Final Project: Perfectly Accessible Home
Above image is a rough sketch of my apartment with dimmensions, to the right is the apartment with scaled dimensions (to be ajusted upon printer bed measuring)
— 15 / 1 in. scale
A rough representation of scale. This model is intended to be small, able to fit nicely on a shelf, yet not so microscopic that it becomes impossible to work on
For my project, I want to create a model room of the main room of my apartment—which includes my living room, kitchen, and studio— but imagined if it were perfectly accessible for me as a wheelchair user. There are a lot of things that have to be changed about space in order for me to navigate it well, and more often than not these are haphazard short term fixes that don’t solve the problem for me that completely, and often cost me a lot of extra time and money. My apartment is easily where I spend the greatest amount of time, and so not only is it where I’ve put the most energy into modifying things for me, but it’s also a space I have a lot of opinions about in regards to what could be fixed. The goal with this isn’t to design an entirely new space from scratch, but rather I want to show how accessibility can be worked into spaces in simple and beautiful ways that aren’t obtrusive or an afterthought.
I love small things, and doing fun crafty things with my hands, so I want to take this opportunity not only to model something cool but also to get my hands messy making a fun and unique object. The goal is to model and print individual components of my ideal apartment which I can finish and assemble into a little scale model of my ideal space complete with a scale model of my wheelchair to show how I would navigate the space.
To the left is a rough representation of the furniture layout I’m planning on. This is highly subject to change depending on not only the aesthetics and functionality of the space, but also the time available to create individual pieces.
The planned pieces are a chair, couch, coffee table, side table, lamp, two cube shelves, a small breakfast table, two desks, and a cat tower. Not to mention pieces like the oven and the fridge. In quantity, it’s a lot of pieces, but many of them are extremely simple to model and will make the space feel complete without excessive modeling effort. I also want to include small textile touches like a rug and tiny pillows to keep the space from feeling sterile.
I had to sacrifice some of the pieces in my original design due to time, and not time for modeling but time for finishing. The modeling process, though somewhat tricky, progressed very quickly once I got the hang of things. What really took the bulk of time was printing, sanding, and painting.
The last thing I did model wise which doesn’t show in the floorplan, is I added arms to the chair and the couch. My current sitting chair does have arms on it, but our couch does not and while this doesn’t make it any less comfortable, it does make pulling myself from one seat to another more challenging. Extra seating isn’t something that most people think about for wheelchair users, after all, we come with our own chairs, but a wheelchair isn’t always the most comfortable option and it’s nice to be able to lounge on the couch in the evening. It’s basically the wheelchair equivalent of putting sweatpants on when you get home (or removing any pants at all).
I began by modeling the floor and walls, which would then give me the ability to scale all of the furniture models accordingly so that I wouldn’t have to worry about all the fiddly logistics of getting perfect scale measurements.
I printed the floor and walls—easily the longest print of them all—and then sketched the floor plan on the printed model. I took measurements for each piece of furniture off of the sketched floor plan, and then modeled each furniture piece in its own file. I pulled each individual model into the model of the apartment and did any final size adjustments from there before printing.
printing all of the furniture was tricky, many pieces had thin legs that would break easily if not laid out carefully on the print bed. Some pieces had to become thicker in order to be more stable, but because the piece was more about form than function, I did what I could to preserve the intended shape of things as I could.
I also redid the design in order to think about what would be the best way to use the space as a wheelchair user. As I was pondering this, it became clear that the biggest hindrance to movement is the very thing that makes a home different from a cement box: walls and furniture.
Every time I have to turn around a corner, not only am I risking skinning the backs of my hands on a sharp corner, but also pulling the paint off of the walls. You can tell where the biggest trouble spots are in my apartment based on how much paint is still on the walls, no joke.
To mitigate this problem I started thinking about how I could open up the space without losing functionality. The first thing I did was swing the counter that currently sits in teh middle of our house, and put it on teh far wall to make an L shaped counter. Not only does this prevent traffic jams with my partner, but it also makes it so that I’m able to open all of the cabinets and appliances without having to awkwardly shimmy behind the doors to reach inside. I also moved the stove and oven right next to the sink to make it easier to do things like make spaghetti. It seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult considering that in the current layout the sink it right behind the stove, but you try holding a pot of boiling water above your head while you slowly push yourself in a circle to turn around and tell me you don’t fear for your life.
In order to not sacrifice space, I also added a kitchen island. This keeps the prep space about the same, but the smaller footprint of it makes navigation easier, and it keeps the apartment from looking awkward with everything pushed up against the walls. The island does add some corners to turn around, but it also keeps the functionality of being to pass food from the kitchen to my desk and to the (potentially to be modeled in the future) breakfast table which comes in real handy when trying to transport beverages and other liquid-based dishes.
okay now we get to jump forward about 40 hours of printing to the fun part, the finishing touches. Once all the parts were printed and sanded (with approximately six different kinds of sand paper) and painted with a coat of primer, I got to painting in the details.
Keep in mind the largest single color piece (the tall desk top) is about the length of width of two average six sided dice sitting side by side, everything got smaller from there. The smallest detail, the stovetop burners, are about twenty-five percent smaller than a pencil eraser. that being said, it took a lot of patience and very very small brushes to get everything painted.
If you thought all this fiddly painting was ridiculous though, I decided to go even further. I was unhappy with the flat color floor, and i couldnt’ get the wood texture I wanted for some reason, so rather than continue to fight with paint I made wood slats out of bass wood and created a wood floor for my model. I sealed it with resin and called it a day.
I used a special kind of paint called acrylic gouache, an acrylic based water activated paint, to paint the models as I do all of my painting with it because of it’s color accuracy and staying power.
The final (for real this time) touch was adding some fabric to the model to give the scene life and warmth. Carefully cut scraps of fabric served as a blanket and an area rug, a snippet of detailed ribbon became a runner rug, and folded and glued fabric squares became throw pillows.
With all the pieces finished, it was time to photograph! I took my model (with great anxiety as 100 hours of work perched on my lap) into the ATLAS design studio to get some nice photos.
