Habilitation: the art of person-environment interactions, or rehabilitation before you
need it
Professor Nick Tyler CBE
Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering and Pro-Provost, East and South Asia, University College London
This talk is about the idea that we should try to keep people out of the health service by keeping them
in good health – in this case through using the built environment. The idea of ‘habilitation’ is that the
built environment is made so that it is already great for people to use and encourages people to
improve their ability to move around. This is different from rehabilitation, which is how we try to
enable people who have contracted some injury to re-establish their connection with the world. First
of all it is necessary to understand how a person interacts with their environment – how their senses
work, how they cope with the built environment as it is etc. Then we need to look at how we can
construct the environment to match these capabilities. The costs of falls-related injuries alone is large
enough to make it attractive to treat the built environment as a kind of healthcare technology to help
people not stumble/trip/fall and to improve their general health into the bargain.
About Prof Tyler: Nick considers that the purpose of engineering is to serve the world’s population
with the aim of making the world a better place – i.e. engineering is a public service. He works with
clinical, engineering, social science, arts and humanities researchers in order to explore exactly how a
person interacts with their immediate environment. Nick’s research portfolio amounts to some £20
million in funding from Research Councils, industry and government and he has established research
projects in Latin America, Japan, China and the EU as well as in the UK. Nick is the UK PI on an extensive
Chinese research and application project “Low Carbon City Development” in which approximately £2
billion is being invested by Chinese cities in the development of practical low carbon initiatives in cities
including Guangzhou, Shanghai ad Nanyang. He is a member of the EPSRC Experts Group on
Infrastructure, a Co-investigator on the £6m EPSRC Programme Grant “Transforming the Engineering
of Cities”, a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a
Fellow of the Transport Research Foundation. He was appointed a CBE in the 2011 New Year’s Honours
for services to technology.