This image reveals the happenings of a typical day for students in Ray Lifchez’s design studio, Arch101: Social & Behavioral Factors in Design. The revolutionary course taught students how to incorporate accessibility into design and conceptualize space from a wide range of personas.
In this photo, we see white, male students with and without disabilities huddling together on Sproul Plaza with their instructor, Ray Lifchez (pictured off center with camera). Importantly, we see them listening to member perspectives from Berkeley’s independent living community who were treated as design “experts” and were invited to critique student work as mock clients. As a collective group, the students and people with disabilities gathered environmental design research that later formed the content of Lifchez’ and Barbara Winslow’s book, Design for Independent Living: The Environment and Physically Disabled People (1979). The nexus between design education and input from the disabled community conveyed a paradigm shift in teaching accessible design.