Tailor-Made: Exploring Adaptive Design in Interiors through Apparel

Barbara Laskey Weinreich

“Difference” and “disability” have come out of the closet - specifically the clothes closet - as apparel which adapts to wheelchair users has entered high fashion. Accessible interior design which is beautiful, inventive and adaptive is woefully behind this trend. Today, providing accessibility ininterior design is treated as a code requirement, not a design opportunity. It is viewed as institutional and not inspirational, further marginalizing wheel- chair users, whereas adaptive clothing design is emerging from the shadows onto the runway. To address this disparity between design disciplines, we created an undergraduate interior design studio at Pratt Institute's School of Design that uses the exploration of adaptive clothing and product design as a device to investigate applications to accessibility, transformation and adaptability of an interior environment. The program of the studio is a hypothetical pilot flagship store for an actual adaptive clothing brand. The store, by definition and intention, will be fully accessible but it will also adopt the tenets of Universal Design - as differences among user experiences come in many forms. Students were assigned a progression of tasks to ramp them into design of a retail store: research into current adaptive clothing, product and interior design, design charrettes to create objects which transform and revert, and finally designing a retail store for wheel-chair users. This trans-disciplinary design approach will result in students - and thus future practitioners - having internalized the lessons of well-designed accessibility and Universal Design and who will be as mindful of accessibility as they currently are of sustainability. As opposed to only satisfying “code requirements,” accessible, adaptive interior design will be second-nature: beautiful, exciting... and common.