A Visit from the Chanda Plan Foundation
Learning to rock the boat.
We had a pretty amazing guest this week in our UX3 class: Chanda Hinton. She’s the founder and executive director of the Chanda Plan Foundation, a nonprofit that makes integrative therapies more accessible to people with physical disabilities, dramatically improving the quality of their lives.
Chanda also happens to be an expert on those life saving benefits. She has been a quadriplegic since the age of nine, and the services the Chanda Plan Foundation offers are based on a regimen that saved her life more than a decade ago.
During the hour and a half she spent with our class, Chanda told us her story and then talked to us about the health center she founded and helped design for people with physical disabilities. Oftentimes, designing for accessibility means meeting some minimum requirements and checking off some boxes, but Chanda wanted the building to be both accessible and delightful to the people receiving services. An example: the waiting area is more than a waiting room — it’s a tea bar designed with people in chairs in mind. Those design choices were about redefining the way people felt about the healthcare they were receiving.
One of the things Chanda talked about on Tuesday was the willingness of her generation (people in their 30s) to “rock the boat” when it came to demanding accessibility — compared to older generations that might have been more resigned when it came to a lack of accessibility. I’m seeing something similar happening in the design community, and am noticing more and more conversations about ethics and accessibility — and a designer’s responsibility to keep both of those in mind.
I’m so grateful to be part of a program that brings in people like Chanda to help teach us.
