Trading Places is the name of an exhibition that is at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Sackler Centre for Arts Education http://www.vam.ac.uk/school_stdnts/education_centre/index.html from 19 April to 16 May, 2010. Nick Leon, from Design London, was kind enough to take me along to the exhibit when I met with him. He introduced me to Julia Cassim — Senior Research Fellow at the Helen Hamlyn Centre.
Julia explained the history of the exhibit — and the fact that it is based on a 10-year collaboration called the DBA (Design Business Association) Inclusive Design Challenge. The collaborators are the DBA themselves and the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre (www.hhc.rca.ac.uk).
From the Exhibition Brochure:
The title refers to the process behind the Challenge model, which has seen 500 professional designers from 41 DBA member consultancies ‘trade places’ with older and disabled people in order to find new ways to design more inclusive products, environments and services for a changing society.
For example, last year’s winner of the DBA Inclusive Design Challenge 2009 was ‘mo dynamic seating / Matter.
It is a lightweight, portable seating product with a pixellated support system that accommodates the user’s micro movements, providing a health-positive solution to inadequate seating in any context.
Pictures from the Helen Hamlyn web site. http://www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/2395/all/1/%27mo.aspx
But don’t get the idea it is all about products — not at all. The projects featured in the Trading Places exhibit vary from “Go Steady” — a public awareness campaign and kite-mark system by Wolff Olins to encourage greater awareness of mobility issues to Adare’s Mind Book — a software tool to encourage positive interactions to Judge Gill’s Ormsthwaite House dementia care home, designed to reduce the isolation of linear corridors.
Julia has been involved in a great diversity of global projects around inclusive design — from 1971-1998, Julia was resident in Japan. As an arts columnist of The Japan Times, Julia wrote widely for other publications and founded Access Vision, a non-profit organisation for visually impaired people engaged in research on alternative modes to access and interpret museum collections of art and artefacts. She also curated and designed award-winning exhibitions for audiences with visual impairments and learning disabilities. ‘Into the Light – Museums and their Visually Impaired Visitors’, her book published by Shogakkan in 1998, draws on this experience. (from her web-site at http://www.hhc.rca.ac.uk/216/all/1/julia-cassim.aspx)
Julia joined the Helen Hamlyn Centre in 2000 – and she has been the main force behind these Design Challenges.
Not sure if we have anything similar to this in Canada/BC in terms of inclusive design. If we don’t, we should have!