A Handle On Accessibility is the culmination of a six-month-long, in-house exercise led by the firm’s Chicago office to create a better and more accessible door hajndle using the principles of empathetic design. Beginning with a series of empathy/aging experiments that simulated the effects of limited mobility and sensory deprivation, teams then gleaned the results from those lessons to formulate their designs for a new/improved door handle, ones that considered context, environment, and the limited mobility of the user. The resulting six prototypes fall into three categories: handles that adapted/evolved traditional forms; handles that rethought form altogether; and handles that rethought how doors can be operated.