Goals of UD, ViewUDGoals, Wellness

Wellness

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Contributing to health promotion, avoidance of disease and protection from hazards

The City of New York has an extensive initiative focused on improving pedestrian and bicycle travel. Using simple and inexpensive strategies like painting and planters, hundreds of streets are being transformed to provide safer bicycling opportunities and passive recreation sites. The photograph shows an improvement on the West Side in midtown with a bike lane, enlarged sidewalk, and planters. The initiative is designed to encourage walking and bicycling and outdoor recreation by improving both safety of the environment and streetscape amenities.

Universal Design (UD) is an approach to design that increases the potential for developing a better quality of life for a wide range of individuals. It is a design process that enables and empowers a diverse population by improving human performance, health and wellness, and social participation (Steinfeld and Maisel, 2012). It creates products, systems, and environments to be as usable as possible by as many people as possible regardless of age, ability or situation.