EVALUATING CONFORMITY TO UNIVERSAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES TO ENHANCE INCLUSIVENESS IN THE DESIGN OF PROPOSED MODERN SPORT COMPLEX

(A CASE STUDY OF KANO)

By

Author

Presented To

Department of Environmental Design

ABSTRACT
Sport has been realized as a key towards healthy development, sport complex is a sport facility comprising of facilities such as stadium; baseball stadium, football stadium, track and field events, swimming pools and indoor sport. Sport activities involve all groups of people; children, adults and elderly, and able and disabled people, some groups of people come across barriers when participating in sport activities which hinder there effective inclusiveness in their communities. Therefore the standard design should be maintained to carterfor all these groups of people. The study is aimed at evaluating the conformity to inclusive design principles to enhance inclusiveness in sports activities, through evaluating universal design for spaces and activities in sport complexes and accessing conformity of sports complexes to universal design. The methodology employed a mixed-method approach which (quantitative and qualitative methods), which include a visual survey (case study) checklist, and interview. The checklist was used to access degree of conformity to universal design while finding from visual survey showed pictures of conformity to inclusive design standards, while the checklist showed in (percentage) degree conformity to universal design. And finally the interviews conducted are structured and ask two questions. The research established that all the facilities studied has complied up to 64%, the highest had 76% and the lowest had 56%.therefore the universal design principle; Equitable Use, Flexibility in Use, Simple and Intuitive Use, Perceptible Information, Tolerance for Error, Low Physical Effort, Size and space for Approach and Use need to be considered in such cases. And this will serve as a framework for new designs and strategies for improving the standards of existing sport complexes so as to enhance inclusiveness in sport activities.