In collaboration with Red Cross in Honiara Special Education Unit, we're recovering school grounds destroyed during recent Solomon Island storms. By reframing ideas of play from a fixed equipment to an urban farm adventure, we aimed to build resilience and sustainable life skills that lead to career opportunities for students with disabilities, teachers, and families. The Red Cross initially approached us for advice on the selection of play equipment for kids with disabilities. While there are a number of accessible play units on the market, what we were concerned about is the value added...

AQ's independent research early findings suggest tactiles are being over prescribed at the taxpayers expense and are underutilised by the visually impaired.  In economic modeling, current estimates of annual global investment in Tactiles is just under 1 billion AUD with Australia and New Zealand leading the way with the most pervasive regulation for building installations and investment followed by Japan and the UK. Tactile Ground Surface Indicators are the penny sized lumps and bumps you see at stairs, platforms and intersection and are designed to give both visual and tactile...

Have the Australian Standards become a design Crutch? It's of great concern to us to see architects leaning on building codes and standards as architectural templates instead of their own imagination and creativity. Any decent self respecting species on the planet knows that diversity is the key to survival so what's the evolutionary advantage of standardising design?  It didn't work for Mao Zedong or Stalin and there's no evidence that stifling evolution will work for us and there's every reason to motivate our designers to innovate solutions to today's lifestyle problems. When to...

Any stairstep falls or even falls on the same level in public building should be taken seriously for reason that they never occur in isolation and  the probability of more serious falls increases with time. We usually become involved in stairstep falls claims following a fall or near miss. If you've had a stairstep fall or have a business premises with problem staircase or ramps then we advise to follow up with a stair audit to identify the problem and take advice on fall prevention and control strategies. It's important to note that stairstep falls are rarely the fault of person or...

WHS in the home The general exemption for homes, dwellings, units apartments, houses. It’s a moot question whether a home is a workplace and therefore required to be safe and accessible. The community like to think of our house as a home and not a workplace and this is reflected in the exemption of most freestanding houses from the Premises Standards. There may be an issue in housing when a house becomes a workplace or an apartment building with accommodation and communal areas. However, generally speaking, the Premises standards doesn't extend to single dwellings, townhouses or...