Our 5th stop in 5 days, we spent today at San Francisco State University, hosted by their Design and Industry department chaired by Ricardo Gomes. San Francisco State is home to Whirlwind Wheelchair, and boasts an entirely accessible campus. We were asked to rethink the trailer exhibition (the trailer does not have a ramp or a door wide enough for wheelchairs to enter) so that it might be accessible and of course we were happy to oblige.
Because we designed the exhibition around a modular unit (the milk crate), we were easily able to simply transport all our products and set up shop in front of the Coppola Theatre lecture hall in the Design and Industry building. The foyer space in front of the theatre made for a great space to install our shelves of products on tables, tiered using our milk crates.
The lecture began at noon, and after a few technical glitches I presented the Design Revolution as a call-to-action to all in the audience. The Q&A was lively and supportive. Ralf Hotchkiss, founder of Whirlwind Wheelchair brought a colleague who had an important question about accessibility in design. He raised the point that while Project H’s work is responsive to human needs and accessible to all, the fact that it has been designed with physical accessibility in mind should be made explicit as one of our design values. He raised the point that while more and more things are wheelchair accessible thanks to ADA requirements, very few designers or engineers explicitly make accessibility a core value to what they do.
After the lecture, we filtered into the foyer area to check out the exhibition. Other students group joined our communal exhibition, including iDo (Industrial Design Outreach), an amazing on-campus team that “promote the field of industrial design and use its methodologies to enhance the education of both high school and university students.” Department head Ricardo Gomes’ adorable son was in attendance to test out the Hippo Roller (below), along with dozens of students and educators. It was a great afternoon event to end a wonderfully eventful week!
