Iowa State University professor of architecture Arvid Osterberg knows there’s a long way to go for his cause.

That hasn’t stopped him from having an unusual career goal: becoming obsolete.

“I guess in a way it would be nice if I could work myself out of a job,” Osterberg said.

Osterberg teaches a class called Design for All People, whose goal is to get students to think about designing for people with disabilities. He just finished the third edition of his 260-page manual, “Access for Everyone,” which lays out guidelines from the federal Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and his own design tips learned from 33 years of experience.

Influenced by his childhood and his friend Ronald Mace’s universal design concepts, Osterberg has devoted his career as an ISU professor since 1977 to making design improvements at the university. He also has used his experience in the field to give guidelines for everyone to design with disabilities in mind.

“The work that Arvid has done in creating his minimum standards and ‘Access for Everyone’ guide goes way beyond Iowa State University,” said Steven Moats, director of student disability resources in the dean of students office at Iowa State. “He and the guidelines have had a tremendous impact.”

Osterberg’s manual lays out minimum ADA design guidelines and adds about 400 of his own recommendations. Most of them are common-sense things that people just don’t think about, he said.

He does think about them, and has for a long time.

Influenced by early experiences

Osterberg’s life work has been strongly influenced by his experiences as a child and as a student at the University of Illinois in the 1970s.

Osterberg was diagnosed with polio when he was about 5 years old. For him, the disease didn’t end up being a big deal. It did for his brother, who was briefly paralyzed as a child, which resulted in his left leg being several inches shorter than his right leg.

It was when Osterberg went to college at Illinois that he became aware of how people with disabilities were forced to go about their daily lives. It was the little things that he noticed with a friend confined to a wheelchair.

“When we’d go into the architecture building there, he would go through the back door up the wooden ramp, and I’d go to the front door, which is discrimination,” Osterberg said. “It’s not the same experience.”

A few years later, when Osterberg returned to Illinois to pursue a master’s degree, he decided to study design for people with disabilities full time. He took that experience to Iowa State, where he immediately saw the same issue with wooden ramps, and this time decided to say something, advising facilities planning and management officials that “we shouldn’t be doing it with wooden ramps.”

“I suggested doing things in a more democratic way, something that worked for everybody,” Osterberg said. “That’s when they started asking for my advice.”

ADA standards lead to manual

Things got easier when the Americans With Disabilities Act became law in 1990. All of the sudden, there were standards for how new buildings needed to be constructed to accommodate people with disabilities.

That gave Osterberg an opening. He arranged a thorough inventory of the buildings on campus, having students evaluate areas where the structures didn’t meet ADA requirements. The university then set priorities for what needed to be changed. The process took more than three years.

Not everything the students found could be updated, due to budget constraints, but “it did a lot to raise our awareness and commitment to try to make things more accessible,” Osterberg said.

In the process, Osterberg and his students learned just how hard it was to read and understand the government’s standards. In the mid-’90s, Osterberg decided to start writing the manual, which grew from a simple pocket guide of regulations to a multi-year project. The first edition came out in 2002.

The ADA requirements were updated in 1998 and again this year. Osterberg’s goal is to go beyond the requirements.

“There’s this problem, to me, in that they only describe the minimum,” he said of the ADA rules. “They don’t really describe the better way to do it, the way that meets the needs of the most people.”

Beyond providing the minimum requirements, the manual adds notes about how to do things better. For example, Osterberg notes that a number of measures can be taken to make stairways safer, including installing proper lighting and handrails, highlighting the edges of the steps and making the dimensions uniform. Or, for a handicap parking space, it’s just as easy to make the spaces a little wider and the access lane a little narrower so drivers don’t park in the access lane as though it were a parking spot.

“It’s those sorts of things that keep cropping up,” Osterberg said. “They’re just easy to miss.”

His book supplements his Design for All People class. As part of the class, he has students look at practical ways to design for people with disabilities and even has them experience firsthand the limitations of being in a wheelchair.

He said the class has drawn a lot of interest from design students, and has drawn students from a lot of different design disciplines.

“I think the younger generation of students coming up is much more accepting to it,” Osterberg said. “Everybody needs to take responsibility, not just put it on the experts.”

Working to not have a job

The goal for the future is to get architects and other designers thinking about how to design for people with disabilities from the beginning of a project to the end, Osterberg said. If that is done, any discrimination that still exists will be eliminated.

For now, ISU officials are doing everything they can to make disabled students feel comfortable, said Moats from the dean of students office.

The days of wooden ramps behind buildings are gone, but he recognized there are still issues that require classroom or meeting locations to be changed to accommodate students with disabilities.

“The challenge will always remain how to address the structural challenges related to existing older buildings and structures,” Moats said. “People with disabilities, physical challenges, mobility challenges still work in some of those locations. Trying to update those facilities and buildings and keep a budget in mind is a challenge for sure.”

That’s why Osterberg finds it so important to design in an inclusive way. And that’s why, when he stops to think about it, he wouldn’t mind if his Design for All People course were eliminated when he retires, while his book lives on.

“In one way or another, this material needs to be integrated better in all the design disciplines,” Osterberg said. “If it gets to a point that it’s being done well, then you don’t need the extra course to learn about it.”