Inclusive, active and adaptive design as approaches to user-centered design

The paper analyzes the evolutionof user-centered design in a variety of approaches that have been established in the history of architecture. It leads up to the current tendency to consider the designed environment as a physiologically prosthetic phenomenon inasmuch as it favors behavioral objectives while maintaining certain requested states that are physiological and behaviorally prosthetic due to the fact that the designed environment intentionally configures specific behavioral topographies. Therefore, the degree of a design’s quality and the various scales to which it is referred follow from its ability to interrelate on a human scale; that is to say, the capability of physical elements to confront the factors that characterize a design focused on well-being: inclusive, active, and adaptive.