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A universally accessible weight machine is among the front runners in the current James Dyson Award contest.
We've had the Americans with Disabilities Act for nearly twenty years, but gyms remain nearly impossible to access and use for those in wheelchairs. The Access was inspired by the difficulty, after the designer saw a man in a wheelchair arrive at a gym, with a bag full of homemade gadgets attached to the back of his chair. In the following hour and a half he spent more time fiddling with the equipment and getting in and out of the chair than he did working out. Surely, he wasn't alone: Almost no gyms have equipment for the handicapped.
The designer's still anonymous, because the design itself is competing for the James Dyson Award, a global competition to find the cleverest student-designed concepts (after the spirit of Sir James and his ubiquitous vacuum). The Access has two arms that extend laterally, and which can rotate up to 180 degrees, each independently. That allows anyone to configure it to their specific need:
Currently, the design is the second-highest rated entry among hundreds from around the world. It's just a hair behind this design, for a reusable seal for food containers--a variation on something that's been running on infomercials for years, stateside.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From FastCompany.com:
