HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN

The Institute for Human Centered Design, formerly know as Adaptive Environments (AE), was founded in 1978 by Elaine Ostroff and Cora Beth Able, an outgrowth of the Arts and Human Services Project, a multi-disciplinary graduate program supported by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. The graduate program emphasized the leadership role of artists and designers in creating community-based programs for people with disabilities. The design emphasis coincided with the deinstitutionalization movement of the late 1970s in which people with disabilities, many of them children, were moving from institutions into communities. Schools, libraries, entertainment and recreation places, public space, even homes were not designed to accommodate this new level of community diversity. The Institute for Human Centered Design began with a focus on helping families and communities solve practical problems of the design of places. It engaged designers..

Primary location: Boston United States