Inclusive housing arrangement makes for better ETH engineers
In Switzerland’s first inclusive 'ParaWG'-flatshare, students from ETH Zurich live alongside people with spinal cord injuries. It is hoped that the students will draw on this experience to help make the world more accessible for disabled people.?
In brief
In collaboration with ETH Zurich and Balgrist University Hospital, the Swiss Paraplegic Centre (SPC) has opened Switzerland’s first inclusive 'ParaWG'-flatshare for wheelchair users in Zurich.
The flatshare involves students from ETH Zurich living alongside people with mobility impairments. While wheelchair users undertake independent living training, students gain awareness of the challenges individuals with disabilities face in daily life.
The idea is that students draw on this life experience and combine it with their university education to take better account of the needs of wheelchair users in future technical developments.
Even at the best universities, some things can’t be taught – not in a lab or in a lecture hall. Oliver Stoller knows this challenge only too well. He heads up the Competence Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Science (RESC) at ETH Zurich. The Centre focuses on the development of technical solutions to alleviate or support physical impairments. “We can equip students with the technical and practical skill set to design and build assistive devices for people with disabilities,” he says.
What is more difficult, he explains, is teaching them how the needs of disabled people can be translated into technical requirements. “Engineers tend to see humans and their role in society too mechanistically and to seek purely technical solutions to potential problems.” Sometimes this causes them to lose sight of what is really needed. This affects the acceptance of novel assistive devices, for example. The inclusive flatshare for wheelchair users in Zurich’s Seefeld is an innovative way of approaching this issue as it aims to help ETH students better understand the needs of people with disabilities.
A change of perspective
The concept of an inclusive flatshare for wheelchair users emerged from a collaboration between ETH Zurich, the Swiss Paraplegic Centre (SPC) and Balgrist University Hospital. The SPC operates several of these “ParaWGs” – residential communities in which people with spinal cord injuries complete training to allow them to live as independently as possible. They are supported and guided by SPC staff.
The concept was expanded to allow students from ETH Zurich to live with individuals with spinal cord injuries. In the first inclusive flatshare for wheelchair users, individuals with spinal cord injuries share their home with non-disabled residents, and their independent living training is combined with an inclusive lifestyle centred on mutual support. ETH students can also gain first-hand experience of the many small and large obstacles wheelchair users face in a world designed primarily for pedestrians. Thanks to financial support from the Swiss Paraplegic Foundation, the flatshare opened in September this year as part of a 13-room cluster apartment in an urban housing project in Zurich’s Seefeld.
A greater awareness of barriers
It is just over two months since it opened and the flatshare is already home to five ETH students and two wheelchair users – with five more set to arrive in the medium term. “Really, it’s just a very normal flatshare,” says ETH student Amelie Grossmann. “Apart from the fact that some of us are in wheelchairs.” The roommates help each other and occasionally do things together. Grossmann is on the Master’s programme in biomedical engineering and therefore corresponds exactly to the target group of the inclusive flatshare. She says that she has become more aware of the barriers faced by disabled people since she has been living there. And there are many.
Delia Guggenheim is the second wheelchair user to have moved into the flatshare. The psychology student and keen athlete was involved in an accident in March this year, which resulted in a spinal cord injury. The first time she left the house in a wheelchair, she was taken aback: “I was really shocked to see how difficult the world is to navigate for wheelchair users,” says Guggenheim. There were obstacles everywhere, and even on trams with wheelchair access, there were often small barriers to overcome just to get on.
She moved into the inclusive flatshare for pragmatic reasons, as she needed somewhere to stay until her flat was converted and is eager to learn to live independently as soon as possible. She is impressed by the idea: “This is how change starts. When non-disabled people are made aware of these issues early on, they can put this knowledge into practice in their respective fields later in life and help make the world a little bit more wheelchair friendly.”
“Innovation needs to be more in touch with reality”
The current goal is to find ways for students to contribute their experiences to their studies and specific projects – the project partners’ research departments are currently developing potential ideas in this area. Simultaneously, opportunities are being explored to further expand the concept and increase its availability to more students.
Oliver Stoller from the RESC strongly believes that sustainable innovation and inclusion need to be more aligned with reality. He therefore hopes to launch other similar programmes to give even more students access to this life experience as part of their education. “The experiences from the inclusive flatshare for wheelchair users will stay with students for life and therefore have a positive impact on their future careers.”