Following his life-altering diving accident leading to a spinal injury, James Taylor (1993, D) and his Radley friend Ed Warner MBE (1993, G) set out to create innovative and beautiful solutions to inclusive design. Their journey resulted in Motionspot, a RIBA award-winning consultancy which creates stunning inclusive and accessible spaces that redefine the boundaries of design excellence.
James and Ed were in the same class from their very first day at Radley and, throughout their time at school, they were teammates for rugby and cricket; they were dry bobs who emphatically never went near the river. Ed was head of his Social while James admits to being less studious.
The 1997 1st XV. Ed is on the far left of the middle row, and James is 5th from the right in the middle row.
James went on to Durham where he studied French and Economics and kept up his rugby skills, while Ed studied Geography at Bristol where he also played hockey.
After completing his degree, Ed initially stayed in Bristol and set up a drinks distribution business with a friend before moving to London and to take up a sales and marketing role with Cadbury Schweppes. He moved from there to Nestle, before joining an ethical water business called One Water. One Water uses the profits from its worldwide sales to fund clean water projects in African countries such as Malawi, Ghana and Rwanda. It was Ed’s first experience of working for an organisation with social enterprise at its heart, and ignited a new passion for balancing business success with social change.
James had moved to London after finishing his degree and started a career in finance with UK investment bank Kleinwort Benson. He was enjoying his work and everything that London has to offer when, during a holiday in Portugal during the early 2000s, he broke his neck in a diving accident, leaving him with a spinal cord injury. James spent the best part of a year at the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville hospital recovering and undertaking intensive rehabilitation, learning to live with his injury.
In his absence, a well-meaning healthcare professional had transformed 25-year-old James’s home in a bid to make sure his new and quite specific requirements were met. This left it looking rather more like the hospital that he had just left than the sort of space a young man would want to live in.
A few fruitless attempts to source aesthetically pleasing and accessible furniture led to a frustrated conversation between friends James and Ed. They both felt strongly that a life-altering experience like James’s shouldn’t be compounded by removing all the usual opportunity for individuality and self-expression that come with creating your own personal space. They set out to find a solution to this problem.
They started small, with a narrow focus on physical accessibility in the home. Specifically, they aimed to create beautiful bathroom interiors which were suitable for the special requirements of wheelchair users, allowing customers to retain independence without having to compromise on style. Bathrooms, Ed says, are where the worst ‘design crimes’ tend to happen.
However, it soon became clear that the issue they had identified was far wider in scope. Having witnessed James’s experience, and noting an obvious gap in the market, Ed left his job at One Water, and, in 2012, together they founded Motionspot.
Motionspot started as a small team: an interior designer, occupational therapist, and a contractor who was already building beautiful accessible bathrooms.
“Our first client was an injured grenadier guard soldier who had just come back from Afghanistan as an amputee, and couldn’t get in and out of his own bath. We transformed his bathroom into a space that was accessible for him and that he felt proud to invite friends and family to use. We started to understand the positive impact we could have on people’s lives through improving their independence and the effect that feeling proud about their homes would have on their social relationships.”
Galvanised by this success, James and Ed worked hard to build the company, creating an accessible bathroom business with national reach over the next three years. During this first phase of growth, they helped hundreds of clients to overhaul unattractive utilitarian bathrooms and replace them with appealing and inclusive spaces which matched both their personalities and requirements.
Over the last 11 years, Motionspot has evolved beyond private homes and is now a global award-winning inclusive design specialist consultancy.
“We work with clients from across all sectors: commercial workplaces, big hotel chains, education settings, retail, later living and healthcare, to help them understand what the challenges are within those environments. Not only the challenges for someone with a physical, cognitive, or sensory disability, but also how to design wider than that: to design for faith, ethnic background, culture and gender.”
Demand for their expertise is growing rapidly as companies, and society more broadly, understand the value in making spaces suitable for everyone, and enabling all people to engage fully in work and recreation.
The Motionspot team in 2023.
Motionspot has expanded to a team of 22, and now operates globally from their office in Greater London. Their core message is this: inclusive spaces are about so much more than a wheelchair ramp at the entrance; only 7% of disabled people are wheelchair users. Inclusive spaces also need to be a supportive and welcoming environment for the other 93% of people with different requirements.
“I don’t think you can overestimate the importance of feeling comfortable and feeling included. Whether that’s at home, as the employee of a global company, as a student who is able to learn better because of the environment that suits them, or as a hotel guest who experiences a seamless journey from check-in to their accessible room, and to the dining room.”
Reports vary, but the World Health Organisation estimates that 16% of the population experience significant disability – that’s 1 in 6 of us, or 1.3 billion people worldwide.
If you are thinking that all this sounds lovely but doesn’t relate to you, think again. Not only will most people acquire an access need at some point – through illness, accident or age – but the benefits to your business can be quantified.
Research shows that designing spaces to be inclusive can increase consumer usage, improve customer loyalty, reduce operating and renovation costs, and even increase overall productivity. Thoughtful use of colour, construction materials and planting may not only meet the need of those living with dementia or neurodivergent people, but can also promote mental wellbeing more generally.
From attracting talented and diverse staff to your company, to reducing incidents of workplace accidents through careful design, there is plenty of commercial benefit to designing inclusively. Following their renovation of Clyde Campus in Glasgow, Former Director and Major Projects Delivery Lead at Barclays Ron Coghill stated that for every £1 they spent on inclusive design up to £100 was saved on retrofitting at a later date. Read more about Motionspot’s work with Barclays in the following case study.
Barclays, Clyde Campus, Glasgow
“There’s a much greater awareness since the pandemic that actually we’re all vulnerable, and we’re all impacted by our own environment.”
The history of accessible design has been to meet the functional requirements of users, in other words, the bare minimum of what a person needs to carry out their daily tasks. What we understand now is that the bare minimum is not enough for a person to live comfortably, express themselves, and be as productive as they have the potential to be. Truly inclusive design is about melding function and form to create spaces which facilitate and inspire. Importantly, Motionspot is advocating for a time when we no longer think about accessible spaces, but inclusive design as standard.
“Our vision for the future is that inclusive design becomes embedded in everything we do. That it isn’t special, or an alternative, but just good design. We’ve got probably a generation of hard work to get there, but we firmly believe that this principle should be part of the mainstream.”
Achieving this seismic shift in attitude is certainly a challenge, but James and Ed are optimistic. Their aim is to lead by example – continuing to strengthen Motionspot’s position as global inclusive design leader, and to encourage new talent into this growing market. They will also continue to rigorously track their impact by measuring the quantitative and qualitative social change that is being achieved through their work.
In 2016, Motionspot won the RIBA Bespoke Access Award, and the company was recognised with an Innovate UK Inclusive Innovation Award. Between 2019-22, Ed acted as the Government Sector Champion for the Design of Products and Spaces, and this year he has been awarded an MBE for services to Disabled People.
The success of James and Ed’s business is a testament to their personal story and enduring friendship: using James’s own experience and frustration to fuel their drive to find a solution, and ultimately to improve the quality of so many people’s lives worldwide.
To read this article in full visit the Old Radleian 2024 online. Explore Motionspot’s work via their website: https://motionspot.co.uk/.
