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

Obstacles to Navigation

I love these pictures (slides 5 – 7), because I’ve worked in places like that and have unfortunately been forced to design places like that when there’s no budget and I’m reusing existing furniture and repurposing an existing space to put things into.

Cubical Layouts

But in a space like the one on the left (slide 5), where [compared to] the one on the right, you have an absence of color and shadow. It’s a sea of cubicles; a cubicle farm, as one of my friends call it. There’s no way to navigate those spaces.

You look for things -- like, in the very back of the [right] picture[ in slide 5], somebody has a potted plant on their overhead, and you look for that potted plant as a way of orienting yourself in that office space. So cubicles and things that are not fixed architecture can be just as big a problem to navigate as other options.

Furniture in Space with Clutter

This (slide 6) is a blowup of a plan from, like, a 1940s or ‘50s German office building. This was the idea of an open office plan where you could be flexible and you could be within reach of all the pieces that you needed, and someone else could be off over in their own world. But this creates spatial clutter. Freestanding furniture is going to be just as much an issue to navigate through as the architectural walls and the space.

Floor Naming and Numbering

This is a little abstract one, but if you look at those elevator buttons, whether you’re in a building in San Francisco and you come in on the east side of the building and it’s Floor Level One; you come in on the west side of the building and the road slopes, and you’re now in B- 2.

So how do you know what floor you’re really on? How do you orient yourself within that building? We have no system that says, “Here’s how to number a building.” There are certain conventional standards, but there’s nothing that says, “This is the best-practices way to do it.” And you could confuse people between M for Main, L for Lobby, 1 for first floor. Well, in some cases, you’re -- for example, one is actually the second level above ground. How do you name them? How do you number them?

The numbering system, too, when you’re looking at a plan, an architectural drawing -- I’ve been part of projects where they’ve laid a grid over the floor plan, and the upper left corner is one and the lower right corner is 100, and we do a left to right down the grid. And that’s how they number buildings.

Comment by [Participant]: In defense of architects, that should change when the signage comes through, to be logical.

Response by Erin Schambureck: I hope so. It’s meant to be for the mechanical systems and labeling those into the AC systems and [other construction coordination]

Comment by [Participant]: It should never be the numbering system afterwards.

Response by Erin Schambureck: But it gets done. So looking more intuitively at how we number a building, can we come up with a better process for that?

Protruding Objects

We do have some guidelines in the ADA about where you can protrude objects into a hallway, but we don’t necessarily say that the objects protruding need to be of contrasting colors. So you may miss the object or you may not even see it altogether.

Comment by [Participant]: Well, that standard was specifically written to address people using a cane.

Response by Erin Schambureck: A cane, right.

Comment by Participant]: Essentially, the 27 inches is a magic number where [the cane of] an average-height person will intersect with the object, giving that user sufficient stopping time to avoid the object.

Comment by Participant]: So there’s nothing for people with low vision.

Response by Erin Schambureck: Exactly.

Comment by Marsha Mazz: And, in fact, if it’s below 27 inches, it’s not a “protruding object.” So for those of us with low vision, you’re more likely to walk into it, exactly. So again, it’s a situation where we addressed a problem for one user group, but it doesn’t in any way imply that another user group is [accommodated].

Question by Erin Schambureck: So is there a way that we could address “protruding objects” and modify the language in some way that would make it more universally friendly?

Response by [Participant]: The state of California attempted to address that by requiring what are known as detectable warnings, the bumps on the curb ramps, underneath drinking fountains.

Question by [Participant]: Did it work?

Response by [Participant]: Well, using detectable warnings to mark protruding objects would dilute their effectiveness to signal that we’re about to enter traffic. People come up with good ideas, but sometimes, they’re not as well thought out as we’d like them to be.

Disorienting Spaces (slide 7)

These are two images from the [research] project that Dennis talked about yesterday, where they were analyzing interior spaces that visually say one thing but really mean another.

In the [photo] on the left, which is from the Bellagio [Hotel in Las Vegas, this is a reflective glass wall next to the two gentlemen. It looks like there’s four people standing there. There’s actually only two. And the flooring pattern is such that there’s a little offset, but it continues on in through the glass. I would walk into that wall.

You know, it’s hard to tell. If you imagine Las Vegas lighting, it’s a lot of really warm lights and it’s a very uniform – (background noise) – of color temperature of light. There’s not a lot of distinguishing [features]. It is all just sort of orangy, runs together, very disastrous design change.

[In the photo] on the right, it looks like steps. It’s not. It’s actually a flat surface, and then going into the lovely, also very easy-to-navigate checkerboard flooring pattern. So we’re creating in an idea something that was supposed to identify what is probably an elevator lobby, but it’s creating navigation difficulties.