Step Up
Ergonomic Retractable Stair Design for Indian Railways: Considering Access
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kaniska Biswas
Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest rail network with a significantly large number of users. The overnight express trains have two–three berths for sleeping, aligned one over the other with vertical spacing. Presently, instead of proper steps there are only horizontal bars on which the passengers have to balance to stand and climb up. It poses severe difficulties on the users those who are not physically fit for this kind of activity. For the old, it is horrifying that what if they have assigned a berth other than the lower one. The same is true for Indian women with traditional attire. However, for anyone, it is not comfortable to climb up and down with the present design, which does not even have any far resemblance with the conventional stair. Though physical agility has a direct relation to age, however, the correlation is not that predictive and has influence of several factors like obesity, weakness or injury. This paper depicts the design of a novel retractable stair system for Indian Railway to facilitate ease to the passengers to access the middle and upper berths. In this design, we have introduced three retractable steps, one at the level of the lower berth, one at the level of halfway between the lower and middle berths and one at the level of the middle berth. The final model is conceptualized and tested with a set of users from different age groups and validated with experts.
Design ± Context: An Evolving Enchantment with Stairs
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Houser
Few elements within the build environment command our attention as do stairs, stairways, and stairwells, or their mechanical counterparts, escalators and elevators. As sculptural forms, they bring order to grand and humble spaces, from the grand Jordan Staircase in the Winter Palace to the basement stairs of a New York tenement. As conveyances they gently lower us into the Louvre in Paris or speed us through the myriad levels of the Moscow Metro. They visually and literally usher us through space and time. The author is a designer and an artist. This study tracks his creative efforts focusing on our uses of, and expectations concerning stairs and stairwells. His artwork has evolved from documenting spaces and objects, to creating site-specific installations, to making multi-media objects. His creative work has moved from capturing and presenting realistic images to taking objects out of context and digitally morphing them into surrealistic settings. He pays particular attention to the act of peering over handrails, looking into the depths of stairwells, and experiencing unexpected events. The work discussed here has been included in juried and invited exhibitions and represented in private and public collections.
