Designs on the Games
Tuesday 7th October 2008
Savoy Place, London
Organised by PhoneAbility and the IET
Service excellence for disabled customers
by Sir Stephen Duckworth
Thank you very much indeed. Dear me, I feel I have been set up to be shot at now with my ODA hat on!
Firstly, just to explain how the structures of the organisations involved in London 2012 work together. There's the ODA, the Olympic Delivery Authority, which is the body responsible for the construction of the venues, the park, and the establishment of the Olympic transport system. And then there is LOCOG, which is the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, who have been tasked with organising the events, such as the Cultural Olympiad, the Olympic Games, and I think the first time it's been mentioned, the Paralympic Games, which is the second largest sporting event in the world, ten times bigger than the World Cup football competition. So let us not forget that this is about the Olympics and the Paralympics.
So there are two outfits involved in this, and you've got to be clear about the distinction. We try and put ourselves forward to the public as a combined effort to deliver London 2012, the event, as it were.
There are other very important acronyms involved in the event as well. The GLA, of course, and David Morris from the GLA is with us today and there may be others, who through the LDA, London Development Agency, used to own the land upon which the Olympic Park is being built, and will take over ownership of the land in legacy mode. They have a vested interest in the legacy of what is left behind after the Games.
Everything that we do within the Olympic Delivery Authority on the construction side is driven by those legacy demands, and in fact yesterday the new Mayor, Boris Johnson, established the legacy strategy group, who are looking at who will be our end customer; who are we, the Olympic Delivery Authority, designing things for? Who is going to take over the running of the venues after the Games, because that's very important for us to be able to have designed and developed something knowing who's going to want to use it and what it's going to be used for afterwards. Otherwise our legacy challenge becomes somewhat more difficult.
So the acronyms are important. Lord Erroll spoke before about being sort of a libertarian. Liberalism is the way forward and I am very passionate about what he said about the individual, and how the individual has rights, but also along with that the responsibilities to embrace and enjoy those rights. So I very much support a lot of what he said.
We are talking about big events here. If you think about big events, big sporting events, you would probably think of 90,000 people going to Wembley. Has anyone been to Wembley? Hands up? (a few) It's a bit of a mess getting there - it's a bit of a chaotic challenge getting 90,000 people into a stadium.
We are going to get about quarter of a million people in an hour, roughly, into the Olympic Park. Try and visualise the volume of people that have got to get into that venue. It's not just about filling the 80,000-seater stadium; it's about the basket ball arena, the hand ball arena, the hockey, the football, and - sorry, the football isn't taking place in the main park, of course, but all the other sporting events, such as the aquatics and cycling, on that site. So it's an enormous flow of people. It's the hugest, or the most significant movement of people outside of a war environment ever that we will see. So it's a huge logistical event that comes with huge security implications as well.
A quick question before I go into the main part of my presentation. Can you put up your hand if you think you're normal? There are several. They must be engineers! (laughter) You are an engineer, aren't you? Yes, you are nodding! Isn't it remarkable how engineers think they are normal, when the rest of us know how completely abnormal they are!
The point to my question is this. Not many of us in this room think that we are normal, and if you look up the word in a dictionary it says, "Appertaining to the norm or belonging to the majority".
If you look at the person who's sitting next to you, you start to draw comparisons between yourself - as long as it's not an engineer! - and the person who's sitting next to you, you will realise that you are very different from the person sitting next to you. You live somewhere different. Hopefully you are married to somebody different or you have a different partner! You do a different job. You work in a different location. You have different enjoyments. You support a different sport or team.
Whatever it might be, we are all different. So I could argue logically that it's normal to be different. If it's normal to be different, we need to design and develop an infrastructure that accommodates what's normal, and what's normal is different. And one of the key elements of why London won the bid for 2012 was because we promoted not just about youth, but also about the diversity of the population of London.
There are 300 languages spoken on the playgrounds of the schools in London. 300 different languages. So, yes, we are going to expect an influx of people who are going to communicate in different languages, but we already have that wealth of diversity within the population of the five London boroughs where we are actually constructing the Olympic venue, the major Olympic venues.
So it's normal to be different. And who are our customers? This is about service excellence for disabled customers. One group of customers - that's a bit about me; you don't really want to hear that... - I was a doctor by training, but you know, that's sort of irrelevant.
Someone had a go at doctors earlier on, so I thought I ought to say that!
There's one group of customers - this was a picture (above), you can see of the water queue in the background, coaches in the background and an extraordinary number of wheelchair users, one of which is me and one of which is another member of the audience here (interestingly enough), and other disable people. It looks a bit gloomy there. It is in Beijing. It wasn't the weather - it was just about to go dark so it was twilight as we advanced our way towards the opening ceremony.
One group of customers is the spectator customer. But there are other customers we need to think about as well. The other customers are our athletes. Here there are three cyclists. For those of you who can't see, one with a leg missing and an artificial limb, just being awarded one of their many gold medals.
So another customer we need to think about is the athlete customer. What are we doing? For example, is there technology? I remember going to the Bird's Nest stadium and watching the blind sprinters running with their guides. When they had run the race, the 100-metre race and run over the finishing line, they didn't have a clue whether they had come first, second or third. Is there an electronic wrist band that they could have that would indicate to them where they had come as they crossed the line? It's technically possible surely to let them know. Of course their guide was inevitably a few paces behind as they crossed the line, because those are the rules, who would tell them and you would see a sense of euphoria or disappointment depending on where they had come.
In relation to the other customers, the paying customer if you like, there's also a significantly large number of non-paying customers. They are known as the Olympic or Paralympic family. They are treated like gods by the organisation, because essentially, without them, the host city wouldn't have got the event.
What I was surprised about - because I became a member of the Paralympic family when I went to Beijing, because of my involvement with London 2012 - is how does such a red-carpet treatment, if you happen to belong to that family, and how there's quite a lower standard of treatment if you remove that particular badge - as I did for one day - and try and get in as a bog-standard punter, as it were.
It was quite appalling the disparity of treatment between the two customers, and I hope that, in 2012, we can get it right for both customer groups.
It's critical really because, in Beijing, as you can see from this image here, there were very few local Chinese disabled people attending events. A couple of elderly Chinese people who looked fairly affluent compared to the people that you would see out on the street, but very few disabled people in China attended the events at the Paralympic Games, and I am told also the Olympic Games.
I think that, when the event comes to London, at least 50% of the spectators will be London-based. The other spectators in Beijing, the other disabled spectators in Beijing, were other athletes. So we are going to see double the number of disabled spectators over and above that which we were seeing in the event in Beijing.
Here is an image of me going up in a stair-lift up the short flight of stairs. This is in a venue called the Workers' Stadium, which wasn't on their main Olympic site, and it's where the judo and similar sports were held.
I am halfway up the stair-lift, a flight of eight stairs. You can see I am in the privileged area because it's red carpet there.; The rest is not red carpet.
Interestingly enough, I had to wait for half an hour to get in - similar to the experience this morning, I understand for other wheelchair users! - but I came in the back door, quite swiftly, because they had lost the remote control for the device and they went off to get it.
Now, the way that China overcame the accessibility to technology and other issues problem was through their volunteers. They had 1.2 million volunteers. 1.2 million. We are looking at having roughly about 60 or 70,000 in this country.
I am told, also, that of those volunteers approaching half of them were either police or secret service! And they wore different-coloured hats. But that's the way that you could tell.
So the other thing about this technology is that we are hoping not to require this sort of platform lift going up a flight of steps type technology, because we are designing it in as we go along.
The other thing about the technology was that, on the way down, it broke, so it did take an awful long time to get in and out of that building. The reason being is that I used quite a peculiarly heavy wheelchair, but as technology develops in wheelchair design, electric powered wheelchairs at least will become heavier and heavier.
Another image here of four people riding in the stadium in Hong Kong, where the equestrian events took place. They are actually riding in their electric-powered wheelchairs and scooters, just to give you a flavour of the diversity of people, both athletes and otherwise, who exist.
Another image of what used to be called "murder ball" - I think it's a far more appropriate term than wheelchair rugby. It's far more like murder ball, as these crazy fools who break their neck come careering towards each other and try and knock each other out of their wheelchairs. I am definitely getting tickets for that in London!
Another picture here, it's all my family photographs coming out. This is myself and my partner Rose. I am obviously sat in my wheelchair.; We are sat behind a mahogany frontage. We won't be using mahogany in our stadium, for environmental reasons as well as cost.
But interestingly, this is where the President of China sat, and Rose is sat in the President's chair. Shortly after this picture was taken, a large security guard with a machine-gun came over and asked her to leave because the President would be sitting there in a few days' time at the closing ceremony.
But if you look down to where my knees or Rose's knees are, each of the people who had sat there would have individual air-conditioning units. There would be plug-in devices for people to get translation and other such technological developments, that weren't available to the general public. Only the President of China had such facilities.
So, when it was hot - and it was extremely hot, particularly during the Paralympic ceremony - I thought, "How on earth can they keep their jackets on? Boris didn't, because he had his swinging around all over the place! But they were actually sat with their own air conditioning, so they were probably quite chilled by the end of it!
Another issue is about access for, not me as a disabled person, but me as part of a family unit. Traditionally, we see in stadia that you have a wheelchair slot and a slot for somebody who's their nominated carer or support worker.
When I go to see an event, part of the enjoyment that I have as a participant is seeing the smiles on my kids' face; the enjoyment that they get out of it. Them leaping up and down with excitement.
Quite often, particularly when they are eating, I like them to be at quite a distance! (laughter) But surely we can, and we are going to, design a seating system that accommodates families.
Who's going to tell Tannie Gray that she can sit there with her child and her husband has to sit somewhere else or she can sit with her husband and the child has to sit somewhere else?
She won't accept that level of treatment as an ex-Paralympic gold medallist.
So the question is what is disability? Disability results from the way in which contemporary society has been organised to present disabled people with barriers that other people don't experience. So disability is consequent upon social organisation. So social organisation is the thing that disables us, not our impairments.
What we need to do in everything that we think about is design out the disabling barriers.
How do you do that? We heard mention of chip and PIN technology. The British banking association commissioned my organisation to develop a system to consult with disabled people about how to make chip and PIN technology as accessible as possible. We ran 10 focus groups - sorry, more than that - we ran 35 focus groups, with 10 disabled people in each focus group all of different impairment types all over the country, 350 people in total, to consult about the design of chip and PIN technology.
Two years ago, we looked at identity cards - not that I am from a liberal perspective quite keen on the idea - but looking at the accessibility of identity card technology, consulting with over 1,000 disabled people about the design of it to enable it to be accessible, and of course mention was made of the system that Lord Erroll mentioned about having some tactile device to identify the cards.
So remember what disability is. It's nothing to do with our impairment. It's to do with the way that engineers, architects and others have historically built in barriers that restrict our opportunities to participate as equal citizens. Barriers that we feel we have a right not to encounter.
We have heard about some figures on disability, the old approach to disability was a very medical model approach where disability was seen as an illness, belonging to a person. We need to move on beyond that to, well what we now would argue is the social model.
This is a slide that shows it's the organisation of society that results in the discrimination, and to remove those disabling barriers, the law, the Disability Discrimination Act requires organisations and designers and developers of technology to take positive action so that these individuals can enjoy those rights.
I just want to speak briefly about another model of disability which runs parallel to the social model which is one that I call the empowerment model.
This is a graph where on the horizontal X axis you have got time, and the vertical axis you have got self-esteem - how you feel about yourself a person. The graph is shaped like a bit of a ditch where on the left hand side there us slight elevation above the ditch.
Essentially when people develop an impairment, most people are not born with their impairment but when people develop an impairment, it did happen to me when I was 21, it's quite a shock to the individual and their family.
The reason I am presenting this is because the Government has set up an outfit called the office for disability issues which is essentially a pan-departmental body but hosted within the department for work and pensions, and they produced a report recently showing that looking at the expectations and experiences of disabled people, and only 6% of those who responded to the study, knew of the social model of disability, or were aware of of the social model of disability.
The vast majority of disability people that were questioned in the survey, responded along the medical model lines. They still believe the best way of improving their life was to become able-bodied again or able minded again in their approach (or non-disabled which is the correct term) - I do find also political correctness a bit of a struggle. Because if you look at the acronym PC political correctness it also stands for psychological constipation, {laughter} because it's all in the head and it bungs things up doesn't it.
Language is however, important, and the language we use we have to think about in the way that it does not disable people. So avoid the use of disabling language but don't let it get in the way of progress.
Following the onset of an impairment, many people go into denial, they think that the medical profession, of which I said earlier on I am a member, can fix people up, sort them out and make them better again. Which is not the case. The vast majority of people will continue their life with their impairment. Many people get stuck in denial. You remember Christopher Reeve sadly deceased now, Superman, he always thought he would walk again, that technology would solve his problems. He even got a morphed image of him getting up out of his wheelchair walking again. Sadly it was in his endeavours of trying to that resulted in developing the pressure sore from which he ultimately died from. It actually led to his downfall rather than his success which is a very sad situation to find yourself in.
So people get stuck in denial. If you move through that you become frustrated and angry then you move into this ditch that I called depression or passive acceptance. The vast majority of disabled people in the UK are in this bottom of the ditch mode. This passive acceptance mode. Feeling that they have been dealt a blow by fate, there is little that they can do about it there's little that society intends to do about it, and there they reside stuck at the bottom of the ditch. They feel that sometimes lying in a ditch can become quite comfortable. If you think about those individuals on incapacity benefit, there are 2 to 3 million people on incapacity benefit, many of those are in that situation.
Now when we design and develop technologies for people we have heard talk already about the digital divide, there is a very limited appetite amongst those people who are passive and perceive themselves as being dependent, to want to engage the way that new technology. So as well as thinking about the design and development of the new technologies we have got to think about ways in which we develop that technology to encourage users who are at the bottom of the ditch, to engage with it. Because otherwise we're only going to develop technologies for the more motivated, active disabled people who are doing things. The vast majority of disabled people still stuck in their passive and medical model mode of thinking won't gain access to opportunities.
So do please think about the great unheard group of disabled people who are not as forceful as others in putting their point of view through the various organisations that represent them.
Back to London.
This is an image of the main stadium on the Olympic park. Look its out of the ground its nearly finished I could say {laughter} but its far more advanced than most people would think. Here you see a site with a large number of cranes, a large number of deep piles, these are the large concrete pillars that are being driven very deep into the ground, and the beginning of the platform of the Olympic stadium coming out of the ground. So we are making tremendous progress, and there's another close up slide of it I will show you.
The scale of the work and the construction itself this a closer view of the large piles that will support the structure above it.
So, there's a lot happening. There's a lot going on on site. If you want to have a look, last week we launched on the London 2012 website the 6 live web-cams, so you can view pictures that are taken on an hourly basis of the construction, you can look at the aquatic centre which is slightly less developed as shown by my next picture which is a large pile of mud with some large yellow diggers and things on it.
But that's how the previous slide would have looked a couple of months ago. We're actually ahead of schedule.
My final slide is an image of a woman in a boat, who's just won a rowing race. But for us as disabled people I suppose, service excellent for us would be for London 2012 to mirror the way in which the Para-Olympic and the Olympic families were treated in Beijing we just want the same red carpet as everybody else. Let there not be a division between the way London treats the Olympic family and mainstream spectators, let them not be a difference between the way that London 2012 treats non-disabled spectators and disabled spectators. Thank you. {Applause}
JOHN GILL: Thank you very much Dr. Duckworth, I think we have got time for about one question. Anyone got anything urgent?
NEW SPEAKER: Maggie Yates. I want to make two points. I am doing research part-time at the London School of Economics, and Brussels has just funded a very large research project about contingency, using technology, contingency is a technical term that possess of us who work in that field about moving people around how do they move. At the London School of Economics we will be part of that project which is about to start if anyone wants to work with us, on our contingencies we will be very happy to work with you and talk to you about it.
The other point that I wanted to make, Stephen, I think that you give a very clear message about what some people with disabilities feel. I think the other side of the coin is that some of us know we have a disability, but we don't want to be either registered as disabled, or necessarily to talk about it. I think that the important thing when you look at the figures about the known percentage of people in the population who are admitting they have a disability, the very much higher figure of a group of people growing older who are taking now about 40% of the population. I do hope within the term "disability" those many people who don't want to be labelled as disabled will also be thought about in disabilities.
A: I couldn't agree more, I think when I mentioned disabled people, by that you need to be disadvantaged by the system and structures in society. I would include within that the attitudinal and behavioural barriers that are faced by people who may have had an experience of low back pain, repetitive strain injury, or a psychiatric or psychological impairment. So, that it's not just about the physical barriers its about the attitudinal and behavioural barriers that society has the capacity to remove. I see no better vehicle than perhaps the success that the GB Paralympic team had in Beijing and hopefully will continue to have in London 2012 to demonstrate the capacity of disabled people to succeed in a competitive environment that happens to be a sporting environment, but equally so, the competitive environment of the labour market, of the legal world, the political world, of wherever it might be so we can be seen as equally-able once the barriers are removed to compete as anybody else.
JOHN GILL: Thank you Dr. Duckworth. Now its time for coffee. Coffee is served in the two rooms where you registered outside. I would ask you to be back here at 11.30 at which point we will start getting into the new technologies.
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