Towards a people-first engineering design approach. A comprehensive ontology for designing inclusive environments

The world is ageing, and this change will strongly impact the design of products, services and environments. Notwithstanding the proliferation of research initiatives, guidelines, policies and regulations, there is still a significant gap and lack of a uniformed strategy to guide engineers, designers, and architects to design inclusive environments. This article explores and summarizes through a review of international regulations and standards, the requirements that design practitioners need to consider when designing accessible, inclusive, smart, age-friendly environments. With this explorative study, we reviewed documentation and developed a comprehensive ontology comprised of people and design related criteria aiming to support the design of inclusive, smart and accessible buildings. The ontology was created by interpreting the criteria through semantics used in people-centered design approaches, where people’s needs and design requirements are two fundamental phases for designing inclusively. The results are intended to enable researchers and practitioners to better identify clusters of accessibility and inclusion criteria to facilitate the study and the design of accessible, inclusive, smart, age-friendly environments.