With the goal of lessening and potentially eliminating the controversy surrounding transgender access to public restrooms, Stalled, a design initiative tackling this controversy, launched this past week an open source website called Stalled! Online. The site provides three years of inclusive bathroom design research available to the public as a result of work conducted by a cross-disciplinary research team of experts.
The site and the initiative’s findings, presented at the AIA national conference in New York City last week, explores transgender restroom access from a cultural, political, legal, and design perspective. The goal is to ultimately create “viable economical restroom prototypes for retrofit and new construction projects that can be adopted and deployed across the United States,” according to the press statement.
The initiative took a social justice issue and reframed it as a design challenge. Through innovative thinking and shared used of research, the initiative participants progressed the challenge to focus on safe and inclusive public restrooms for all: irrespective of age, race, gender, religion and disability.
This initiative was undertaken with the support of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architect’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, Stalled! Representatives — architect Joel Sanders and transgender historian Susan Stryker— and legal scholar Terry Kogan, as well as Yale students.
A second outcome of this initiative is MIXdesign, a design consulting firm that will partner with progressive institutions and companies seeking to attract a diverse audience and workers. The consultancy will apply inclusive design principles to everyday building types that were originally designed for cis-gender, able-bodied people, offering a new alternative that will engage people of different ages, genders, races and disabilities. The standards they will introduce are intended to go beyond the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
