People experiencing chronic illness often are excluded from third places for relaxing and socializing outside of the workplace and home. Designs of public places often neglect important characteristics like: frequent seating, temperature control, and accessible restrooms. However, public places also provide healing elements like relaxation, socialization, and views of nature.

This map aims to help people navigate the experience of place and chronic illness, by showing which places have accessability problems and theraputic qualities. Since people living with chronic illnesses can have vastly different experiences, can we help users find places with the characteristics that are most important to them? It builds off of Sylvia Janicki's design principals for public places and chronic illness, developed from interviews of people with chronic Lyme disease.

This is a class project for Jen Mankoff's Future of Access Technology class at the University of Washington. Developed by Sylvia Janicki, Matt Ziegler, and Grady Thompson, with helpful input from Manaswi Saha, Jen Mankoff, and Kelly Mack.

This map shows where public restrooms are close enough that you could access one in a couple minutes.

This page has a list of single-stall bathrooms on campus: Gender-Neutral Bathrooms on the UW campus.

Comfortable seating is personal, but we looked for places that have:

• Benches or wide seats
• With backrests
• Usually made of a soft material like wood or plastic

Frequent seating: you can quickly get to a seat from most areas, for whenever you want to sit.

We looked for:

• Benches long enough to lie down on
• Open grassy areas

Smooth surfaces can be particularly important for mobility devices like walkers. This map shows places navigable without:

• Bumpy or jagged sidewalks
• Gravel paths
• Dirt paths

We looked for places with views of:

• Trees
• Plants
• Other nature scenery

In good places for people watching, you can sit and passively watch a highly-used public space without needing to interact with people. Like street, plaza, or playground.