Universal Design: Geriatric Planning

I don’t really do something that we are all supposed to do: I don’t have a fire emergency plan for my home – not really.

I live in an attached-house part of town and know my neighbors, as do my kids. There’s a lots of people just a few doors up and down my block. A fire happens and we’ll be out front checking on each other – that’s the way it’s happened when there were other fires.

We also are loaded up with cell phones. I have plenty of smoke detectors and a few fire extinguishers. We all know the way out of the house and there are two exits to most parts of the house, even the basement. I’m attentive to these emergency plans but also winging it. I’ve thought things through but I’m also stumbling along. I have a lot of trust that things won’t go wrong. We’re all able bodied. If a school teacher were to grade me, I’d be a C+.

I should have a thorough assessment. I should have a plan. I should review it annually. I should do fire drills. I should share it with my neighbors. I should be at least an A-.

That’s fire. What about getting older? Same thing, but I’m not as prepared. Right now, I might be thinking about having enough cash and a suitable environment so that I can be mostly independent. Like the fire plan, I am basically in good shape – but not really on top of it. My geriatric plan is barely a passing grade.

What about 10-20 or 30 years down the road? I should begin to have a geriatric plan – at least a rough draft. What about nutrition? Medication? Household needs like laundry, shopping & cooking? Hygiene? What happens if my memory fades? Who is in charge of my legal matters? Paying the bills on time? Overlooking my driving ability? Who will help me get to my appointments or advocate for my well-being? Who will help me adapt my home to current needs? How will I stay social?

Like the fire emergency plan, the geriatric plan is a prudent endeavor. It’s pennies now instead of dollars later; it’s hours now instead of days or months later. It’s being ready or just hoping.

I’ll do both – the fire and the geriatric plan. The fire plan will go quick –sit down with the whole family, map it out, run a drill and correct any shortcomings. The geriatric plan won’t take that long either. What there is to do right now is have a financial plan: look at future needs and plan how to have enough.

"Old age is like everything else; to make a success of it, you’ve got to start young."
Fred Astaire




Konrad Kaletsch, CAPS
June 25, 2009
Universal Design Resource
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Universal Design: Welcome to SATH!

Welcome to SATH, the Society for Accessible Travel and Hospitality. Founded in 1976 and presently led by Stuart Vidockler, SATH is an educational nonprofit membership organization whose mission is to raise awareness of the needs of all travelers with disabilities, remove physical and attitudinal barriers, to free access and to expand travel opportunities.

So why do disability travel opportunities matter to you? Maybe the better question is why doesn’t it matter to you? Or maybe you haven’t asked the question in a while and now remember traveling with a temporary disability and the added complications. I am sure your compassionate self believes in equal travel opportunities, but then your brain gets involved and comes up with arguments like cost, inconvenience and mistaken assumptions.

SATH is here to dispel outdated beliefs and put in their place a new reality that illustrates the benefits when travel is available for all. SATH educates and advocates. They work hard to coordinate industry efforts. They field media questions. They post news updates. Best of all, they are here for you. They are a clearinghouse of information and can help you skillfully navigate disability travel whether you are travel agent looking to enter a new market (hint-hint – lucrative opportunity), a hotel or transportation service, or a consumer.

Disability travel and universal design are partners in a better world that works for everyone. Awareness and a demand for inclusive design are necessary to bring about these shifts in design over the next years; the money is there (see below).

Begin by visiting the SATH website. Questions not answered in the site can be emailed to Jani Nayar who will generously assist you.





TRAVELERS WITH DISABILITIES COULD SPEND $27 BILLION PER YEAR, SAYS NEW HARRIS INTERACTIVE POLL.

The Open Doors Organization in cooperation with the Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) and the Society for Accessible Travel and Hospitality (SATH) released a landmark study on the spending trends and market scope of U.S. resident travelers with disabilities. The study, conducted by Harris Interactive, polled 1,037 people with disabilities. The major findings of this groundbreaking study were released on January 16, 2003 at the 7th Annual SATH World Congress in Miami.

The study suggested that people with disabilities could spend at least $27 billion per year, if certain needs were met. These include a "meet and greet" at airports and preferred seating as top issues for the airlines while lodging issues include the need for rooms close to amenities and staff members that go out of their way to accommodate guests with disabilities. People with disabilities spent $13.6 billion on 31.7 million trips in the past year. The modifications suggested by the survey could increase expenditures by people with disabilities by 100% per year.

In 2001, the airline industry saw $3.3 billion in spending by travelers with disabilities, resulting in 52,800 jobs created to provide services for people with disabilities. The lodging industry saw $4.2 billion in spending and 60,000 jobs. The study also suggested that people with disabilities could at least double their spending generating $6.4 billion for airlines and $8.4 billion for lodging if the needs of travelers with disabilities were addressed. Currently travelers with disabilities generate a total of 194,000 travel-related jobs, $4.22 billion in payroll and $2.52 billion in tax revenues in the U.S.

The study was conducted to measure general travel behaviors including how often people with disabilities travel, with whom they travel, how much they spend while on the road, the mode of transportation and accommodations used, and on which sources of information they rely to make decisions. The study provides information that travel industry and related businesses will find invaluable as they seek to stem large losses following the terrorist acts of 9/11/01. The upside potential for both the economy and the travel industry is highly significant. TIA participated in the study in a consulting capacity, advising in the questionnaire design and validating the study and its findings against TIA's substantial market and economic research resources for the U.S. travel industry.

The Open Doors Organization is a not-for-profit corporation founded for the purpose of teaching businesses how to succeed in the disability market and to provide direct support to people with disabilities. The organization creates comprehensive programs and services that offer training and consultation and market statistics to both the public and private sectors.


Konrad Kaletsch, CAPS
May 14, 2009
Universal Design Resource
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Anne Wiesen: The Restorative Garden, Healing by Beauty

The restorative garden can be as simple as a well-situated pot of healthy sage at a window-sill or as sublime as a cathedral forest. It’s how we respond to a garden that makes it restorative. Are there gardens that are universally restorative? Gardens that evoke a healing response in each and every one of us? I believe so.
I’ve learned that the most restorative of gardens are those that embody “nothing less than the entire universe” – to borrow from Luis Barrigan. To me this means, the whole universe of human experience is present: from the basic requirements for our biological survival to the complex processes that reveal the breadth of human emotion, thought and spirit.

The well-situated pot of sage sits in my friend Susanna’s* window. This restorative garden is spare, simple, provocative and beautiful. Just sage, in a large urban front window. It’s there for anyone walking by to appreciate. Susanna’s cultivation and placement of sage gives me pause, draws my gaze, stimulates my thought, and elicits quiet experiences of wellness and marvel. Noticing the darkened soil of the freshly watered plant I feel a curious satisfaction, and completion. Freely circulating air above and around the living sage reminds me to breathe in it’s oxygen and I feel gratitude for my ability to do so. I realize my attention on the garden has shifted my mode of thinking. It’s not that I am momentarily distracted from my busy life. Instead, I have momentarily returned to what is essential for human life: the plant world, all the bio-chemical processes that support it, and the care of a thoughtful steward to transform these processes into nourishment and care. No wonder then, that a single well-cared for plant carries a universe that we experience as beautiful.

Gardens that reveal the nourishing forces of nature re-enforce our experience of beauty and wellness at multiple levels, with myriad benefits. At our simplest, in our common humanity, and consciously or not, we are all evolutionarily prepared to be nourished by a restorative garden.


* Susanna is a restorative artist, therapist and interfaith minister (2010). Her practice, Creating Space, is to reveal nature’s essential potency and beauty and to help us reveal the same in our selves.



Anne Wiesen is an ethnobotanist and garden advocate who runs the NYC based non-profit, Meristem. Meristem provides educational resources for architects, designers, urban planners, and community activists to create restorative gardens that promote ecological, individual and community health.

Order your copy of: Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being Through Urban Landscapes. Published by the US Forest Service, the volume is multidisciplinary compendium of 19 authors inspired by the Meristem 2007 Forum with a foreword by Dr. Oliver Sacks. No charge.

Meristem, Inc. Information about restorative gardens, including a database of studies supporting nature’s role in human health, and to contact the author.

It has been a pleasure to have Anne Weisen bring her appreciation of nature and her commitment to our having it always present to this blog; thank-you.

Konrad Kaletsch, CAPS
April 24, 2009
Universal Design Resource
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Universal Design: Destination or Journey?

One day, there will be the ultimate universal design handbook. It will have well conceived answers to every design quandary, each achieved cost effectively and with elegance.

No. That would be as if universal design was a destination, a place we arrive at where solutions were the intention of its creation. This notion that a checklist can be created pervades the present consciousness of legislators and building inspectors alike. We will have measures by which we can recognize the effectiveness of our solutions, however, what brings us closer is when universal design is understood as a journey.

Universal design gives a place from which to look. It is our starting point and it is our compass. As we travel, we find that we have come further and that there is more to go. But to imagine that we arrive is to fall back to a notion that it could become a set of solutions, and that we must conform to them. That would assure that universal design could never be more than a trend, never more than a set of laws that some day gets trashed as disappointment by a future generation.

Universal design is a crackle of possibility seeking expression. It is an opportunity of liberation. It is a willingness to get a lesson thus far not learned. It is a letting go of old thought.

The promise of universal design is inclusiveness. As such, it represents a shift in consciousness more than a recipe. It represents a shift away from a thinking that is rooted in fear, doubt, worry and anxiety. It moves from scarcity to abundance; from stingy to generous; from me to us, from excluded to included. Universal design is an expression of compassion, and, compassion gives us true peace.