking Barriers Award 2001 attracted entries from all over the continent. The international jury was called on to make a first selection for each of the three categories (Home & Daily Living: 19 products shortlisted; Travel & Leisure: 11 products; Work & the Workplace: 4 products) and then to choose a winner for each one.
The Germany company Wall's Streetline City Toilet won in the Home & Daily Living category; the Travel & Leisure award went to the Northern Ireland public transport Translink network's website, while the Work & the Workplace award was won by lift manufacturer Schindler, which also won the online vote run on the Award's website until a matter of an hour before the 3 December presentation ceremony to take home the special e-users' award.

For further information about the Breaking Barriers Award, go to http://www.eddp.org (choose your language: English German or French). This site also includes a useful list of links to other sites for information about disability activists in Europe and the rest of the world and about Design for All.

For further information about Design for All, go to www.design-for-all.org, the website of the European Institute for Design and Disability. Although the website currently carries only a limited amount of material from the EIDD's magazine Crisp&Clear, a major overhaul is planned to generate a source for examples of best practices. Want to publicise any? Got a gripe about bad design? Then contact the EIDD's Birgitte Witstoft at bw@proasolutions.dk.

About the author
Pete Kercher is a communications consultant based in Italy. Executive Officer of the Bureau of European Designers Associations BEDA from 1988 to 1994, he has represented Italy on its Board of Directors since then, including a stint as Honorary Secretary (1999-2000). A founding member of the European Institute for Design and Disability EIDD (Dublin, 1993), he is currently serving as its Vice-President.
Representing BEDA in the international jury of the Breaking Barriers Award 2001 chaired by the well-known Italian design industrialist Alberto Alessi, he was flanked by representatives of the European Commission, the European Disability Forum, the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe, Corporate Social Responsibility Europe and the European Institute for Design and Disability.