BURLINGTON HOTEL
3 JUNE 2010
NATIONAL DISABILITY AUTHORITY
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NDA Conference – Burlington Hotel – 3 June 2010 1
NDA conference on Universal Design, 3 June 2010, held in the Burlington Hotel, Dublin:
MR CRADDOCK: Good morning, I'd like to welcome our new chairperson, Peter McKevitt and with him is our Minister, Minister John Moloney who is with us here this morning and thank you very much for his support.
So as you're taking your seat I would like to welcome to the podium our new chairperson, Peter McKevitt to say a few words and start the ball rolling here this morning.
MR McKEVITT: Good morning and thank you, just to say that as Chair of the National Disability Authority it gives me great pleasure to welcome you all here today, a particular welcome to our Minister, John Moloney, whose taken time from his busy schedule to be with us and we'd like to thank him for that indeed. A special welcome to our distinguished international speakers, both those who are here with us and those who will be with us virtually, and a particular welcome to everyone else that's come.
Also I suppose I'd like to thank the organising committee for making sure that the ash cloud has stayed at a distance and allows us all to be here, they did great work on that anyway!
Today we're here, also as we're saying it's a seminar on the whole area of universal design and an area around the role of universal design in terms of legislation, policy and practice, and we hope by sharing our experiences and by sharing our understanding of universal design and about designing our environment and processes and systems not just for people with disabilities but for all of society, regardless of your age, regardless of your size, regardless of your ability or disability and that at the end of the day that we'll have a wealth of experience coming together that will inform us more accurately on the way forward immensely.
The National Disability actually this month, it celebrates it's 10th anniversary and it was born out of the commission on the status of people with disabilities. The commission on the status of people with disabilities is the mainstreaming of people with disabilities in society, at the heart of all it does.
The government adopted this policy of mainstreaming and it gives responsibility to government departments and public bodies, to have mainstreaming of people with disabilities as its core value and the centre of its remit. And it was from that, that the National Disability Authority was established in the year 2000. And in order to give independent advice, expert advice to government around policy, around services and around supports for people with disabilities and to support the Minister in every way possible, to ensure that that happens.
And as part of the National Disability Authority, the government took out the National Disability Act 2005, which had as part of that, was the inclusion of a Centre for Excellence and Universal Design. And so it was from that, that the NDA's remit, the National Disability Authority's remit was broadened to include that whole area of universal design for all of the people, and we were delighted to be able to do that.
The National Disability Authority has launched a threeyear strategic plan just recently, and it's about progressing the disability agenda. In part of that is also the whole area which is very important to us, promoting the whole area of universal design, and it was following the Disability Act in 2007, the NDA was given the remit to establish a Centre for Excellence and Universal Design under the great stewardship of our very own DrGer Craddock and his team of experts, whom we are very, very proud of, and who have put together this seminar today. And since it's inception in fact it has had, developed or has been working on a number of international had a number of international seminars and conferences, about 15 seminars, and more recently, last year we had the 24 hour Universal Design Challenge. Now, this was rather a unique thing, in the sense that we had about 30 experts, designers and students, work broken into teams of five, with an individual who had, each team had an individual who had severe and serious problems in accessing their own society in various ways and the challenge was to rectify and come up with solutions to those issues for that individual over a 24 hour period. It was like realtime TV programme almost and something maybe Jerry you could develop on that some time, but at the end of it all there were real solutions for real people and real people's needs and it was excellent.
As I said, since it's inception our Centre for Excellence and Universal Design has had three main focuses, one is about bringing awareness of universal design to the public, the other is increasing and improving the standards and setting standards, not only here in Ireland, but supporting it in Europe and worldwide and we have done that on a number of issues, particularly around, quite recently in Europe we were involved in setting and establishing the standards on the training of ICT professionals, that type of thing.
Then also working with the universities and working with the institutes of technology and incorporating the whole concept and the issues around universal design into the curriculum under various professionals and we are working on that through research and various other ways.
So there is a tremendous amount of work going on, we are particularly delighted in the National Disability Authority to be associated with that and promoting it and we are very proud of our Centre of Excellence and Universal Design. And today we have with us 90 people or more who are interested in this topic, who are going to draw from your experience who are going to draw from your expertise, and we know that here in this room, that we have with us, internationally, people from Japan as our speakers, people from Norway, Spain and America, plus everyone coming from every where else. We have in our hands here the expertise to carve the way, to develop a universal design environment for us all, whether it's in the built environment, whether physical buildings, in our services or access to whatever we need. So you and I, if we ever need it, whatever impairment might come our way, at the moment I have one, visionally, it's only ordinary glasses but it's definitely an impairment.
But so that you and I can access what we need in the future to design the problems out of the way forward, rather than including them. Rather than what we are saying retrofitting at high expense later on.
So I want to thank you for coming today and your enthusiasm, and your expertise and I want to thank you for the results I know you're going to have. Thank you very much indeed.
(applause)
It also gives me great pleasure now to introduce you to a man who is highly committed to the whole area of universal design and excellence, a man who is giving all of his time to developing, improving standards for people with disabilities and those with mental health, and services for people with disabilities and those with mental health issues. I'd like to welcome, our Minister, Minister Moloney. Thank you.
MINISTER MOLONEY: Thanks very much, Chairman, and thanks for the invitation as well, I think at the outset the chairman covered nearly everything I was going to say. So either ways the most important part of my few words will be to welcome you. And to thank so many people for coming and being associated with what universal design is all about. But let me pay particular welcome to people from Spain, Norway, Japan and America and of course our own people associated with the National Disability Authority, DrCraddock of course, Peter McKevitt and so many other people who are so anxious as it were, for us in government to deliver on the commitments laid down in the national disability strategy, and for those who haven't had a chance yet from Japan or America to read "Towards 2016" it's the government's commitment again on ensuring access across the board. Let me say also into jobs, housing design, whatever else, and it's so important for us people in government to remain in contact with the National Disability Authority.
I suppose to try to timeframe the commitments that have been laid down and I am happy to say Peter McKevitt and his board and Siobhan have come together to drive forward a threeyear plan to put together and make real the commitments in Towards 2016 and it's my hope we can work more together over the next few months to put that plan in preparation and present something in September.
But in the meantime, this conference this morning, drawing on international expertise, will also help us as it were, promote the agenda. But clearly what this is about this morning is not just confined to people with disabilities, it makes a case for universal design to help and support people of all ages, sizes, disabilities, abilities, I want to welcome them.
I also believe that from the three workshops, I think that's the real meat as it were on this occasion, what will come from the workshops and what we in the department will gain from that.
But I think also given the time restrictions involved and for us to realise the commitments we must live up to is so important we just don't read what comes from the workshops but more importantly to implement that and I look forward to doing so over the coming few months, certainly by way of using the summer break as it were, I'm not sure what the politicians get for holiday but we get a fair few and back in September we can put together how we see ourselves driving the reform programme.
So I want to wish you all well today, I've had a preview of the papers, they are most interesting, more importantly most informative, I wish you well in the deliberations and it's a pity it's such a warm day to be in here, but somebody must do the work. I wish you well.
(applause)
MR CRADDOCK: Thank you very much Minister and thank you chairperson, Peter and also Siobhan who I see in the back, director of the National Disability Authority, distinguished guests, again thank you for coming from long distances, from Spain, Japan, I was with Jose in Madrid in the last couple of days at an international standards meeting and his laptop got stolen and he is busy over here on the side working on his afternoon's presentation, fortunately memory sticks are very good for recording and carrying in your pocket, back up information.
So without further ado, just to frame where we're coming from and where we're at, I think an important document from the OECD talking about government and services towards an integrated public service was a document published by the OECD at the end of 2008, it talks about the key measure of public service performance, how quickly and easily people can access a service and the quality of that service once received.
So I think that kind of encapsulates universal design in many ways and what we're trying to develop and what we'll see here this morning, in particular from our international speakers, the huge work that is happening internationally, particularly in Norway, Spain, Japan and America as Peter mentioned earlier on, coming virtually from Connecticut.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard University talks about simplicity in what we're trying to do, when everyone else suffers from over complexity and she talks about the 20th century being very much a complex century, that the new century, 21st century we're now one decade in, that it is a time for markets and services to be more simple and to simplify the life for all our people in whatever facet that may look.
Also, as the Minister mentioned, huge demands now on government and services, the citizen, the customer is more demanding, increasing social complexity and diversity in the populations we are now dealing with, older population force, against people with disabilities, the population has now increased significantly, as has been demonstrated from recent national survey, and again the change in ratio of working population to older people I think is a huge concern, particularly around pensions that we need to be looking at from a universal perspective.
I think the challenge for today, and we'll hear more about this from our various speakers is how do we think universally and how do we think about design? Design is not only a noun it is also a verb. And I think what we'll hear today is very much the actions, we'll be demonstrating from our international speakers, but also we've key developments and work that we have been partnering with key institutions such as the Dublin City Council, which one of our speakers will present this afternoon.
So it's about action implementation, I think demonstration of universal design has been out there, has been shown to be in existence in the States for over 20 years, so we need to now put this into implementation and action.
Again a lot of the traditional thinking has been about give me more resources, give me more staff and more money I can build it bigger and better, when we talk about design and universal design, the question we start asking is how can we do things differently? And what we'll hear today is where people are doing things differently and saving both on cost, saving on staff, but delivering better quality services, be it in the built environment, ICT, products or services.
Again Ron Mace who was the initiator of the term "universal design" spoke in '98 shortly before he died, that the term "universal" is probably unfortunate in that nothing can be truly universal. There will always be people who cannot use an item no matter how thoughtfully it is designed. However, he goes on to say, that we can almost always improve on the things we design to make them more universally usable.