Author: Ruth O’Reilly, Senior Built Environment Design Advisor, Centre for Excellence in Universal Design, National Disability Authority
Here at the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design, we often use this quotation from the designer, Victor Papanek, to explain the focus of our work:
Figure 1: Quotation from Design for the Real World by Victor Papenek (1971)
A key tenet of Universal Design is that good design works well for everyone. Sometimes however, it seems that social sustainability is the forgotten pillar of sustainable development. How can we persuade designers that taking a Universal Design approach – designing for all people, regardless of their age, size, ability or disability – is a key element of sustainable development?
Authors: Louise Veling is a Senior Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Horizon 2020 SHAPES Project as part of the Assisted Living and Learning (ALL) Institute / Department of Engineering at Maynooth University. Rudi Villing is a Lecturer with the School of Engineering at Maynooth University, Programme Director of the BSc in Robotics & Intelligence Devices, member of the Hamilton Institute and associate director of the Assisted Living and Learning (ALL) institute.
Rudi Villing and Louise Veling
Few people would dispute the importance of centring older people’s needs when it comes to developing assistive technologies. For assistive robots, this is even more important. As in other fields, within robotics and human-robot interaction (HRI) research, older people are often subject to stereotypical representations and ageist attitudes. Assistive robots are also still in their infancy, with few yet deployed in practice, so there is still some distance to go before robots make it out of the lab and into the real world. What they will be capable of and how they will be used is still in a process of negotiation.
Author: Dr Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez, MSCA Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute
Stephanie Ortoleva and Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez
Stephanie Ortoleva, founder of Women Enabled International (WEI) advocates for women and girls with disabilities. She says that, “disabled women are organizing for ourselves because we have found that other movements, whether it’s the women’s rights movement or the disability rights movement, very often don’t include our issues as the key points of their advocacy. Disabled women just aren’t going to be silent anymore” (Ford Foundation, 2020).
Ideas in ALL is two years old! Our blog was set up on 3 December 2020, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. The blog seeks to engage an audience beyond academic journal readers – it aims to be relevant to a much wider range of stakeholders and to engage with public debate. A crucial element of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute’s blog – Ideas in ALL is to empower and give voice to people with disabilities, mental health problems, or chronic illnesses and older people, and their many and varied experiences of positive ageing. We also want those often marginalized from the benefits of mainstream society to feel that they can share ideas here. We strive to ensure that Ideas in ALL is characterized by accessible style, pluralism, openness and appreciation of difference.
Author: Cassandra Murphy, PhD researcher in the Psychology Department of Maynooth University, funded by H2020 project GoGreenRoutes, Assisting Living and Learning Institute (ALL)
Cassandra Murphy
I often talk about sustainability in my work being in the realm of environmental psychology. My research explores the human-nature relationship, which inevitably links to pro-environmental behaviour. People often assume pro-environmental behaviour defines sustainability, but sustainability is much more than recycling and planting trees. Through my conversations I have learnt that the term ‘sustainability’ can be perceived differently. We constantly hear about sustainability, in the news, in our emails, in daily conversations; but what does this term really mean? Everyone’s understanding is individual to their lives and their experience. For some they instantly think of the UN Sustainable Development Goals whereas for others it can simply mean having the ability to keep up momentum of what they do each day and not burn themselves out. An all too familiar experience of many after the recent pandemic.
UN Sustainable Development Goals logo.
The most common definition of sustainability comes from the UN World Commission on Environment and Development which says sustainable development means “to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” That’s exactly what it is. Ensuring that throughout our lifetimes we strive to create a world in which we do not take from the generations that come after us, but instead make sure they have what we have, if not better. The future generations should have equal access to the resources we have and be able to benefit from them no matter where they are, or how much money they earn. In a sense, this is the idea that we are leaving no one behind.
Hannah Casey, Léa Urzel Francil and Matthew McKenna
The ALL Institute celebrated its fifth anniversary at the end of November, which also coincided with the second anniversary of its blog – Ideas in ALL–. With this in mind, we, the blog’s editorial team, invited ALL members, as well as its collaborators and close stakeholders to engage with the topic of sustainability and contribute to a dedicated symposium.
Central to the work of ALL is the core ethos of a rights-based, person-centered approach to social inclusion and independent living. The theme of sustainability aligns itself closely with this underpinning vision. As such, the work of ALL comprises a vital nexus between academic research, civil society, lived experience, law and policy. Sustainability represents a core principle of the ALL Institute, and hence of the Ideas in ALL Blog.
This ERC funding will be used to build an interdisciplinary project team and will enable us to explore the core project research questions and aims, which span bioethics, science policy, law, and innovation. This team includes our project manager, Sinéad Masterson, and postdoctoral researcher, Opeyemi Kolawole, both of whom recently joined the team, and who will be joined in future by further postdoctoral and PhD researchers. Together, we will work to tackle the central project research question, which focuses on investigating what are the main bioethical implications posed by patents over ‘technologies’ related to the human body, and how are these bioethical issues accounted for, if at all, within European patent decision-making.
Author: Philip Finn, Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute and Post-Doctoral Researcher; recipient of the Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Fellowship.
The right to participate in the cultural life of the community is enshrined in a number of international documents, for example the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 27) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (Article 15(1)(a)). In relation to the specific needs of people with disabilities Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires States to ‘enable persons with disabilities to have the opportunity to develop and utilize their creative, artistic and intellectual potential’. The Convention is central to elaborating a human rights model of disability underlining the recognition and participation of persons with disabilities in communal life. It necessitates accessibility as both consumers of culture as well as creators.
Authors: Bob Williams, Systems Thinking Practitioner, Trainer and Evaluator – Consultant. Joan O’Donnell, Systems Thinking Trainer and PhD Researcher at Maynooth University’s Assisting Living and Learning Institute, Research Funded through the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies (ADVANCE CRT)
Joan O Donnell & Bob Williams
In this blog, we will discuss topics covered during ADVANCE CRT’s Summer School on Systems Thinking at Maynooth University in June 2022. See here for the first blog. It can be read as a discourse around designing research, and you are invited to consider how the questions posed offer an inflection point for your research.
Nobody would deny that research is a complex business. One of the most complex decisions is deciding the focus of your research among the vast range of possibilities that lie within its scope. This blog explores how understanding and addressing three different kinds of complexity can help with that tricky decision. Ontological complexity helps you address the reality you are dealing with; cognitive complexity helps you understand how different people make sense of that reality and praxis complexity helps you decide which parts of ontological and cognitive complexities ought to be inside and outside of your focus.
