UNIVERSAL DESIGN FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF ADAPTABLE ARCHITECTURAL STUDIOS FOR LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

Issues arising from the general problem of the inaccessibility of the built environment to people with  disabilities (PWDs), have led to a paradigm shift from design approaches aimed at narrow code  compliance, to design ideologies aimed at producing usable facilities and environments to meet the  needs of everyone, particularly PWDs. One of such approaches is Universal Design (UD), a framework for designing products, buildings, and environments to be accessible and usable by everyone. Consequently, guidelines have been developed for many products and environments,  including learning environments, in line with the UD principles. However, these models are considered  inadequate to fully address design requirements of architectural studios in learning environments. This  study developed a design framework for developing adaptable architectural studios, in line with UD  parameters and peculiar needs of students in a traditional and digital studio learning environment. The  study adopted a qualitative research approach. Observation and systematic review of relevant  literature were used to collect data, which were coded according to themes for easy analysis for the  development of the framework. Illustrations were employed to present the findings for clarity and easy