Disability, Experience and Architecture: Towards Inclusive Sports and Leisure buildings

The built environment can greatly influence human activities, thus becoming an important factor in users’ everyday experiences, including those within sports and leisure buildings. For users with impairments in structure or body function, performing activities in the built environment can be a challenge as architectural design often does not take into account individual differences in perception and interaction with space. This leads these users to experience situations of disability and thus exclusion.
The Danish goal of greater inclusion of people in sports and leisure activities necessitates research to better qualify the role of architectural design on impaired users’ spatial experience. By investigating the role of the built environment and its influence on the cognitive, physical and social activities of users with mobility, visual and hearing impairments, this study aims to develop knowledge on how architectural design can enable them to better perform, and thus participate, in sports and leisure activities.
While current research concerning the influence of the built environment mostly focuses on identifying and addressing the environmental aspects which hinder user performance, this study takes a different approach by investigating how the built environment can play an enabling role in supporting and stimulating users activities. This study employs a phenomenological approach to explore the experiential dynamics between users and the physical space and utilizes the theory of affordances to delve deeper into how the designed characteristics of the built environment enable users with mobility, visual, and hearing impairments to perform cognitively, physically and socially.
Drawing upon three existing analytical models which address and examine the dynamics between individuals and the built environment – the Person-Environment-Occupation, the Enabler and the Users-Environments – this study develops a new analytical model which focuses on the enabling mechanisms occurring in the person-environment dynamics. Throughout case study research, the developed model has been employed to investigate person-environment relation contextually in two selected sports and leisure buildings - Vandhalla, a sports centre in Odder, and Musholm, a multifunctional sports hall in Kørsor - which represent the state of the art in the application of Universal Design in the Danish context. The investigation of the enabling mechanisms was conducted with a dual perspective. The first identifies the enabling mechanisms offered by architects during design, the second identifies the enabling influence of the dimensional, organisational, visual, tactile and acoustic characteristics of the environment as experienced by users.
The analysis of the collected data from both architects and users’ perspectives indicates that the design of the environment’s materiality, dimension, organisation, lighting and acoustics can offer mobility and sensory impaired users better opportunities to orient and interact in physical and social contexts. As such, this study offers performance-based design strategies that can support architects in designing more usable and inclusive sports and leisure buildings - thus reaching toward both the Danish aim for greater inclusion, and Universal Design’s objective to better include human differences in the design process.