Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Opening Remarks and Introductions

Earle Kennett, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, NIBS

Hello. I’m Earle Kennett with the institute, and I have the distinct honor that I got from Vijay to facilitate this facility.

In a few minutes, we’re going to go around the room and get introductions from all you so we’ll know what organizations you’re with. But before we do that, [I have] just a couple of things. You’ve got an agenda package, and [in it is] the agenda, bios for the all people. I am not going to go through introductions except for one person.

Now, there was a team working on this over the last few months. This was really the brainchild of Vijay. I just wanted to introduce Stephanie. She’s with the institute, and she’s basically the one that’s done all the hard work for these people and put everything together. So I appreciate it, Stephanie.

The other folks on the committee that put it together were Jim Woods and Tom Sachs and then Marsha, who’s already introduced herself from the Access Board, and Tom Williams who’s out there making his points with Susan as the GSA disability advocate.

We’re all on that committee. Including one other person who really managed it, who really put together everything, invited everyone. And you probably saw his name on several e-mails and documents and then are wondering where he is, and that’s Stuart Knoop. And our thoughts and prayers are with Stuart. Stuart had to go into the hospital, not a life-threatening situation but certainly a medical situation with his neck just a few weeks ago and, actually, was really, really disappointed that he couldn’t be here to take advantage of all of the hard work he had done.

But he did enlist – Stuart and I and Vijay and Jim go back several decades, and Stuart was principal – at the time Oudens and Knoop, Associates. His son, Greg Knoop, has agreed to take over some of the panel moderation and work here as parts of that workshop. And so, as Stuart was laying in intensive care, I’m sure he had long conversations with Greg about this workshop and brought Greg up to speed.

So Greg, we appreciate it and, really, tell your father that we have a lot of concern for him and our thoughts and prayers are with him.

Well, this sort of – before our introductions, this leads me up to ask Vijay to say a few words. He’s the only person I’m going to introduce, really, but I want to introduce Vijay a little bit.

I go back with Vijay at least 20, maybe 30 years. Vijay has worked for GSA for, I guess, probably – see I can do this from memory – for about 40 years. He is the chief mechanical engineer for GSA. You run across people in the federal government in this huge bureaucracy that have large amounts of responsibility. And every so often, you run across someone who really – whose heart is truly in the right place and advocates for – and is an advocate for a number the issues even to their own professional detriment. Okay?

If there’s any organization out there – many you here are in the private sector – any organization out there that resembles the government – you know, and I’ve worked with the feds for over 30 years working with them – and they don’t like criticism. They don’t even like self-criticism. So when you stand up and say, you know, we can do it better, they tend to take it personally. And that won’t be a good route for your progression and movement into that agency. Okay?

I have seen that firsthand myself. And Vijay has been part of that. And Kurt Knight is the chief of quality control and assurance and, primarily, their chief engineer and mechanical engineer at VA, has been through those exercises. People like Vijay and a few others, they constantly pound their head against that brick wall. And, you see that brick wall over the years move just a little bit.

But the blood and the bruises that these guys and women have on them is just enormous. And so I have utmost respect for Vijay.

Vijay has his primary purpose over there, besides trying to enhance mechanical systems and energy engineering, to develop post-occupancy evaluations. And under their sometimes misguided belief that if you go out and you evaluate an existing building that’s been running for a couple of years, that the problems you learn from that building, including tenant and user concerns, is, in many ways, going to benefit the agency and show you that you probably shouldn’t redesign the same problems into all your future buildings.

That’s been a long, hard process for Vijay. And we have tried very hard – Patrick Fee, who will introduce himself, in charge of the property managers at GSA, has been the recipient of many of our tales on GSA buildings. You think that would be easy. It hasn’t been easy, and it isn’t easy. And Vijay has been a constant advocate for that.

He started initiating the HVAC Excellence Program at GSA. As I mentioned, he’s run a number of post-occupancy evaluations. He’s a fellow in ASHRAE. He’s been honored in ASHRAE. Not only is he a mechanical engineer but he’s – actually, his first degree, I believe, was in civil engineering. And he’s been a recipient of honors here at the institute. And he’s been – and I’ve traveled around the country with Stuart and Jim Woods and Vijay looking at numbers of GSA buildings.

I have seen his vision deteriorate over those years. And there’s a number of people in this room that have vision disabilities, and they just press on. And I saw the deterioration with Vijay over the years, [who was affected by] glare and contrast problems in these federal courthouses that are supposed to be open for the general public; problems as he’s made his way through these buildings and, over the years, needed more and more assistance from Jim and myself and Stuart.

So he’s been through this, and he’s fought the good fight. Vijay is going to be retiring at the end of this year, and this is his last swan song [that] he wants to leave with GSA.

Vijay, we really appreciate you and the effort that you’ve put in over the last four decades. So I’d ask you to say a little bit, and thanks a lot, Vijay.

Vijay Gupta, P.E., Fellow ASHRAE, Chief Mechanical Engineer, Office of Design and Construction Programs, Public Buildings Service, GSA

Well, thank you. It’s a great honor to be here. I’m in GSA 36 years by the way, not 40.

Response by Earle Kennett: Oh, okay.

[Before joining GSA, I worked] nine years in private sector. I’ve been through a lot of changes, a lot of reorganizations, a lot of things, a lot of lessons learned.

I came to GSA in ‘74 when President Nixon was the president. My first day on the job, my boss called me. I said, do I have to go to orientation. He said no, no, no. We’ve got another task for you. I asked, “well, what is it/”. He said, we got a call from the White House, and President Nixon cannot see the Washington Monument. And, my gosh, I mean, what can I do to fix [the view of the] monument from the Oval Office. So he said, well, the problem is there’s an obstruction between the monument and the Oval Office, and it’s your job to fix it by end of the day. The vision problem doesn’t have to be the physical eyes, but it could also be an obstruction in the way. So there was a big plume of steam, which was right in the smack – in the middle of the Ellipse. And he looked through the Ellipse to see the monument from the Oval Office, and the plume was like a hundred foot high. So my job was to stop the flume by end of the day.

Anyhow, to move forward, I’ve done a lot of engineering excellence workshops – about 18 of them – and this [low vision workshop]. Initially, I was diagnosed with macular degeneration in ‘76. I went to Hopkins. Anyhow, then in 2000, I was diagnosed with rod/cone dystrophy, which made things a lot worse than macular degeneration. So for now, things have gone way down. Anyhow, so that’s why I’ve decided to retire. It’s about time.

But we’ve done a lot of good things, and I checked into [lighting needs that could be addressed] in 2007. I asked him, I said, well, Stuart, what’s in the [ABA] that makes the building more accessible, contrast, less glare and other issues. He said, well there’s nothing in [the ABA] which says that and nothing in ADA, which addresses that. So I [asked], well, what can we do with it? So he said, well, a lot of research, not much had been compiled or nothing much is in the law.

I started thinking about it. I talked to Tom. I said, well, Tom, what can we do to – he said, I don’t know. So I started thinking about six months ago, we initiated this task. So we appreciate all of you coming, and that’s where we are. We’ve been tasked to – [hold] this Workshop]: Tom Williams, Tom Sachs and Earle Kennett – we all worked together. By the way, Kate and Marion also helped in preparing all these brochures.

That’s all. I think my time is probably up, but I’ll be talking more later on.

Self-Introductions of Participants

Comment by Earle Kennett: Well, now, your turn. We just want to go around the room and you tell us who are you are and what organization you’re from. And if you want to throw out a couple of sentences about your interest in this, you know, feel free to do so.

Stephanie Stubbs, who works here at the institute. She’s been the primary person that’s put this together with Kate and Marion.

David Munson: I started off [studying] lighting and design in 1975 in New York. Lived all over New York. I worked with Jim Knuckles, wrote a paper in 1973 on lighting for the aged, and I’d never thought I’d live to be old enough in years to use it. I spent 26 years at HOK in architecture as a lighting designer and vice president in the legal group. And I’ve got to tell you that working on a GSA building or a federal courthouse is the most complicated project in the world and tend to be the most expensive. Federal judges, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got stories about federal judges. Anyway, glad to be here. Thank you.

Marsha Mazz: I’m the director of the Office of Technical and Information Services at the U.S. Access Board and will be talking more later about what the Access Board does and maybe doesn’t do.

Mark Mazz: I’m Marsha’s husband. I am an architect. I have my own business and I specialize in accessible design. I’ve done this for about 30 years.

Priscilla Rogers: Hi, everybody. I’m Pris Rogers. I work for the American Foundation for the Blind. Although we’re headquartered in New York, I work out of Dallas where we have built a national center on vision loss to show what kinds of design concepts can help people with low vision. So I’ve been asked to come today because of that project, I think. I also manage our website for seniors, which is called AFB Senior Site. We have a lot of design concepts on there to help people with low vision support. And can I get some help with the glare that’s coming out of [the above lighting fixtures]? It’s about to drive me batty. I don’t know whether it’s better for me, but is it going to bother you? Thank you.

Jeanne Halloin: Hi, everybody. I’m from Michigan. I work with Harts Lighting Design. I also was a professor at Michigan State University. And when we lived in College Station, Texas, I worked with an architectural firm there. I joined IES when I started teaching lighting and got very involved in a committee that Eunice chaired at the time which involves lighting design for the elderly and partially sighted. And it’s just been a wonderful experience. I also have a sister that works for art education for the blind in New York City. So it’s been a good interest all the way around. But it certainly is an important topic, and I really would like to see it have some space.

Eunice Noell Waggoner: I’m the president of the Center of Design for an Aging Society in Portland, Oregon. Early in my career – I think I was like 26 – I was asked if I would design a home for a woman who is losing her sight. She’s going to be placed in a nursing home simply because she was losing her sight but she was just healthy as a horse. And I knew nothing about aging vision or low vision or lighting for that matter. So I had that challenge at an early age[, which] set me on this course to figure out for myself and work with it. And so having information in place where other people could access that information became a goal for me because I was tired of not being heard or listened to about the needs of other folks. And when you’re young, you assume that everyone has the same perceptions that you do. You don’t realize that they’re different. So that’s why I’m so delighted that this meeting is taking place.

Robert Dupuy: I’m the leader of the Interface Engineering Lighting Studio in Portland, Oregon. Eunice and I are co-conspirators in our efforts to bring quality lighting to the elderly.

Roberta Null: I taught housing and interior design at a variety of universities for years. When I taught at San Diego State, I had my students design – because we found that it was close to the campus – training kitchens for the San Diego Center for the Blind. And in the process of doing this – which has turned out to be a wonderful project – we discovered that most blind rehab centers are geared up to rehab young, totally blind people. And the elderly people with partial eyesight are a whole different group and a much larger group, by the way. And it was difficult at that time, which was in the ‘80s, to even get funding for rehab for older low-vision people because they didn’t think it was a good investment. Well, when somebody is 70 and you help them to live independently in their own home and they have live until they’re 90, it’s a good investment. And so it’s been a wonderful project. And because of being involved in this, I have expanded my work to work with universal design and wrote a book called “Universal Design: Creative Solutions for ADA Compliance,” which has not been real successful financially but has opened many doors for me. And now, I’m in the process of revising it, and I have – I’m going to tell you tomorrow a little bit about – and show you some pictures, hopefully, if my technology came through – of this wonderful facility that was built in San Diego that I think is a wonderful example of good universal design plus designing supporting environments for older, low-vision people.

Debra Babcock: Good morning, everyone. I work with the Internal Revenue Service, fondly known as the IRS. I have nothing to do with any audits; I purely work with the Web. I was originally hired to revise and renovate IRS.gov. Because we do offer a lot of products for blind and low-vision taxpayers, became very interested in that aspect of it. And, right now, I’m involved in several disability initiatives at the IRS as currently – (inaudible). So I’m very glad to be here, and thank you.

Cheri Wiggs: I’m from the National Eye Institute as part of NIH. One of the portfolios that I oversee is the low-vision and blindness rehabilitation program. So you’ll find out a little bit more about that in a few minutes.

Marie Elise Dennis: Good morning. I’m a public affairs officer for GSA. Thomas Williams graciously invited me to attend, so I’m here covering it for our website.

Bob Lynch: Good morning. I’m an architect. I’ve been involved in universal design since before it was called that. I sit on the American National Standards Institute Committee on Accessible and Usable Buildings and Facilities, and I represent the Brain Injury Association of America on that committee.

Tom Williams: Good morning, everyone. I’m the national accessibility officer for GSA. I have a passion for helping people with disabilities. It’s an acquired passion. It was in total ignorance that I started as an accessibility officer eight years ago and really not knowing anything about the plight of people with disabilities and how difficult the built environment can be for them to function in. With no training when I was an architectural school at VPI about people with disabilities. Nothing was ever mentioned about it. At that point in time, there wasn’t an Architectural Barriers Act, either. So that was a few years ago. But the bottom line is I have learned about the passion of people in the Access Board to help people like them across the country and across the world that have disabilities. Our nation sets an example for other countries in the world. Our agency, GSA, has a leadership role to play in federal government in promoting whatever we can do [in] the design and built environment to assist people with disabilities in whatever way we can. Our leadership of Susan is a wonderful example of leadership committed to this. There has been other leadership in our agency but don’t think it’s taken this on such a personal way as she has. We’ve had management within the Office of Design and Construction that has looked at disability as one of those things they wish they could just sweep under the carpet. And so I’ve tried to bring a heightened awareness of that, and this workshop is part of my heightened awareness of another aspect of disability that I don’t know a lot about. But I think all of us that are advancing in age find that our vision is not – if we had good vision to begin with – is not as keen as it was when we were younger. If some people who have had all of their life to live with a vision loss and function well and achieve much, like Marsha, can be helped by anything that we can do in this workshop, then I am absolutely a hundred percent supportive. And I hope that you have you here are here for that reason, also. I think, together, we can achieve some wonderful things. Even if it’s just initial ideas of what to do, we can achieve a good start on making real progress in this area. Thank you for attending.

Kurt Knight: [I am] director of facilities quality service in VA. We develop all VA standards for facilities. And it’s interesting. We have a couple of types of buildings that reflect blind rehab centers. But as you pointed out, that’s mainly younger veterans that I’ve talked to how you exist and work around obstacles in living and just constant living. We’ve recently had a new vision in nursing-home care for the elderly. The typical VA patient is older than the general population of a typical hospital and, often, has more chronic illnesses of one kind of another. So there’s also multiple things going on with a VA patient. And our long-term care process is dramatically changing to provide more home-built environments or nursing-home patients or long-term care patients called community living centers. And they have addressed vision issues in those because it tends to be an issue. In addition to that, we’ve recently put out a polytrauma design guide which reflects the fact that many of our veterans coming back from the recent wars have multiple injuries, including vision impairment and loss of limbs and a whole series of things that need to be treated differently. So we’ve been building – in the process of developing and building some centers just to deal with these multiple traumas. Again, the major goal is going to be to get people back into society and working around. Having said that, I mean, the VA has always been an advocate for the disabled. I mean, we’ve often gone over and above what the standards are in VA hospitals with more accessible rooms or more accessible bathrooms, et cetera, to ensure that we, you know, deal with those kinds of issues because of our patient type. But I do commend Vijay for starting this because, having said that, I don’t think our – certainly, our standards don’t focus on vision like they do on accessibility and access to the buildings. Now, we have a lot of stuff in our standards relative to that, and we don’t really focus on the vision or low-vision or – I mean, we do some in finishes and our floors and signage to some degree, but we don’t have a real focus on, you know, a direction to accomplish that in a more aggressive way. But it is the right time to do this. I mean, we have the new energy standards where we’re dealing with new lighting standards. We’re dealing with daylighting requirements. We have daylighting in buildings. So these energy issues in lighting all impact all of this. So I mean, there’s a lot of changes going on in our standards to try to achieve these energy goals. And that relates to a number of issues involved in vision. I think it’s a good opportunity and an excellent time to do this conference.

Mariana Figueiro: I am a social professor at the Lighting Research Center. It’s a polytechnic institute. I do a lot of work with what we call visual. I’m part of the committee that Eunice and Jeanne head. I’ve also done some work with AARP Andrus Foundation on developing guidelines for lighting for the older adults, and we do a lot of human factors work at the Lighting Research Center. I’m also going to touch a little bit on the other area which I have been more involved in the past few years, which is what we call the non-visual effects. Really how light impacts our sleeping patterns. And even though I always say that research has to be predicting what’s going to happen in 10 or 20 years in practice, it’s probably something we should be thinking about knowing that light can also impact how – light during the day may impact how we sleep at night. So that’s also an area that we have been heavily involved. So I look forward to the workshop.

Kate Brennan: I work with Vijay Gupta.

Dr. Suleiman Alibhai: I’m an optometrist who specializes in working with people who are visually impaired. I’m known as a low-vision specialist along with my colleague, Dr. Dennis Siemsen. And I’ve been doing this work with visually impaired people for about 18 years now. And a lot of these issues that you all brought up are very pertinent to the work I do with patients. I am really looking forward to learning from all you, really, how I can better help my patients in all the questions they bring up, especially in terms of how can we make it easier in our homes, and the buildings we work and so on and so forth. So I think this is a wonderful opportunity, and I thank Vijay for inviting me, and I’m really looking forward to learning from all of you.

Dr. Dennis Siemsen: I’m an optometrist as well. I’m a low-vision specialist in clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I’ve been doing this for 35 years. I got into it because when I was a student – an optometry student – our techniques were not nearly as good as they are today. Bob Massof has been around as long as I have, and, you know, we’ve certainly seen a lot of changes in the way we provide services for visually impaired people. My first task was a young man who was a bystander in a liquor-store robbery in Chicago. He’d gotten the shotgun blast on the side of the head, had no vision in one eye and a little bit in the other. Our task was to get him to be able to do some filing in a filing cabinet so he could get a job. We managed to do that with a very simple, little flip-in loop – Al Rosenbloom was my mentor on that one – and you know, here was this hardened kid from the inner city; when we could get him to do that, he cried and we cried, and then I got it. I understood why this was important. I’m pleased to say that our techniques have improved a lot over the years and the awareness about low vision has improved a lot over these last three to five years. But I think we still have a lot of room to grow. You know, when I tell people that I’m a low vision specialist, they have no idea what that means. They don’t know, does that mean blind? Does that mean I’m legally blind without my glasses? No, no, it’s not quite like that. I mean there’s really a big difference here. I think what you’re probably going to hear is a lot of different perspectives on vision impairment and what the potential impact is. And I hope what you’ll end up with at the end is that it’s really much more than all of that. So I think when Jim invited me, I said well, I don’t really know much about building design other than I hang around with an interior designer. But please feel free to use [our expertise] and references and resources; not just here at the meeting but if you have any questions or comments or how does this work or whatever, I mean, I kind of get it that we’re the people who are in the trenches in those exam rooms with the people who have vision loss. So no question is too dumb. If you have any questions about how this works or how you modify this or is this possible, please ask us. Eye disease – if you don’t know what that means, we’ll try and answer the question. You know, we’ve probably seen just about every kind of disease processed over the years and how it affects vision. So we’re kind of your resource people here during the conference and please feel free to use us.

Erin Schambureck: I’m the interior designer Dennis is hanging around with: I’m his youngest daughter. I have a commercial interior design background and I’m currently an independent designer but if any of you former professors need to put in a plug, I’ve applied for MFA programs this fall. So feel free to [contact me]. Jim was kind enough to let me tag along as well and participate. I’m very excited to be here, sort of as a personal research project and learn more, kind of connect with what I’ve watched my dad do for the last how ever many years, but also from my standpoint as a potential student going back and becoming a researcher and a grad student looking at how we can disseminate this information that we’re going to be creating and continue to educate the rest of the design population. Not just the people that have really made a point of focusing their careers on that but that are in the trenches designing it – those architects and designers who don’t want to have sullied their beautiful creations by accommodating for a specific population group. How can we share that information and teach them how to use it effectively. So I’m excited to be here. Thank you.

John Brabyn: Hi. I’m from Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. We have about 20 or 25 people there altogether working on research projects on things to do with blindness and lower vision, including technology for blind people and that sort of thing. I’m really glad to be here. Thanks.

Robert Massof: I’m a professor in the Ophthalmology Department and Neuroscience Department at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Sorry Erin, I won’t be able to help you with the MFA but if you decide to emphasize the visual impairment side, we might be able to work something out. I also direct the Lions Vision Research and Rehabilitation Center of Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute. We do basic research on visual impairments as well as clinical research on visual impairments and we also have a low vision rehabilitation service that is provided to primarily ophthalmology patients: people coming right out of the doctors’ offices to play their first encounter with how to deal with the visual impairment they’ve just acquired. So you kind of think of this as the front line to the rehabilitation. I’m going to have more to say later, so I’ll stop talking now.

Patrick Fee: Hi, I’m the director of operations for GSA PBS. We have 1,517 owned facilities across the country and some 8,000 leased spaces that we operate. The accessibility program is a program that’s in my division. I’ve been working with Vijay for about the last seven years once I joined GSA. And a few months ago, he came to us and said I need your support and so we’re here to support. And that’s all I have.

Mary Ann Hay: Good morning. I’m with Syska Hennessy Light and Design in New York. I’ve been in the New York lighting design community since the early ’80s so I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of change over close to 30 years in the lighting industry. With this global drive to reduce energy consumption and sustainability, it’s really become a daily challenge to provide a quality illuminated environment for our clients: one that people are comfortable in; one that people can perform tasks in – and that’s even for people who don’t have vision impairment. So I think this is a great workshop and something that’s been really overlooked for a number of years and I think it’ll help us, even as lighting designers, give us further support for just why lighting is important in the interior environment and how to really make sure those quality issues are addressed and are maintained.

Frederick Krimgold: I’m from the Virginia Tech Advanced Research Institute and my background is in architecture. I’ve specialized particularly in disaster risk reduction mitigation, which involves a great deal of field work and reconnaissance. About eight years ago, I had experienced severe loss of vision and the diagnosis was that I had irreversible glaucoma and there was nothing to do about it. That was quite a dramatic situation because somehow, you’ve got to keep on making a living. And to my great surprise and benefit, I came across people at the low vision center, the Lions Low Vision Center at Johns Hopkins, particularly Judy Goldstein who gave me a tremendous amount of help and showed me a wide range of tools. I have every one that’s been offered and have found that they help. No single tool solves the problem; but it is possible to keep on working and keep on maintaining activity. I’m very interested. My expertise is from the other side. That is, I know what it’s like not to see and I’m very interested to see this topic addressed. I’m tremendously appreciative that Vijay and the rest of the team here has seen fit to bring together this amazing group of experts.

Tom Sachs: I’m a principal with Oudens Knoop Knoop + Sachs Architects. I’m not an expert in vision of any sort, but I have been involved in design and advocacy for disabilities issues for about 25 years. I was introduced to disabilities when I got a project dumped in my lap called the National Rehabilitation Hospital, a new hospital here in Washington. So that was my introduction. Since then, I have chaired the D.C. Building Code Advisory Committee’s Committee on Design for Persons with Disabilities. So the first D.C. building code requirements for accessibility were developed under that and I’ve been a member of the Alexandria Commission on Persons with Disabilities for about 20 years now, working in that area. I do a lot of health care work, which almost by definition requires more accessibility than many other facilities. And I was lucky enough to be on Earle’s and Vijay’s and Stuart’s list of participants, so I’m looking forward to working with all of you and taking another step forward.

Jim Woods: I’m recently retired, quote retired. I haven’t retired from life yet. I want to bring a couple things to the table. One is, it’s in my current residency – we’ve recently moved to a continuous care retirement facility – and I think I’m the youngest person there. It’s absolutely amazing to see these people age. And what I’m learning in this particular case is how you can enable people. There’s a lot of vision issues. There are all kinds of issues. As people get older and we’re an independent living – you go to assisted living and you go to nursing care. And yet people are vital. They’re still vital in that regard. So that was one thing that is really exciting me about being able to deal with these issues right now. The other, I guess, is a background: I’ve been working with Vijay and with Earle for eight years on buildings now I think in some detail to look at how buildings are performing. When I go back to look at my academic background – I’ve been a professor at two universities; I’ve worked in industry – and I’ve seen the good and the bad and the ugly of buildings. My background is bioenvironmental engineering, so my master’s is physiology; my Ph.D. is in mechanical engineering. What I really look at is how the indoor environment affects human response. Lighting is a huge [issue]. The thing I want to bring across here: I’ve got some really good friends – David Munson was a mentor of mine in some of this regard. But, from the perspective of lighting and vision, this is how architects learn. Almost everything that they learn is by visual acquisition. Mind to hand type situation, but it’s all visual. And as we look at low vision, what happens? As we look at the other aspects of accessibility that architects are not going to perceive visually, how can we make that happen? I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of this expert panel.

Gregory Knoop: I’m with Oudens Knoop Knoop + Sachs. I’m a practitioner. I design federal buildings. I work on security, health-care projects and projects for long-term care. But I’m a practitioner. So in a way, this workshop is aimed at me. We’re all human here and we’re flawed. We have failing vision, failing body parts; but we also aren’t perfect in the way we do things. We’re learning. Part of the reason why we’re here is to try to develop an impetus to a better way of practice and develop better skills as practitioners, as contributors to our society to make better buildings that accommodate our people better. Now, it’s like everybody’s goal to live life fully in every moment. And to be denied that is, people are acutely aware of it when their eyesight fails, when the environment seems scary. So I’m here as an advocate, also as a son. My father has failing eyesight. In fact, my brother-in-law’s father also had failing eyesight as well. I’ve seen how difficult it is for them to get around, to negotiate a built environment. So it’s also my honor to be here as the advocate of a son for his father, as well as an advocate to the architectural profession.