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DESIGNING FOR THE DISABLED: THE NEW PARADIGM
By Selwyn Goldsmith. Oxford: ButterworthHeinemann. 1997. L45
Pity the poor architect who is so creatively crippled when designing for people that he (sic) has to resort to crutches in the form of design guides, those handy manuals for an ideal ergonomic utopia inhabited by standard, average ciphers. Of course in reality there is no such animal as an average person. We are all unique non-modular individuals, although in public design terms there has to be some kind of common denominator, albeit broader than the notion of the 'average'. Many people who do not conform to this average have been disabled by architects and their clients through arbitrary changes of level,...