Jurriaan van Stigt
We are making all homes accessible. That sounds noble, but I increasingly wonder: are we doing this in the right way? My 86-year-old mother's wheelchair is a wonder on wheels: super light, maneuverable, foldable, and fitting in any car. We control the lighting via simple IKEA lamps with a smartphone app. Opening the front door? Also via the phone, including a camera to see who is ringing the bell.
At the neighbours', in a house from 1890, we installed a stairlift in one day on their steep, narrow staircase. A flexible leasing system, later reusable elsewhere. The neighbour now walks with a modern, light walker and remains comfortably in her familiar home.
Meanwhile, regulations dictate that every new construction home must have doors that are 900 millimeters wide, with turning circles of 1500 millimeters and infrastructure that consumes a lot of space and costs money. As if technology has stalled at building codes from decades ago. That famous threshold of 2 centimeters? Solvable with a simple wedge element – which works perfectly in the 8.4 million existing homes.
It reminds me of a deposit on cans. Intended to combat litter, but now we mainly have organized street waste: collection points everywhere where bags full of cans are dumped. Perhaps a ban on cans would have been smarter?
True sustainability requires flexibility and innovation, not rigid rules that overlook reality. Before we renovate all homes to one standard or continue to base every new home on outdated premises, we should better look at what is possible now. Because sometimes less regulation and more customization is the smartest path to accessibility. I call that critical design thinking about sustainability.