Concepts
Universal Design
Also Known As Inclusive Design, Barrier-Free Design
Design Principle
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The principle that buildings and products should be usable by everyone, across age and ability, without special adaptation: step-free entry, legible wayfinding, doors, controls and spaces that do not assume one kind of body. Named by the American architect Ronald Mace, a wheelchair user, it reframed accessibility from an added accommodation into a starting condition of good design, now written into building codes worldwide.
Facts
Concept Domain Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
In what year did Ronald Mace coin the term universal design?
Multiple encyclopedic and institutional sources credit the architect Ronald Mace with coining the term universal design to describe designing products and environments usable by everyone, but the pages consulted during this research pass describe who coined the term without stating the year. The year 1985 is widely repeated in informal writing but was not confirmed against a primary or clearly citable secondary source in this pass.
What would resolve this A citation to an early publication by Ronald Mace, an institutional history page from the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University, or a peer reviewed history of the concept that names the year directly.
Architectural history, disability studiesWikipedia
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