Open door policy: HEWI

The HEWI company has accumulated 90 years of experience and its principles remain as unshakeable today as at the beginning, even though the surrounding conditions are constantly changing. Especially societal ones. The conviction that design serves to break down barriers is right at the core of the company philosophy: people shouldn’t have to struggle to make things work for them. Rather, the things themselves should make an active contribution to their own usefulness. In other words, people shouldn’t have to have the necessary preconditions at their disposal; a design should create them.

‘Universal design’ denotes a basic and general idea cultivated by many designers. HEWI has constantly kept this principle in view, continually expanding its product portfolio in this direction. For 35 years, HEWI has been putting products on the market that remove barriers between architecture and people. Approaching this by way of ‘opening doors’ was just the most obvious form for getting rid of boundaries and exclusion. As the HEWI product range shows, this works best when things are used in self-evident ways – without any particular physical or mental preconditions.

HEWI’s System 900, for example, pushes this thought in its design approach. It gives rise to barrier-free bathrooms that are at once intuitive in their use and eminently open to the principles of ‘universal design’. In the process, almost in passing, HEWI has accomplished a neat trick. Namely, the inversion of the famous principle formulated by the design theorist Viktor Papanek, from ‘Everyone is a designer’ to ‘Design is for everyone’. And an aesthetic aspiration also shouldn’t be the prerogative of an exclusive clientele.

© Architonic