Designing for rest

/
 
 

In this image we see three rows of plastic yellow seats. The two rows in the foreground are empty and facing each other. In the background, a person dressed in a suit and tie is lying asleep across a row of seats, under a window. His head is possibly resting on a bag. Under the seats we see a sign saying 'Life Preservers' so this photo was probably taken on a ferry.

It caught my eye because I've just been reading about the work of Raquel Meseguer Zafe, an artist who lives with chronic pain and needs to frequently lie down to rest. 'For a while my world got really small. And so in 2016 I began to play with lying down in public so I could be out in the world more: I lay down on trains, in galleries, on benches'. She noticed how 'cities are designed for verticality and movement, rather than rest or pause' and how we view people at rest. She has been collecting stories from other disabled people about their experiences and uses her work to advocate for more resting spaces and 'horizontal events'.

Perhaps this is going to become even more important in the near future. A recent BBC documentary highlighted the challenges of living with long covid and in this recent article, Gareth Ford Williams wonders how we can prepare for this in terms of designing for accessibility. 'Not everyone with Long-COVID will identify as having a disability or being neurodivergent, but their lived experiences and barriers will be ones that we are familiar with. The added benefit of more readily accommodating fatigue as a characteristic will also benefit the whole community'.

With around a million people in the UK now living with long covid we'll need, more than ever, to understand and design for people with the range of symptoms that it brings, including its most reported symptom - fatigue.

We often talk in our work about the need to be able to rest - sitting or lying down - during our journeys and how there is often little opportunity to do so. Knowing where we can rest is a key part of journey planning for many.

For many people with other conditions, fatigue is a challenge that they have lived with for many years but we have not recognised or designed for it. Gareth Ford Williams describes searching for “accessibility+fatigue” and found that '...most of the articles were about individuals managing the condition rather than ‘us’ as an industry considering the impacts of fatigue in our approach to design… so is Long-COVID showing us that we’ve been missing a trick all this time?'

Yes, I think it probably is.

This originally appeared in Go Upstream’s Future Journeys weekly newsletter. You can subscribe here.