Edited Transcript Universal Design Conference Sydney Town Hall - - PDF document

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 1

Edited Transcript Universal Design Conference Sydney Town Hall (Lower) Wednesday, 20 August 2014 at 9am Day 1

About This Document This edited transcript has been taken directly from the text of live captioning provided by The Captioning Studio and, as such, it may contain errors. The Captioning Studio accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from the draft transcript provided for this edited version. COTA NSW accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from this edited transcript provided for the benefit of conference delegates. Only those presentations made in the Lower Town Hall are provided. There was no captioning available for the concurrent sessions held in an upstairs room. The original draft transcript must not be published without The Captioning Studio’s written permission.

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 2

INCLUSIVE PRACTICE Concurrent Session One: Chair Nicholas Loder Richard Bowman: Slip resistance according to Goldilocks Synopsis: Richard outlines the issues associated with gauging slip resistance and says that trips and falls are not necessarily associated with slips, or slips on slippery surfaces. There are many factors to consider in preventing trips and falls and not all of these can be captured in an industry standard. Cleaning materials and wear and tear over time all contribute to the complexity. Getting slip resistance just right is not as easy as it looks because the qualities of slip resistance change over time as the surface wears and generally it is measured when the product is new. And fall prevention is much more than providing a slip-resistant surface. In Europe the construction product requirements now state that floors must be safe or slip resistant at the end of an economically reasonable working life. A simple statement. Why not put that in your specifications? It's an inconvenient truth that slip resistance decreases as time passes. We've got test methods, and this is one developed at CSIRO. It's very simple. It doesn't take too long to do. This is a test method that can be used on resilient materials. In the Standards meetings representatives say we don't have anything, but they do have standards and it's just a matter of applying them. In handbook 198 that was published earlier this year, we have some revised guidance in table 3B. There are some aspects that I think are very good. We've changed the classifications were V W X Y Z, to P5 down to P0. The P1 recommendation for dry areas excludes a lot of polished stones and other materials traditionally used in those areas and there are several aspects of this handbook that need to be revisited, but that is the guide that you should be using at the moment. It doesn't have some of the material that's in handbook 197, which is meant to be being rewritten at the moment. So you need to go there if you want to use the recommendations. But in that handbook there is no guidance for domestic residential situations, so that's unfortunate. In some projects, the slip resistance has been compromised within a week of installation. If you think of a green Scotch Pad that we use for washing dishes, that is what is used in the accelerated test method and that can take the figure down by 15 BPN units in some materials just a 30-second light rub. A lot of the materials we're using don't have a lot of slip resistance. They may appear so initially, but they don't. What we basically need to be doing, I believe, is to be identifying a level at the end of an economically reasonable service life, a maintenance level where you might want to use some form of treatment. So floors should be not too slip resistant when new. The traditional way has been to say we need a factor

• f safety. Let's increase the requirement for slip resistance. Then you can't clean the floor. In a

commercial situation, people are going to get aggressive cleaning machines with pads on and that's going to remove the slip resistance, so you've totally compromised the procedure at the outset and you end up with something that is no longer slip resistant. And we need sufficient slip resistance at the end of the

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 3

working life. But how much traction is required? If a floor surface has greater available traction than a pedestrian demands, it should be safe. It's a very simple equation. However, we determine human traction demands

• n force plates in laboratories and we measured the availability of flooring traction using competing test
• methods. These results may not be replicated in real situations. So you can maintain the floor, clean it in

different way, different experts get different results. It's not reported accordingly. So there is a lot of ambiguity at times in the results that you might get when you commission them. Testing with three speeds of walking - young people, middle-aged people, senior people, male, female. There is not a lot of difference. So as we age, our traction demand really doesn't change that much. It's often stated what is the limit for slip resistance? It's a nonsense to try to abstract things to a single figure because when we're walking on a known slippery surface, we lower our traction demand. When we're walking in an unconstrained manner, we have a higher traction demand, when we're pushing a load, we require more traction from the floor. So what traction we need from the floor depends on our activity and how we approach it and what we know about it. We don't suddenly find that at point 4 it's safe, point 39 it's dangerous, there will always be a continuum spectrum and it will be highly dependent on the shoes we're wearing, the nature of the contaminant, when the floor was last cleaned, all manner of things. So it's not a simple issue. So what is adequately slip resistant? We don't have any benchmarking data. For all of the work that we do, who can tell me what the slip resistance of this floor is anywhere in this building? Nobody would know. This is true of the general environment. One of the projects I'd like to tell you about is our use of virtual reality environments in gait biomechanics experiments to determine the required slip resistance of flooring materials. When people are walking in laboratories on plates, they're told to walk in an unconstrained manner, walk freely, and as they walk that gives an indication of their traction demand. If we tell them to walk cautiously, they'll walk in all manner of different ways: How dangerous is it? How safely do I walk? So you can't ask people to do that. If we put people into a virtual reality environment, we can control what they're seeing and we can control their response. So we can understand far better how people might approach a room that they've never walked into before, whether it's a residential bathroom, public toilets, or if it's an

• ffice building, walking out from the lift into a lobby and it's raining outside, or if it's bright light outside or

it's dark outside, you can change anything you want. In the virtual reality environment I can have rats appearing through the floor, I can have fire coming out - anything. So we can produce all manner of

• environments. We can change the lighting, and we can use the Vicon system where we mark people and

we can determine where the centre of gravity is and things like that. This will be done on a treadmill where we have a couple of force plates and for some of the work we can do this in an omni walking situation where you're far freer to change direction. Are the Australian regulations sound? No. The whole of our building code is built on clichés and innuendo rather than fact. Basically a study of the Australian Building Code commissioned by Monash University Accident Research Centre, there was absolutely no quantification of slip resistance, no relationship between slip occurrence and a magnitude of slip resistance and, as I said before, there is no benchmarking

• f the level of slip resistance within our environment. So how do we know when somebody falls over

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 4

whether it's due to slipperiness, or some other problem? I'll just mention the fact that this all was based on some work done by Archicentre and 11,000 metropolitan

• inspections. 25% of those houses were built before World War II and all of the people living in them were
• ver 60 years of age, and they were identifying strip and slip - - trip and slip hazards. Protruding door

thresholds come under the heading of slip, but it’s a trip – not the same thing. That brings me to the second project, where the aim was to compare human perceptions of slipperiness and the prospective risk of slipping in a residential bathroom. We had 12 surfaces. We asked people, architects and designers to handle the floor specimens dry, handle them wet and then to walk on those surfaces in the shoes they were wearing on the day and then to walk on them bare feet. We only had 25 of the 77 people walk on them bare feet, but we had a very simple ranking system, not at all slippery, slightly sip slippery, quite slippery, extremely slippery. This was the ramp and the small samples, all manner of footwear. The designers were amazed by the deceptiveness of dry touch. For glass mosaic it got the best ranking, wet bare foot, but this doesn’t match the charts set down by the pendulum method. Everything is all over the place. People can't assess very well: results depended very much on the type of footwear they were wearing. So it shows to me that even if the architects went out there, it was probably the footwear that they were wearing on the individual day that would determine their performance and that they wouldn't have reproducible and repeatable analysis

• f slip resistance and it would depend on when that floor was last washed and all manner of things. So far

more needs to be done in that area. If access auditors are going to assess slip resistance, they should either take the pendulum or there's a machine called a SlipAlert. That's a device anybody can learn how to use in 20 minutes. It's far easier to pack, unpack, and you can make 20 readings on a floor within an hour, as against one with a pendulum. It is so quick, so easy, and it's reproducible, repeatable. You don't have to worry about the calibration aspects. So we've got all manner of difficulties there. I don't think we've got enough evidence. The classifications are very artificial constructs and whether or not the critical classification between P0, which means it has absolutely no slip resistance, and P1 which means it's limited, should that be at 15 BPN, should it be at 12? There was no data that anybody put forward to discuss any of this, and there needs to be that level of consideration. We now have requirements in the building code and within houses we have a requirement on stairs for a level of slip resistance that is so excessive it's stupid. It has been implemented in New South Wales. It will be implemented in all of the other States I think by 1 May next year. This decision was based on the recommendations that we had for commercial and industrial situations for stairs, no consideration of residential at all, and yet they've just taken it out and put it in and it's now law. There's a false note in there. So X3 is not equal to 3, as it states, and that needs to be looked at very carefully if you're relying on old slip resistance test data. The whole basis for changing the standard was based on some of the research that I did and it indicates very clearly that once you get down to that old X classification, products in there were often far less slip resistant if they were a very smooth floor. Thus

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 5

we've changed the way in which we prepared the rubber slider so it's not the roughness of the rubber slider that determines what the result of the floor is, because that's totally misleading. We would have been far better off to have increased the length of the going in the building code from 250 to 280mm or 240 in some countries. That would have reduced the incidence or risk of a large overstep, which is the problem. It's not the slipping, it's the overstepping that is the problem. That would have reduced the incidence by 94%. The cost benefit analysis that they did, they pulled a figure out of the air of 30% and, again, as with so much of politics, it was the big builders saying no, we will lose too much of the floor space if you increase the length of each of the steps by 30mm. You look at any stairs that are worn, where are they worn, they're worn on the nosing. You put a slip resistant nosing in as required under law, which part will wear fastest? The nosing. It becomes useless. To me it's ludicrous. The elderly will floor. In November you'll have a speaker from Canada speaking at the slip and fall prevention conference here in Sydney and these are some of his videos that I could have showed you

• today. He put 264 digital video cameras into common areas in two health care facilities and their initial

paper was published over a 26-month period of observation. They captured 227 falls from 130 individuals. Only 3% of those were slips. You look at other papers that are published in the pseudo biomedical area and you'll have figures of slips 20, 30, 40%. Why? Because it's self-reporting. People when they age don't like to say "I'm getting old, I'm getting frail", they like to blame the floor, it was slippery, therefore I fell. It's not the case. They're tending to be overbalancing. Their results show - they're there in black and white or colour, video - that people are falling. So there's all manner of things I could be talking to you about. They did use a product in there that was meant to be safe, but we have different results in Australia, but it comes back to environmental slips, or slips are generally environmental, but there is often a biomedical aspect to it and I could go into lots of case studies, but thank you very much for your indulgence, Nick. Thank you. (Applause). NICHOLAS LODER: Thank you, Richard. Yes, it's rather damning evidence that more data is needed. So I don't think we should let Richard go. Someone must have a question. Margaret. DELEGATE: Margaret Kay from local government New South Wales. I'm just going to ask you, since you have the hookup with the slide, what do you suggest is the most appropriate approach for public areas? RICHARD BOWMAN: Well, that's a loaded question in some respects and politicians should always load the dice because they know then how to roll them. I think that your question should be taken in two parts, one for Town Halls and other facilities you might hire out to other people, because there is an aspect of risk there, and then there is your role in certifying housing as being fit for occupancy, and that's a different issue. DELEGATE: What about public spaces, though, footpaths?

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 6

RICHARD BOWMAN: For public spaces, footpaths, in Melbourne the bluestone is put down, as it's sold it's normally sold with a value of about 70 BPN, 60 to 70 BPN. In measuring it at times it's in the mid- to low-30s, it has changed considerably, it doesn't go below that. People have run on that, it's on sloping surfaces, so it's obviously quite satisfactory. How much lower can we go? I don't know. It's again one of those things we need to get that benchmarking data as to what is proven to be satisfactory out there and to then say "This works, so let's establish that as a benchmark", so the architect can write "I want something that at the end of its working life will have a slip resistance of at least this level". DELEGATE: Hi, I'm Sofi De Lesantis from Sport and Recreation Victoria. Tiles are very important in my area, particularly when we're looking at aquatic centres, so I found your talk very interesting. The question I have, just your comments about tactile indicators, we've been hearing a lot about people with dementia

• ften get confused with tactile indicators in terms of their step and that has caused an increase in slippage.

What are your thoughts in that area. RICHARD BOWMAN: On walking into this building you saw no tactile indicators. You won't see any in forth Sydney anywhere, or very rarely. They are one design solution, everybody looking at the AS 1428 part 1 will see them as being an absolute requirement. So I believe that if you can design out potential hazards and I know I've attended disability access standards meetings where people in wheelchairs do not like them

• ne iota. Can people sense them under their feet, to what extent? Different people, different countries,

there are different designs, different meanings. So from the international perspective it's very different. In aquatic centres, cleaning is such an issue and appropriate cleaning and that's what often leads to a lot of the problems in there. So I would normally say try to get them out, and I know under foot comfort when people have been in swimming pools for a long period of time is quite important and people like to be able to walk normally when they get back on to dry land. If you have something that has an undulating surface, it does affect them at times. So I would say if you can find a better design solution, do so, but you have to engage the people that have got visibility problems. My name is in the AS1428 part 1 standard, the Bowman-Sapolinski equation. I wish that they had not used my name. In the preceding version, I put in an equation that Sapolinski, a high school student, did some

• research. I tried to get so many people interested in doing that research. Nobody would do it. They said

it's too expensive. A high school student made up some eye charts, different letters, colours on backgrounds, and took them

• ut and in analysing all of the results and in looking at the equations that were then used in other

international standards said that the one I had developed was best and he modified it slightly to overcome the deficiency at the dark end of the range. He came up with a beautiful equation, fantastic. That wasn't safe enough for people, so they multiplied it by 2. There are now colours that you cannot get anything to match with. Again, it's ludicrous. So we have to involve people, but we have to ask the right

• questions. When I look what the Australian Building Codes Board has done, I have had limited discussions

with them over the years. When I said I'm going to stand up and do what I think is right, after 20 years, somehow I was no longer Chair of the Standards Committee. So I don't know that the two are related, but it was a three-way discussion with Standards Australia, the Australian Building Codes Board and myself. So - and all of that research is being conducted basically by people like myself and other people who do a little bit of testing and we are funding that, Victoria University has put a little bit of money in. So it's

Edited Transcript

2012 National Disability Award winner

by Jane Bringolf

COTA NSW

Page 7

frightening to think that the country is in ignorance, the world is in ignorance. I have been going to Europe talking at various conferences for a while saying "you've got these construction product requirements that are government regulations, what are you doing about it?" They've started doing work in Spain, they started doing work in Germany, in Italy the attitude was if we do nothing, they won't enforce them. We've got to have the dialogue, we've got to get people involved, because otherwise we're going nowhere, we're creating problems for ourself but we're not finding solutions. So the simple solution is to be saying "I want it slip resistant at the end of working life" and causing the challenge. It's then somebody else's

• problem. As an architect, you have done the right thing.

DELEGATE: My name is Louise from Greater Shepparton City Council, I have a question about outdoor aquatic areas. Have you had much feedback about people with disabilities who stand on them bare feet and they get burnt? RICHARD BOWMAN: No, I haven't. With the aluminium or steel ones, they have often sharpened the edges and they have put milled surfaces into them to get them to be very, very slip resistant according to the standard because they want to be able to sell them into any environment. That works when they're new, but when they start to wear you no longer get that. We have changed in the standard the actual method of testing of the indicators. If you can imagine them from the side, the test area is effectively 6

• indicators. When you have a pendulum swinging down, it will make contact with the leading edge of the

rubber slider - will make contact with the top of the first two, it then goes into a void and the centre or the underneath of the rubber then goes thump into the edge of the next two indicators before it comes back up being spring loaded. So you're getting a massive loss of energy and it's the loss of energy that is equated with the slip resistance. So we haven't really been measuring slip resistance with the old method of test, so we've changed it around so that we're now approaching it at a 10 to 15 degree angle so you have continuous contact and maybe they're going to re-engineer some aspects of that surface, but they have been making them with very, very sharp edges as well. So that's maybe part of the discomfort aspect. Heat is I guess one of those problems we'll always have, particularly with very dark surfaces, not just metallic ones, that will conduct the heat and store it. NICHOLAS LODER: It doesn't sound like my tactile indicators are the favourite of many people, but I have to draw the session to a close. So thank you very much. (Applause).