Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Guidance Documents, short-term

Comment by [Participant]: I think Bob’s absolutely on the right track, and I think that’s one of the sort of things we should start on immediately that will have medium to long-term effect.

And it seems like another medium-term effort should be the things that have come up yesterday and today about the ANSI committees and Illumination Engineering Society committees. [They] are really closely related to this field and we could start developing input for those, which would eventually result in standards that were backed by facts and research and that kind of thing.

It seems like we should also think about maybe some short-term efforts in that some of the things that we’ve all discussed over the past couple of days are kind of so well-agreed upon and obvious that it might be a good idea to try to compile something almost immediately that everyone agrees on. And whether it’s a brochure put out by NIBS or whatever it is, it could be something that could be just used as examples or suggestions for good practices.

Comment by Roberta Null: I wanted to offer sort of a framework that we could start with and I just have – I wrote this book Universal Design. It was called Creative Solutions for ADA Compliance and it came out in ’96, and it’s out of print. But I’ve been working on a revision of that – and with best practices and things that are going on in a whole variety of areas related to universal design.

I just lost my publisher because it was somebody in interior design and very interested in the fluff, and not understanding universal design. I thought, well, I’ve got a lot of it done, so I could bring in the collaborative thing and it started out that way anyhow.

I certainly would be willing to work with anybody who’s interested in really having some examples of things right now. That would be something that I will offer as something that I think could be a solution because I think that I’ve done a good job so far and the book has received a lot of recognition.

I’ve never made a lot of money on it, but the people in Japan think it’s wonderful, because they’ve got this aging population, and of course in working with the elderly. I’m an advocator, and so it’s been written but it’s got a lot --. I’ve found it on Amazon and I can buy the used book. This was in a library someplace and nobody checked it out. So I could get it for $15.

But the other thing, when we were talking about stairs, I worked with a fellow called Jake Paul. He’s working on the international codes and things like that. But we could really bring in, you know, people who, I think the people in this group really recognize, lots of experts in different areas, and I think that that would be a good example because he’s really –

Response by Marsha Mazz: And Jake is on the ANSI A117 committee.

Comment by Jim Woods: I’m going to take a chance on something here and look at it shortterm, mid-term, long-term, and go back to some of the stuff that I used to deal with when I was teaching in the classroom, undergraduate and graduate levels. I’m going to propose three principles and see how far they fly:

• One is to design for health and well-being, not just to prevent disease or infirmity.

• The second is to design for the last day of occupancy, not the first day.

• The third is to minimize energy consumption, don’t build it; otherwise, optimize energy efficiency to achieve the design objectives.

I don’t know if that captures what we were talking about here or not but it gets across both the current situation, the energy issues, but it also, I think, attacks some of the health issues, and we can then start putting the low vision lighting and stuff like that within it. But it would lead us I think in the area of being able to support that with research.

Response by [Participant]: I like your first point, because I think that what Bob has suggested is a starting point on that, which can be supplemented with similar approaches to modeling this individual environment to fit at the same level of sophistication for other types of sensory and physical conditions. And then we have something to work with. I mean, we then have a basis for making rational recommendations and having reasonable answers to the skeptics.

Comment by Erin Schambureck: In the interest of giving ourselves some short-term goals to work on immediately and [to] have something to review, possibly when we consider getting together in three or four months here, would it be a positive thing to – and I’m willing to volunteer for this task – but to take all of the presentations and the notes and things that have been taken from this workshop and compile two lists?

One is a list that would go out on the site that would be the list of the identified problems – not the solutions yet, but the list of the identified problems that we’ve all talked about, and try and define them as we can. Maybe that’s a Google doc that people can access and modify or revise or update, still trying to keep that succinct.

We want it to be obvious what we’re talking about and not go into the hours of discussion that we’ve had here, but to create that list of identified problems, and then the second list to create a list of the proposed solutions to those problems.

So the second list might have that point that says we have a high-contrast strip at the top stair and the bottom stair of each stair section, you know, at each landing – simple solution, two sentence, something that then that second list is again user-friendly where it’s succinct but we’re solving problems or at least attempting to solve problems and creating something almost immediately that can be used at the VA, that can be used at the IRS, that can be used throughout GSA quickly.

[Editor’s Note: Erin has drafted the list: it is included as Appendix G.]

And then as part of the mid-term and long-term solutions, we’re backing that up with research and developing ways to turn that into more long-term implementable solutions, and I’m willing to do that, to cull through the information in my free time.

Responses from [five Participants]: Wow. And create those two lists so that we have a summary of what’s happened. Sold. This can become a living document in the short term. With data of items to move forward.

Comment by Bob Massof: Our deadline is November 16. That’s the deadline for an R-21 proposal to do an exploratory – kind of the equivalent of like a planning grant to put together this type of a collaborative project, and so the next window to do that is – the deadline is November 16, which if we could meet that – it’s a six-page proposal. It’s going to be denser than a New York bagel, but the earliest start date would be July 1.

Comment by Earle Kennett: So to some people who are interested in pursuing that type of thing, you know, raise your hand. We could really get started on this immediately and we’ll set up some conference calls and –

These can be completely parallel.

This is really kind of a framework for things that Kurt –

Response by Kurt Knight: Both are useful, I mean, absolutely.

Well, we can quote your problems in the beginning of the research project.

Comment from Marsha Mazz: Well, it’s kind of hard to hear over here what you’re exactly talking about and I can’t read your lips. So, if you could talk about what the research is again that you’re trying to do?

Response by Bob Massof: Well, the larger project, which is what would be two years preparatory window in terms of before you would actually engage in, there’d be a lot of preliminary groundwork to do: planning and pilot work to see what’s feasible and what direction you go and things of that sort.

So there’s two phases to it, and the first phase is this planning and feasibility phase, and there’s a program announcement within the NIH to support just that for these collaborations, and there are grant types that are called an R-21. It’s an exploratory grant. You don’t need preliminary data to show what you’re going to do. There’s no risk. So it gives you an opportunity to do some things a little wild and crazy.

So it’s providing funding to help people get together, provide funding to get some pilot data, provide funding to try some things out, see what’s going to work, what’s not going to work. And so if we wanted to get on that train, it leaves the station November 16, and we would be able to get started doing work. The earliest start date would be July 1.

And so there, what we would need is for people to basically identify themselves as being interested, wanting to participate and to help shape the larger project. It would involve, you know, conference calls – maybe if NIBS would be interested in hosting these kinds of meetings to help shape that out, then that might all get together on occasion to further refine and put this together, and probably bringing in other people as well who represent certain technical expertise that we may not have represented here. Like, if we’re going to do physics-based modeling, we want people who know how to do physics-based modeling. We want some optical people who do these rate tracing models, and these are kinds of people who design lenses and do things like that. You do that with helicopters, I know.

Comment by David Munson: I do that with architecture. I was one of the guys who invented it. And here’s the problem. Unless you’re doing 100 courtrooms and you’ve got a federal judge who wants to see 100 federal courtrooms, you can’t afford to do it because the cost to build the model is almost as much time as designing a real courtroom and getting the thing finalized. I’ve got a courtroom program right here. You can dial up how many people are on the jury, how many tables the defendants are going to have, what colors, is there skylights; and it will generate a three-dimensional model and you can walk around and you can grab a chair and you can put it over here and you can say, does all of the chairs see everybody’s chair because they’ve got eye heights, and can the judge see all the ones in the jury? And you can go through all the stuff and in the end it’s not very damned practical.

Response by Bob Massof: Well, you’re about 50 years ahead of my thinking.

Comment by David Munson: I was flying three-dimensional computers in 1983. We did raytracing, we did full radiocity calculations.

Response by Bob Massof: So this may never be useful. This is really designed to understand the problem. It’s still a research project. The idea is to create a research tool.

Comment by David Munson: Find five buildings that you find acceptable. Find five buildings that you find acceptable and say these guys work. Find five that don’t work. Publish just the pictures.